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When Scream came out in 1996, it broke one of the cardinal rules of horror film––the characters in the movie watched and loved scary movies. The characters in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press), love to tell a good ghost story. In “At This Late Hour,” the specter of a local legend clouds the social forces which women negotiate in a small town in New Hampshire. In “Warnings,” a girl’s cross country team groans about running together until a teammate goes missing, becoming the missing girl from the warnings they’ve been given. “The Last Unmapped Places,” one of the collection’s most propulsive and evocative stories, looks at the narratives that shape the lives of a pair of twins, from childhood through their adult lives. Through its attention to storytelling, the collection investigates both the social forces that assert their presence on the narrators’ lives––conformity, misogyny, homophobia––and the role that folklore, nightmares, and urban legends play in enforcing certain social codes. Rebecca Turkewitz is a public school teacher based in Portland, Maine, where she spoke with CrimeReads about ghost stories, true crime, and the ways that narratives shape our lives. Michael Colbert: We’re speaking in Maine; both the state and New England have a particular tradition of ghost stories. What makes the region so ripe for ghost stories in your mind? Rebecca Turkewitz: I think a lot of it has to do with its literary history: Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Shirley Jackson are all part of it. And then the landscape––the joke is that in every movie about Maine it’s really foggy, but I feel like it’s kind of true. MC: For a visual, we’re speaking on a very foggy day in Maine. Debutiful said that your “stories are R.L. Stine for adults.” These stories are about hauntings of a much more realistic nature––grief, loss, disappearances, life changes. What haunts us as we age? How does Goosebumps grow up? RT: I was such a Goosebumps fan when I was a kid. I was obsessed with them––it’s embarrassing. I also think my characters are dealing with a lot of deeper issues. When I think about ghosts and monsters, I think for adults a lot of times it is about grief. That comes up in a lot of the stories, and loss, and thinking about the past, and the way the past prompts the future. As you get older, how do you reconcile your personal history and the history of a place? I think you think about death more, or you think about time more, or you think about change. MC: Did you have other horror influences or ghost stories that you were thinking about? RT: I’m a huge Shirley Jackson fan. I’m always just in awe and trying to write towards that. I do love Stephen King. The Shining is one of my favorite books. I also love Dan Chaon and his book, Stay Awake. I read White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi when I was writing. I also was thinking about—and aspiring towards—the way writers like Jesmyn Ward and Toni Morrison use ghosts. I’m thinking of Beloved and Sing, Unburied, Sing. Those are ghost stories, but they’re not spooky. I think I was trying to meet somewhere in the middle of spooky and ghosts as a way to get at something deeper thematically. MC: What draws you to the ghost story? Why is that an evocative genre? RT: Kelly Link is also a huge influence. Someone asked her a really similar question, and she was like, “Well, who doesn’t love ghost stories?” MC: That’s so true. RT: I love that quote because it’s true if it’s true for you, but it’s not true for a lot of people. My mom will read my work and be like, I don’t get it. I think that for people who like ghost stories, it’s like, who doesn’t love a ghost story? Which I know is not true. I know there are a lot of people who don’t like ghost stories. Since I was kid, I’ve just loved them. It’s hard for me to articulate why. MC: With the collection, it felt more like you’re working in the mode of ghost stories as opposed to horror; spooky as opposed to scary and gory. RT: Talking to people who write or read horror, they say, “Oh this book is not horror; it’s just ghost stories.” But then talking to people who read more literary work, they’re like, “Well this is a horror book.” MC: A lot of the stories have this moment when a character comes into the ghost story, like in “At This Late Hour” or “Crybaby Bridge.” I was thinking about the power of narrative within the stories. What interests you about local legends, true crime, or ghost stories as a social force? RT: I’m obsessed with stories within a story. And I also love local legends. I love oral folklore and local history. I read a lot of true ghost stories, which Maine has plenty of. I’m very preoccupied with the way that people interact with stories. I think these types of stories help people connect to different places and understand their relationship to that place and its culture. In my life, I do that. I seek out these types of stories, so the characters are doing similar things. MC: Were there any particular stories from the real world that you drew upon to inspire these stories? RT: There are a few. “The Elevator Girl” is set at OSU, where I went to grad school. The art building there is haunted. To be honest, I don’t truly believe in ghosts. But there is a story about an art student who haunts the elevator. The real story does not have a lot of details that are in “The Elevator Girl.” I was really drawn to that I think because, like in the story, she doesn’t die in the elevator—she dies later. I like when ghost stories have really weird details. So then I was thinking about why the elevator would be haunted, and the story stemmed from that. “The Attic” is not based on any particular legend, but in the Midwest, there are a lot of legends about telekinetic children. And “Crybaby Bridge” is a big Midwest legend. There’s a lot of bridges that are called crybaby bridge. MC: The titular story takes place in the wake of the Pulse shooting. The couple processes the news differently. What were you thinking about with that story? RT: Even though it’s tonally different than some of the ghost stories, I think it’s a similar preoccupation with the way stories shape our personal lives. I think that was an event that affected queer people in very different ways. In my friend group, we had really different responses to it; I was interested in that. I also was interested in, as a queer person, what does it mean to be unsafe in the world. MC: With that story, there’s this question of how the two women felt the immediacy of the event. Thinking of safety, for one it’s closer and for the other it’s further. RT: I’m not a very autobiographical writer. In terms of life details, there’s not a lot of similarity. But the story that she tells about the gay man in the south who the funeral home wouldn’t bury, that actually did happen a couple years before, and I had this very strong reaction to it. I was still thinking about it and wondering why, because it had nothing to do with me. I lived in Columbus, Ohio, and pretty much all my life I’ve lived in places where it’s pretty safe to have people know that you’re queer. And then I was just fascinated by that. I was wondering why I was having this reaction to it. MC: Do you think ghost stories have a power to enforce a social code or set of politics? Do they ever become a restrictive force? RT: I think sometimes. I think it’s both a reflection of a culture and also a way of reinforcing it. When you look really closely at a lot of ghost stories or fairy tales, they are enforcing a certain ideal or world that they want. MC: I really loved “The Last Unmapped Places.” I was particularly impressed by the narrative elasticity and control. What was on your mind as you wrote? RT: I think that’s probably my favorite story too. It was the last one in the collection that I wrote. I wrote it over two years, and I think that’s part of it. I really wanted to be narratively ambitious with that story. More than with other stories, I could see what the story would be. I wrote the beginning and the end in this week that I was at the Hewnoaks Artist Residency. And then that summer, I sort of wrote a draft and thought all I had to do was revise. I kept doing a little bit and then putting it away. I think I was always scared that it wouldn’t work, but I could see a world in which it worked. MC: It’s different than the other stories. The telling of the story itself mimics some of the questions of ghost stories: how does a personal story become the organizing thread of a life? How do you look back on the past? You see that working in the story through its play with time. What else is exciting to you in fiction right now? RT: Right now, there’s a lot of amazing short story collections coming out. Paul Tremblay’s The Beast You Are comes out in July, and I’m super excited to read it. I just finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which blew my mind. I’m reading She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran and a poetry collection by Mary Biddinger called Department of Elegy, which is about the post punk era in Ohio. I feel like I’m reading super eclectically. For a while when I was finishing the collection, I was reading a lot of spooky stuff, and now I’ve just been reading all the other things that I’ve been interested in. MC: What are you working on now? RT: I’m finishing a short story that’s thematically similar to the book. In theory, I have an idea for a novel that I was supposed to already be working on. I’ve been working on short stories for so long. It’s really hard to get out of that. In undergrad, I thought I was going to write a novel and then I fell in love with short stories. I want the challenge of writing a novel, but I keep coming up with story ideas. A couple years ago, I started writing flash fiction. I’ve done a lot of that, which is really good for me working full time. I write mostly in the summers and breaks, but flash I can write whenever. I also want to shout out to Black Lawrence Press. It’s been amazing working with them. Writers often don’t know anything about promotion or publishing, and I think that they have been really good at illuminating the next steps. It’s been a great learning experience. View the full article

As a kid, I was absolutely terrified of horror flicks. Not an uncommon stance to have, really, but a lot of that was due to a pair of twenty-something uncles with nothing better to do than sit me and my cousins down to watch said movies just to gauge our reactions. My cousins? Much braver than I was—if you could even see me since I was probably long gone before they even pressed play on the VHS player. Aging myself. Later in life, I was able to embrace a lot of the genre on my own terms. A lot of that came with discovering movies and books on my own that appealed to me. So, when I sat down to write my first YA Horror novel with the express purpose of trying to bring that first, healthy dose of ‘ick’ to readers, I decided to go to the movies that evoked those great reactions you’d get with a crowd or a group of friends. That said, there was a low bar of difficulty in finding the ‘ick’ when one is writing a book where roaches serve as one of the primary elements of spookiness. It was tempting to simply write all the details that would give folks immediate heebie-jeebies (and don’t worry, I did), but there had to be a little more. The supernatural elements of the book begged for more pop. The themes did as well. All that thinking and brainstorming of scenarios made me realize exactly where I had to go back to find inspiration for the scenes in INFESTED. Body horror. The ultimate in ‘ick’ factor. The place where the squeamish wince and the aficionados cackle maniacally. It’s a genre of horror that has a huge place in my heart because I was initially introduced to it in very wrong way but fell in love with it once I was able to explore it on my own terms. So what I aimed to do with INFESTED was to write a horror novel for younger/newer readers of the genre that could use an intro course. I wanted to be the gateway to the more extreme – that first taste if you will—since I never really had that opportunity. Now, INFESTED may be meant to be a little more of an intro to a wider world, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t draw inspiration from the more mind-bending and super gross genre pieces I was exposed to. Here’s what helped inspire the scenes in INFESTED that I’m hoping readers won’t forget (and I’ll avoid spoilers here, since where’s the fun in spoiling the gooey bits?). There are also plenty of books out there, but I decided to stick to movies since the list is shorter. If you are looking for phenomenal examples of the best writing in the genre that inspired me, look no further than Clive Barker, Jack Ketchum, and Paul Tremblay. On to the flicks. “They’re Creeping Up on You!” – Creepshow (1982) An absolute staple of my weekend TV viewing, Creepshow was a flick I’d never seen uncut until I was well into my 20s and WOW, what a difference from watching the censored version on TV. In this story, a germaphobe zillionaire begins to find roaches in his hermetically sealed apartment after a business rival commits suicide. I won’t get into the specifics, but the final shots of this story are some of the absolute most influential to a lot of the grosser moments in INFESTED. Hopefully, I will leave a few mental scars at the same level that were left on me when I finally saw the full version of this short. Naked Lunch (1991) One of the many, many movies I picked up once my mother gave me free reign with the Blockbuster card, Naked Lunch was 1) not at all what I expected and 2) not at all appropriate for a twelve-year-old to watch. Based on the novel by William S. Burroughs and directed by the legendary god of body horror, David Cronenberg (don’t worry, he is very much on this list again), Naked Lunch was a movie I wasn’t prepared for and one I would revisit multiple times before finally reading the book. Now, I can’t say if I “love” either, but the imagery in both and the sheer insanity of some of Cronenberg’s images, especially a beetle typewriter, inspired me as I wrote INFESTED. That said, I was only ever interested in the movie to begin with because Peter Weller starred in it and I was a huge Robocop and Buckaroo Banzai fan, so I’ll own that. Mimic (1997) My first exposure to Guillermo del Toro’s work and, to me, a sort of hidden gem of a sci-fi horror flick, Mimic’s imagery was a definite influence on the way I envisioned the villain of INFESTED, Mr. Mueller, as I began writing the story. While, my final story wouldn’t go as far as del Toro’s imagery, I don’t think INFESTED would have been the story it was without those pictures in my head. We may not have man-sized roaches in INFESTED, but the monsters of Mimic were an influence on the final product that I cannot deny. The Fly (1986) Mr. Cronenberg returns with one of the movies that consistently stays in my mind with the 1986 remake of The Fly. The practical effects of this film are unmatched and the themes of metamorphosis and man’s descent into savagery were very much on the front of my mind when I started to write INFESTED. What do we become when we give in to the impulses that were inside of us all along? What happens when we become a physical manifestation of our greed or our anger or our loneliness? Movies like The Fly are great because you can take them at face value and revel in the shock horror and gross-out scenes, but the thematic elements are what make horror such a wonderful genre. The Trojan Horse concept of hiding very serious themes within the shock always spoke to me and I very much wanted INFESTED to explore the concepts of colorism, gentrification, and anger through the lens of the horror story. Apt Pupil (1998) Sometimes the “ick” factor doesn’t have to be physical; it can be spiritual. When I first pitched INFESTED, I used Apt Pupil as an example of how I wanted to explore the social issues in the novel. With a villain who very much is an example of the very worst of us, INFESTED is meant to be the story of a young man at an impasse. He’s not entirely sure who he is just yet and the decisions he is about to make may not necessarily brand him for life, but they will dictate the path he takes. I wanted to use a villain who could be very much like Pupil’s Dussander (though, I wouldn’t go as far as to make my protagonist, Manny, as awful as the movie’s lead, Todd Bowden). Projects like Pupil, though, go to show that horror doesn’t have to be visceral to weigh heavy on the audience. In INFESTED the horrors of Mueller’s actions in the past have more weight than his state in the present day of the novel, and I wanted to make that very clear: the sins of this man’s past are just as bad as his present. If there’s anything I hope anyone can take from INFESTED, young or old, it’s that horrors come in all shapes and sizes. From the lowly roach to the virulent racist blowhard to the latte-sipping gentrifier blissfully unaware of the impact of their existence. *** View the full article

These days, it’s hard to be an optimist. War, inflation and unrest seem to be steering us toward the dystopia we’ve been seeing in movies and books for years. We could use an antidote, a vision of ourselves and our world at its best. We’ve done it before. After the horrors of World War I, at the height of mob violence in America, people dared to choose optimism right at a time when it was sorely needed. America built a World’s Fair. In Chicago, of all places. The Wild West In 1929, the St. Valentine’s Day massacre shocked the world. Seven men were gunned down in a Chicago garage by an unknown group, some dressed as Chicago cops. The city’s big mobsters bantered about who did it. Al Capone said it must’ve been Bugs Moran. Bugs said it must’ve been Capone. Nobody really believed the culprits would be caught (they weren’t). Chicago was corrupt, bloody, lawless. It was the Wild West fueled by the speakeasies and bootlegging of Prohibition. The massacre was a wake up call. The straight-laced businessmen of the city had had enough of Chicago’s reputation for violence. Under the leadership of the dour-faced Rufus Dawes, the city was going to push back by showing the world a different Chicago: safe, clean, sober. A World’s Fair on Lake Michigan, the biggest, grandest fair that had ever been held, could attract millions of people from across the country, families looking for a good, wholesome time. It was planned for 1933. No mobsters allowed. The Plan After the massacre, the press descended on Dawes, demanding to know how he could assure the country that the World’s Fair would be safe from mob violence. “We have a plan,” Dawes said, “and I assure you the gangsters will be gone by the time the fair opens.” It was a big promise. The massacre had the potential to scare away the investors Dawes needed to get the World’s Fair off the ground. If all went well, the Fair would stretch for miles along the lakefront and would feature the most modern buildings and technology yet seen in one place. It would glorify industry and science, celebrating the achievements in those fields in the past hundred years. The Fair would be called A Century of Progress. If the mob didn’t kill the project first. Dawes picked up the phone and called in the Secret Six. The Secret Six The mythos around Al Capone shrouds the fact that he was quite a businessman. During Prohibition, his mob largely controlled the production and distribution of beer in Chicago. That was big business when every Chicagoan statistically drank six pints of beer a week. It sold for a dollar a bottle, and while Prohibition lasted, Capone made a fortune. In the Great Depression, he funded soup kitchens, the image of the man of the people. He was an international star, the dapper uncle who kept his violence in the shadows. He seemed invincible. Elliot Ness and the Untouchables made for good stories but barely made a dent in Capone’s world. It was quickly clear he couldn’t be caught on Prohibition charges. Most Prohibition agents, like the rest of Chicago, were bribed by the gangsters. To break the mob’s hold on the city, the anti-mob powers needed a war chest that would fund the fight to bring down Capone, a move that would show the gangsters their time was over. Enter the Secret Six, a shadowy group of millionaires headed by Robert Randolph who wanted Chicago cleaned up in time for the World’s Fair. By Any Means Necessary To Randolph, fighting gangsters called for extreme measures. He favored interrogations under torture and the suspension of the Fifth Amendment. If the murder of a mobster was necessary, so be it. Randolph hired his own corps of investigators from law enforcement organizations, and funded others in the background. The Secret Six even opened its own speakeasy as a front to learn Capone’s business and recruit informants. By 1930, the fight seemed to be escalating. The murder of a foreman at a construction site signaled the mob’s intention to infiltrate the World’s Fair as it broke ground on the lakefront. If something wasn’t done soon, the mob would be demanding a cut of the Fair’s construction, concessions and other businesses. By then, Capone and the mob were getting heat from all directions. Investigators for the Secret Six had infiltrated Big Al’s businesses. Agents of the IRS were amassing the evidence it would use to convict Capone on tax evasion. The Chicago Tribune launched a crusade against the mob after a police reporter was murdered in the street. Public opinion was shifting. The city had had enough of the Wild West. End of an Era As it turned out, the taxmen got to Capone first. In 1931, he was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Lopping off the most prominent head of the Chicago mob didn’t cure all the violence in the city, but the mob grew quieter, more subtle. The gangsters were worried. Across the country, the states were repealing the amendment that had launched Prohibition. Soon beer would be legal again, and the mob would lose its biggest moneymaker. The mobsters did not get a piece of the World’s Fair. On May 27, 1933, the Fair opened to a fanfare of publicity. In its first summer season, the Fair was so successful and lucrative, it would return the following summer for a second season. Millions of visitors flooded to Chicago and left with stories and souvenirs of the Fair. Chicago had succeeded in cleaning itself up, for the time being. The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair not only gave America a fun time, it showed a positive vision of the world, at least for some. The Fair was less popular with Black Americans and others who didn’t share in the utopian view of the country. European fascists also used the Fair for their own ends. But in the duel between the mob and the fair – a violent today or a positive, peaceful tomorrow – it was optimism that won. ___________________________________ Further reading: Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago by William Elliott Hazelgrove. Anika Scott’s new novel Sinners of Starlight City is a “Godfather-esque tale of revenge” set at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. She’s the internationally bestselling author of The German Heiress and The Soviet Sisters. Her mother’s family is Sicilian-American, but as far as she knows, none of her relatives was ever in the mob. View the full article

Shakespeare’s “What’s Past is Prologue” suggests that history shapes our present and offers insights into the future. But what does Shakespeare have to do with crime? Authors of crime fiction plot their characters in high-stakes situations, ensuring the reader cares about the characters and engaging the reader’s pursuit of problem solving. What could be higher stakes and what offers the reader a greater opportunity to solve a problem rapidly gaining in complexity, and potentially a crime against humanity, than resolving the serious threat of nuclear war? Since the beginning of the Cold War, nuclear weapons have been one of the most existential global threats. I grew up during that time with great fear of a nuclear war destroying humanity. Like most high school students, I had read and was horrified by John Hersey’s Hiroshima. For the longest time after reading Hiroshima, I tried to imagine carbonized bodies and human shadows etched in stone, but it was unimaginable. I stopped imagining; easier, safer not to think about the suffering. Years later, I met my Japanese American husband, Kent, and grew to know and love his parents and learn their stories. Kent’s mother was incarcerated in multiple camps during WWII. His father, also an American citizen, is a Hiroshima survivor. Sharing their remarkable stories with the world necessitated that I step into history: the researching, the imagining, the suffering. And something else shifted. What began as a desire to share their stories, became something far more important to me. Co-authoring Of White Ashes changed me. I developed an unexpected greater calling to effect positive change in our world. How? By promoting and attending pilgrimages and educating people about the WWII Japanese American incarceration and by doing my part to promote peace. Two weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of attending a Jewish wedding, where the rabbi described her interpretation of the traditional breaking of the glass: “Glass is strong and yet fragile. Once broken, you can’t put it back together. Love and marriage are like that too.” Her metaphor can also be applied to the strength and fragility of our world. Today, the Doomsday Clock is at 90 seconds to midnight, with midnight referencing doomsday—a world-destroying catastrophe. We are now closer to midnight than at any point since the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists developed the design in 1947. With 4,500 nuclear warheads, Russia is the world’s largest nuclear power. The U.S. follows with 3,600. These numbers are roughly 10% of the Soviet Union’s arsenal in the 1980s and the U.S.’s in the 1960s. However, today’s nuclear bombs are exponentially more destructive than the ones used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to advancements in nuclear physics, advanced weapon design with optimized explosive yields, and flexibility and accuracy in targeting due to advances in miniaturization and precision technologies. The Doomsday Clock was advanced from 100 to 90 seconds to midnight on January 24, 2023: before the idea that nuclear weapons was normalized thinking, before Putin’s rhetoric began prompting fear that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons on Ukraine, before Putin moved nuclear warheads into Belarus, before the Wagner Group’s armed mutiny in Russia and the uncertainty of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s whereabouts, and before creating chaos in Russia and increasing concerns over who might ultimately control the world’s largest nuclear force. Experts are most worried about the absence of disarmament efforts and possession of nuclear weapons by volatile nations. And the risk of an accidental or unintended nuclear incident looms ominously, casting a dark shadow of uncertainty. This uncertainty, along with the increased likelihood of cyber-attacks on nuclear infrastructure, raises exponentially the risk of triggering a catastrophic accident. Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security developed a frightening simulation illuminating a plausible rapidly escalating nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, estimating that more than 90 million people would die or be injured within the first few hours of the conflict. The purpose of this essay isn’t to debate the criminality of the nuclear bombs used during WWII by the U.S. in Japan. We can’t change the past. But what about today? Is the use of a nuclear weapon a crime? The Assembly of the States Parties to the Rome Statute of The International Criminal Court was held in 2022 to address the increased risk of nuclear weapon use. Their conclusion: “Given the immense and indiscriminate destructive power of nuclear weapons and their wide-ranging catastrophic humanitarian consequences, the use of nuclear weapons would constitute a war crime under several of the provisions outlined in the Rome Statute.” Addressing the current threat of nuclear warfare necessitates concerted efforts to prevent a nuclear catastrophe and safeguard global security. Governments and international organizations must continue disarmament initiatives, prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and promote diplomacy and dialogue to defuse tensions and resolve conflicts. But what can we do at the individual level? We take self-defense classes to protect ourselves from attack, install security systems to protect our homes from invasion, and install anti-virus software to protect our computers. How on earth do we protect the fragility of humanity and our planet? I imagine that, like a good detective story, it begins with intention and problem solving. We can use the power of intention to consider the future we want and discover ways to come together as humans to find common ground for problem solving these difficult and complex issues. Have the intention to make a difference, be open to other’s experiences, and promote peace with our neighbors and within our world. Are you interested in taking action? Start small or go big! Consider: Reading an article Picking out a book for your book club Visiting any number of websites, including The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the United Nations Disarmament Commission, Youth Fusion, and Voices for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons Saying something—in an opinion piece or on social media Joining peace-promoting organizations Creating a grass-roots effort in your community Learning my father-in-law’s story and then researching and writing about Hiroshima for Of White Ashes changed me. Through harrowing images, I gained invaluable insights into the horrors of nuclear warfare and now better appreciate the urgency of preventing its recurrence. Kent and I hope our readers will imagine what it might have felt like to live through a catastrophic experience like this and finish reading our historical novel with a deeper understanding of the profound impact of war, its aftermath, and the extraordinary resilience of our characters. “What’s past is prologue” isn’t a universal truth. Peace can prevail over destruction. Each of us has the power to prevent history from repeating if we commit to a world at peace, have faith in that commitment, and are present with that commitment in our daily behaviors and decisions. Imagine ordinary humans each taking small actions and doing their part to do extraordinary work with hope in their hearts. Hope—springing from the desirable and achievable, igniting our human spirit, fueling our resilience, and propelling us forward to a better tomorrow. Imagine a world at peace. Just imagine. *** View the full article

The lack of women serial killers in fiction is often a source for 90s-style feminist outrage—an extreme version of “anything you can do, I can do better”—but the female serial killers that do pepper crime fiction have, until recently, been rather like cardboard cutouts of their male counterparts, mostly around for shock value. I shudder to think of one popular tale-turned-film in which the woman committing the crimes was merely carrying on for her father (the acceptable form of taking a man’s job). Women serial killers in fiction have, in effect, been the twist—a hat trick from an author who believes too much in the inherent kindness of women to realize why women might be tempted to kill (and kill again, and again). Ever since Gone Girl, women’s rage has been considered marketable ground for psychological thrillers, and fiction has been far more likely to embrace the angry woman as a main character since the #metoo movement began, but she must still be Wronged in an Acceptable Manner (usually the twist with the angry woman is that she is, in fact, justified in her rage, or has at least been manipulated into her actions, and is never just the cheerful psycho. But I digress…). Now, the fiery rage is transforming into cool-blooded killings, as an army of Patricia Batemans rises to eviscerate those who annoy them, providing plenty of detailed product recommendations and pop culture references along the way. Uniting all of the following protagonists is their vanity and self-centeredness, although they vary in their theoretical “right” to be unhinged. All have great outfits, perfect makeup, and deranged taste in music. Here are several works from this and recent years featuring women with Ripley-level amorality and the body counts to prove it. Many of the characters in these novels appear to be begging for someone to stop them, which also makes for a fascinating exploration of privilege in an extreme fictional setting. Others are using violence to feed the gnawing hunger society demands of their thin bodies. Some do it just because they can. These characters also exhibit a narcissistic lack of empathy and aversion to remorse, as the authors use their exaggerated features as a way of pillorying all those who get away with more than they should. Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer (Anchor Books) The one that came first! It is certain that none of the books below could have been published without the runaway success of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s snarky masterpiece. Not told from the perspective of its beautiful, amoral serial killer, but rather from that of her plain, practical sister, My Sister, The Serial Killer makes a compelling argument for why women might be more able to get away with mass murder than previously thought: bleach. Skillful use of a great deal of bleach. My favorite aspect of the novel’s darkly comical plot is the idea that a serial killer, to the one who cleans up after, might be just as annoying as any of the killer’s victims. What could be more of a slog than cleaning up after someone who needs you, again and again and again…especially if they splash quite a lot of blood everywhere. Weary, nonjudgemental, and hysterically funny. Eliza Clark, Boy Parts (Harper Perennial) I know this is a consistent refrain in such a list, but what a truly disturbing title this one is. Set in the art world and featuring a damaged, and enraged, photographer protagonist, Boy Parts follows its deeply unreliable narrator as she takes revealing pictures of ordinary-looking young men using questionable consent practices and spirals further and further out of control. When her work is accepted by a prestigious gallery, Clark’s damaged artist gains a new understanding of the violence in her own work and how it relates to her own trauma. Is she a victim, or is she a perpetrator? Is she getting off, or getting revenge? Boy Parts is perhaps the most polarizing title in this list (not an easy feat). It is also very, very funny. Keep an eye out in September for Clark’s brilliant take on the Slenderman case, Penance. C. J. Leede, Maeve Fly (Tor Nightfire) For all those who stan the creepy girls/learned the Wednesday dance, Maeve Fly is a delicious, disturbing treat. Leede’s very-much-antiheroine is a Disney princess by day (one of the Frozen sisters, which makes it even funnier), and a serial killer by night. She has a best friend, a grandmother who understands her, and the kind of beauty that screams innocence. But when her grandmother’s health takes a turn for the worse, and her best friend’s hockey-playing brother comes to town, her perfectly arranged life begins to unravel. Damn, this book is messed up. Laura Picklesimer, Kill For Love (Unnamed Press) The bored college fifth-year narrating Kill For Love has always been good at suppressing her appetites—you can see it in her carefully counted calories, svelte figure, and attempts to mask her sociopathy from her sisters. But when she kills a man in the act of coitus one night—then devours a meal of greasy meat for the first time in years—she soon realizes she’s found the one hunger impossible to ignore. Of particular note is how Picklesimer’s language reverses the male gaze as her killer objectifies the frat bros around her and tries to keep from mauling their drunken flesh. C. J. Skuse, Sweetpea (HQ) This one might be the most misanthropic on the list. The narrator of Sweetpea is anything but; she hates her partner, barely tolerates her friends, and labors meticulously over a kill list of everyone who’s ever annoyed her, from the grocery clerk who mishandles her orders to the skinny 20-something sleeping with her husband. From bruised vegetables, to butchered humans, the violence in this one escalates quickly. Very Serial Mom vibes. Victoria Kielland, My Men Translated by Damion Searls (Astra House) 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. View the full article

By the time I could get to downtown Nashville in July 2021, I assumed there wouldn’t be any lingering traces of the explo­sion. When I told people why I was going there, most of my friends didn’t even remember what had happened on December 25, 2020—or if they did, they had only the vaguest recollection. In a year when so much took place, including a global pandemic and a monu­mental presidential election, the strange incident involving Anthony Quinn Warner had quickly, it seemed, faded from memory. I assumed downtown Nashville would be back to normal. My friend Karl and I parked in the six-­story garage adjacent to Sec­ond Avenue, where the plywood in the stairwell was the first indication that not all was right. The plywood, it turned out, was everywhere—on windows up and down the street, for a full block and beyond, and stretching onto side streets. This had been a bustling artery of Nash­ville’s nightlife, home to a Coyote Ugly and a B.B. King’s Blues Club and a strip of local bars and clubs. Now it was a cordoned ­off construction zone. There are still garlands wrapped around the light poles from the Christmas decorations—garlands that somehow miraculously sur­vived the fireball. Crews were hard at work trying to salvage the street that Warner had utterly destroyed on Christmas morning at 6:30 a.m. Having parked his RV in front of AT&T’s Main Central Office on 185 Second Avenue North earlier that morning, a strange countdown be­gan at 6:00 a.m., in which a recorded voice urged people to stay clear of the area, interspersed with a recording of the 1964 Petula Clark song “Downtown.” Thirty minutes later, the bomb in Warner’s RV exploded, taking the RV, him, and much of a city block with it. Warner’s broadcast had warned people away, and several police offi­cers worked diligently to clear the area in time, but it still seems some­ thing short of a miracle that only Warner was killed in the blast. Now, even six months later, it’s easy to get a sense of how massive the dam­age was. The AT&T building itself is a ruin, three brick walls and not much else. Just at the edge of the roped­-off area is the Original Snuff Shop, a tobacco shop that has just reopened after six months of renovations. I talk to the two employees, who relay a number of theories they’ve over­ heard as to what has happened here. Sean tells me he heard one story that some uncounted ballots for Donald Trump were being held here, ballots from Georgia that were deliberately removed to ensure Joe Biden’s vic­tory in that state. He’s also heard another story, that the bomb was insti­gated by the business improvement district, which wanted to renovate Second Avenue and paid Warner to commit suicide so that they could destroy the block and start again. Wyatt, meanwhile, tells me a friend is convinced that it wasn’t a bomb at all, that it was a missile strike, and that in certain YouTube videos you can see the missile onscreen a split second before the explosion. Wyatt and Sean are both skeptical of these various theories, though Sean did end up more or less shrugging as to what actually happened. “Nobody will ever really know,” he tells me. I understand his hesitation. After all, these theories, as far­fetched as they clearly are, aren’t that much more bizarre than the actual story, that Anthony Warner Quinn was targeting the AT&T building because he believed a secret race of reptilian overlords were using 5G technology as a mass mind control device. He’s not alone. In 2022, a documentary titled Watch the Water be­gan to circulate amongst conspiracy theorists, claiming that Covid­19 is not a virus; it is a synthetic form of snake venom, and it’s being distrib­uted through vaccines and public drinking ­water systems. “I think the plan all along was to get the serpent’s, the evil one’s DNA into your God­created DNA,” chiropractor Bryan Ardis explains in the video. “They’re using mRNA . . . from, I believe, the king cobra venom. And I think they want to get that venom inside of you and make you a hy­brid of Satan.” If this sometimes seems absurd, it can get tragic quickly. In August 2021, the owner of a Christian surf school in Santa Barbara, California, drove his two young children to the Mexican resort town of Rosarito, where he killed both children (ages two years and ten months) and left their bodies by the side of the road. He would later claim that his wife “possessed serpent DNA” and he had killed his children out of fear of “interbreeding” between humans and reptilians—a theory he seems to have adopted through the work of ex-­athlete and Green Party politician David Icke. * The idea of lizard people—reptilian aliens with vaguely humanoid shapes, who wear human disguises so as to move undetected in our midst—is a long­standing trope in science fiction, appearing in pulp magazines through the decades. The idea broke through into mainstream consciousness through the movie, and subsequent TV show, V. The miniseries’ creator, Kenneth Johnson, took Sinclair Lew­is’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, about a fascist takeover of the United States, and adapted it for the science fiction genre, creating a narrative about a seemingly benign visitation by extraterrestrials who look just like us and come in peace. As they insinuate themselves into human government and culture, it slowly becomes apparent that under­neath their human masks they are in fact bipedal reptoids who are se­cretly consuming humans for food. It was meant as a clear allegory for Nazi Germany, down to the Visitors’ uniforms and swastika­like insig­/nias (“The Nazis showed us one face for a while and then they took it off and showed us their real faces—metaphorically speaking,” Johnson explained.). V was a ratings hit and a cultural sensation, but while it made for great television, within a decade there were some who had begun to take a version of it as literal truth. The strange transformation of fiction into fact happened primarily through David Icke. Born in Leicester, En­gland, in 1952, Icke became famous as a footballer, enjoying a meteoric rise before injuries ended his career in 1971. He spent the 1970s and ’80s as a journalist and broadcaster, with reliably left­wing political views, and in mid­-1988, he announced he was running in the upcoming general election as a Green Party candidate—within a year, he had as­cended through the ranks of the organization, being elected party spokes­man. Embracing far-­left environmentalism, Icke also began to adopt a New Age dimension to his public persona, publishing a series of books that moved him further away from mainstream politics and journalism and into strange, conspiratorial musings. In The Robots’ Rebellion (1994), Icke explains “a story of a conspiracy to control the human race,” one created by “manipulators” who “do not want us to know that we are eternal beings of light and love with limitless potential”; unfolding a cosmology that reads like a synthesis of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-­earth mythology, the Book of Genesis, and Star Wars, Icke prophesied a coming time when the world will be “re­synchronised.” He gave a name to these manipulators in The Robots’ Rebellion: the “Brotherhood,” an amalgamation of Freemason motifs and a grab bag of images cobbled together from everyone from the ancient Egyptians to the Nazis. He goes on to explain how the world is controlled by this Brotherhood, indicating that the “swastika, the lamb, the obelisk, the apron . . . and of course the pyramid and eye are still the symbols of the Brotherhood societies.” Freemasons, he goes on to elaborate in 1995’s . . . And the Truth Shall Set You Free, manipulated the events of the Revolutionary War to gain control of the United States, which is supposedly why one can still find an image of an eye atop a pyramid on the US dollar bill. But even these “Global Elite” are only partially responsible for the widespread negative energy that keeps humans from realizing their limitless potential for light and love. For behind the Global Elite are a group of “negative ma­nipulators on the Fourth Dimension”: the Prison Warders. These extra­ terrestrials “manipulate the Brotherhood network, and the Brotherhood network manipulates the world. Each lower level doesn’t know what the level above knows, and none of them knows what the Prison Warders know. It is a manipulators’ paradise, with most people within it not knowing what they are part of or what the final goal will be.” By The Biggest Secret (1998), Icke was ready to describe these Prison Warders in greater detail: known as the Anunnaki, they are reptilian extraterrestri­als from the planet Draco—and their existence is the biggest secret ly­ing behind war, inequality, injustice, and your own personal feelings of frustration and unhappiness. In addition to repeating conspiracy theories about the Freemasons and the Illuminati, Icke has also at times referenced The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They reappear throughout his books and he quotes from them heavily, citing their ability to correctly predict world events— while at the same time attempting to distance himself from charges of anti-­Semitism. “I call them the Illuminati Protocols,” he writes in . . . And the Truth Shall Set You Free. “Some say they were a forgery made public only to discredit Jews, and I use the term ‘illuminati Protocols’ to get away from the Jewish emphasis.” Icke claims that they pre-existed their appearance in the late nineteenth century and were ori­ginally focused on an elite group called the Priory of Sion, the leader­ ship of the Knights Templar. Thus, Icke argues, they’re authentic, but were later altered to be about Judaism. “Whatever the arguments,” he concludes, “one fact cannot be denied, given the hindsight of the last 100 years. The Protocols, from wherever they came, were a quite stun­ning prophecy of what has happened in the twentieth century in terms of wars and the manipulation I am exposing here. Whoever wrote them sure as heck knew what the game plan was.” Icke is not the first writer to offer up The Protocols while simultane­ously attempting to distance themselves from anti­-Semitism. Icke him­ self claims to have borrowed the Priory of Sion thesis from Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln’s book Holy Blood, Holy Grail—a work of speculative nonfiction that heavily influenced Dan Brown’s mega-­blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. Milton William Cooper, a conspiracist who built a long career out of UFO theories that became an increasingly strange and elaborate set of paranoid accusations and musings about world events, also celebrates the Protocols in his perenni­ally in-­print book Behold a Pale Horse. In his book, Cooper reprinted the Protocols in its entirety, offering for context a headnote that reads “Every aspect of this plan to subjugate the world has since become reality, validating the authenticity of conspiracy,” while also instructing that “reference to ‘Jews’ should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati’; and the word ‘goyim’ should be replaced with the word ‘cattle.’” Cooper, along with Icke and Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, all appear to be attempting to transform the Protocols from a literal slur against the Jewish community into something like a structural narrative that encap­sulates a wider conspiracy. It does not excuse the Protocols, and whether or not they felt they were being anti­-Semitic in doing so is irrelevant; they introduced them to a new generation of readers who were free to discard or embrace their anti-­Semitic content. The flourishing of visibly anti­-Semitic content that references the Protocols on YouTube and other social media sites suggests that the damage has been done regardless of their intentions. But it also reflects the direction in which conspiracy theories sur­rounding secret societies began to move by the end of the millennium. What has happened by the 1990s is that there are no longer distinct moral panics. It’s become syncretic: everything gets folded into the same morass, without distinction. It is simultaneously anti­-Semitic but also welcoming to Jews and others who ignore the anti-­Semitic tinge. It can be about aliens, or about the Illuminati, or about lizard people—but it doesn’t have to be about any of these things in particular. No longer is a specific article of faith required for membership in this group. ** What draws people to such outlandish theories? When David Robertson looked into those who’d gravitated toward David Icke and others who had blurred the line between science fiction and conspiracy, he repeatedly found a yearning for something he called epi­stemic capital. For most conspiracists, there is a belief that the masses are ignorant, acquiescent, and unable to understand what is happen­ing to them—encapsulated most succinctly in a term popularized by William Cooper: “sheeple.” While Cooper, Icke, and others seek to en­lighten the masses, there is a persistent pessimism that they’ll never be able to receive the true enlightenment concerning the Illuminati, the lizard people, or other malevolent figures. In a landscape populated by manipulating elites and sheeple, con­spiracists emerge as a third category: they are not allied with the con­trolling elite, but they are enlightened in a way that differentiates them from the sheeple. Robertson suggests that they thus see themselves as a “counter-­elite”: although they lack the power of the elites, they nonethe­less have an exclusive knowledge—their capital is epistemic rather than financial. It is, so to speak, a knowledge-­based economy all its own. So while we may think of the conspiracist’s world—one in which shadowy, malevolent forces control everything, dominate our every move, and engage in horrific acts of violence and murder to pursue their goals—as a dark, strange, and terrifying outlook, for the conspiracist there is actually a measure of power in thinking this way, because it elevates them above the sheeple who know nothing, and vests them with epi­stemic capital. It’s like a strange form of cryptocurrency. This form of capital is ul­timately worthless, because it’s not based on truth (though peddling such nonsense can be quite lucrative for hucksters like Icke). The value of such epistemic capital turns out to be based only on how many other people believe it and buy into it. Conspiracists like Icke work by devel­oping a kind of Ponzi scheme of false knowledge, offering lower tier believers their own epistemic capital: secret clues, hidden riddles, shib­boleths, and other insider knowledge. They encourage a kind of mining of new secrets: spend your time on the Web finding new clues—all of which further enhances the value of the secrets and knowledge already held by those at the top of this pyramid scheme. This mechanism has been greatly aided by the rise of the Internet, which increasingly has put the raw material of such epistemic capital in the hands of ordinary individuals, who can stitch together facts and data from any number of sources to come to whatever conclusion they’d like. This surfeit of information has not created more clarity; rather, it has heightened the question of how we know what we know. As we are increasingly inundated with mediated sources of information— television news, social media, etc.—more and more of our daily work is involved in evaluating the sources of such information, determining who is trustworthy, and adjudicating which news items will be believed or dismissed. *** One last bit of information I was able to learn about the Nashville bomber was that he had apparently spent a great deal of time out in Montgomery Bell State Park, hunting lizard people. It seemed entirely unlike any other version of the lizard people narrative I’d heard, but I wanted to see for myself, so Karl and I drove out to the park. It was a lovely midsummer day, a light drizzle falling intermittently, leaving the leaves and grass glistening and gauzy. At some point, though, the thought occurred to me: What on Earth are we doing out here? Karl and I were not going to see any lizard people. There were no lizard people to be found. For that matter, lizard people were supposed to be highly intelligent extraterrestrial overlords; if they existed, they’d be in a ship floating in space or in some glossy board­ room in Manhattan, discussing strategy with Bill Gates and the Clintons. They weren’t a random bunch of cryptids like Bigfoot or the Chupaca­bra, roaming the forest waiting to be caught by hikers. Slowly, the absurdity of the trip sank in. Not knowing what else to do, we walked into the ranger station. The rangers at the front desk were initially friendly; one woman got up from her desk and came to the front counter, where she handed us a map and discussed pleasantries. After a few minutes just passing time, I asked about Warner and his lizard people hunting out here, at which point her eyes narrowed. “Do you know anything about that guy?” I asked. She watched me closely, trying, I suppose, to divine my motives for such a question. After a few seconds, she turned to her coworker, seated at her desk twenty feet away. “Hey, Mary, do you know anything about any supposed lizard people and that guy who supposedly blew himself up on Second Avenue?” No, Mary said after a pause, no, she did not. ___________________________________ From the Book Under the Eye of Power by Colin Dickey. Copyright © 2023 by Colin Dickey. Published by arrangement with Viking Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. View the full article

In the James Brooks film As Good As It Gets, a star-struck fan asks the misanthropic romance novelist Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), “How do you write women so well?” “I think of a man,” says Melvin, “and I take away reason and accountability.” Yes, it’s a hilariously horrible answer. But it’s also a great question. How do you write characters that feel real? That are real? You know the usual formulas. You’ve studied them in workshops, heard them on podcasts. “Give them weaknesses. Vulnerabilities. Come up with distinctive characteristics, quirks and eccentricities. Develop a backstory.” Aspiring novelists are taught to build a profile for their protagonist. Detail your character’s childhood, their first crush, most painful memories, favorite color (“blue—no, yellow!”). And to an extent, I guess that works. As Steve Martin writes in Pure Drivel, “Liven your character by giving him an adjective: ‘This guy was no ordinary guy, he was a red guy.’ Now he is a full-blown person, with hopes and dreams.” But to me this can feel more like assembling a Mr. Potato Head than describing a living, breathing person. That’s not where the magic happens. What if, instead of setting out to assign your character certain traits, hopes, fear, and dreams, you assume they already have them? And your job is to simply listen . . . with your pen moving. Find them. Learn them, the way you get to know real breathing, bleeding people in your life. The way you came to know your spouse, your partner, your best friend. What if writing a character is not so much a question of invention as it is one of empathy? Stephen King famously says he thinks of stories as “found objects,” already-existing artifacts, and that your task is not to build them but to excavate them, gently enough and skillfully enough so as not to break them in the process. What if characters are the same way? You don’t invent them. You discover them. On a recent podcast James Altucher asked me the Melvin Udall question: “How do you write characters that feel so real?” I heard myself reply, “You write them until you fall in love with them.” Saul Goodman, the hapless lawyer, was meant to be a walk-on part in Breaking Bad, an ad hoc bit player put in to provide a little comic relief in an episode or two. Nobody—not the actor, not the studio, not even the show’s creator—had a clue what was about to happen. Which was that the character would grow to such an outsized role that he won everyone’s hearts, then spun off an entirely new show that equaled (some say even surpassed) the original. Something like the Saul Goodman effect happened in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy. King started the first book, Mr. Mercedes, as a short story brief cast included a minor character named Holly. But the story turned into a novel, and Holly turned into a star. Holly Gibney is a curious one. Pathologically shy. Preternaturally sensitive, even psychic, her unique interior world shaded by Shining-like perceptions. And stubbornly brave when it counts. “I could never let Holly Gibney go,” King has noted. “She was supposed to be a walk-on character in Mr. Mercedes and she just kind of stole the book and stole my heart.” Holly not only bloomed into a central character who stole the show: like Saul Goodman, she even survived the main character (in his case, Walter White, in hers, Bill Hodges) to headline a show of her own. This September, in a post-Hodges world, a new sequel is coming out. The title? Holly. There is a Holly in the Jack Reacher world, too. On a recent podcast, Lee Child was asked if he had any favorite characters in his books, aside from Reacher himself. And I already knew what his answer would be. Frances Neagley. Neagley and Reacher have a connection so deep, so strong, it transcends any storytelling romance tropes. Neagley is afflicted with haphephobia, a horror of being touched, which Reacher respects without explanation or reservation. In fact, he respects Neagley unreservedly in every way. As does Child, clearly. She is Reacher’s only true friend, the only person from his past he stays connected to, and the only other recurring character in the series. There are obvious parallels between Neagley and Holly Gibney—their distinctive psychological conditions, their gutsy resourcefulness, their inclination towards social withdrawal that makes them such compellingly rootable underdogs. But none of that is important compared to this trait they share: their authors have fallen head over heels in love with them. And here’s the thing: it didn’t start out that way. This is what is so fantastic about it, what makes readers and fans like you and me so incredibly fortunate: we get to watch those relationships spark to life and grow, building from casual acquaintance to budding respect to full-on gonzo infatuation. As we turn the pages, we get to watch the authors fall in love. I know what that’s like. It’s happened to me, too. In the second Chief Finn thriller, Cold Fear (coauthored with my Navy SEAL buddy Brandon Webb), I needed the cast to include an Icelandic cop. Krista Kristjánsdóttir showed up on page 11 and took control—of the plot, the book, and the writer. She cursed like a mobster. Hated America but secretly loved American crime fiction. As a kid, she’d waited out a terrible storm sitting at a window with her grandfather as they both watched her parents’ fishing boat sink. None of which I had the slightest inkling of when I started writing her. She was just a cop, put there to ramp up the pressure on Finn. And she stole the show. Booklist called Krista “a compelling character in her own right.” Best Thriller Books described her as “a formidable and brilliant woman . . . one of the top female characters I’ve read recently.” Publisher’s Weekly suggested she was “strong enough to sustain her own series.” Krista had Holly Gibney’ed me. Something like that happened again with the latest Finn book, Blind Fear. The story opens with two young kids, swimming off the beach in Vieques and disappearing. They were supposed to be a plot device, two little living MacGuffins that set Finn on a search-and-rescue quest. But as the words kept showing up on the page, something happened: Finn fell in love with these two children. And so did I. The more I listen to other authors talk about their work, the more I realize what a common experience this is. In his latest novel, Small Mercies, Dennis Lehane tells the story of Mary Pat, a working class Boston mom struggling to find a lost daughter amid the city’s school busing battles of the 1970s. Two cops enter the story in chapter 8. According to Lehane, that was supposed to be the end of it: they show up, ask questions, and leave. But that’s not what happens. One of those detectives, Bobby Coyne, comes back again. And again. He keeps showing up, looking closer into Mary Pat’s situation—and into the heart of the story. Bobby Coyne becomes a character second only to Mary Pat herself, serving as a Greek chorus of sorts, a proxy commentator for the author, and arguably the moral center of the novel. It wasn’t Lehane’s plan. Not until he started getting to really know Bobby Coyne. I had a chance to ask one of my favorite authors, Robert Crais, about this. A legendary television writer (Miami Vice, Cagney & Lacey), Crais is the award-winning creator of the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novels. His die-hard fans (“Craisies”) are craisy about Elvis, but they go all-out nuts for his sidekick, the taciturn, terrifying Joe Pike. I wondered if Crais had originally intended Joe to play such a prominent role, and wasn’t surprised at his answer. “I knew I wanted a buddy approach,” he said, “so I concentrated first on Elvis, my main character, then set about creating his opposite—Elvis talks, Joe doesn’t; Elvis has overcome the hard things he’s endured, Joe has withdrawn from the world.” And then he dropped this bomb: “Also, I fully planned to kill Joe Pike at the end of the first book.” Say what?! “When I reached the death scene,” he added, “I couldn’t do it. I had fallen in love with the character by then. He was simply too much fun to write.” Joe Pike was supposed to die in book 1. So, by the way, was Donald Westlake’s iconic antihero Parker. Lee Child fully intended for Jack Reacher to die in book 24. Holly Gibney was supposed to behave herself and disappear. Saul Goodman was put there to give us a few laughs and then go quietly away. But the authors fell in love. And thank God. Because now we get to fall in love, too. *** View the full article

I’m on the record with all my lavish praise for what Colson Whitehead is doing, which is nothing short of a monument to crime fiction—and to New York City. I’m not sure what else there is to say about the man’s work except, I suppose, to urge readers once again, if somehow they haven’t already been persuaded, to give themselves over wholly, unreservedly to the wild pleasures of Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy: first Harlem Shuffle, now Crook Manifesto, and a third novel still to come. In the new installment, Whitehead returns to the misadventures of Ray Carney, quickly ascending to the status of éminence grise in the small business community of 1970s Harlem, but with that crooked side of his still lurking. Here, the catalyst for his explorations of the city’s dark heart is something simple: his daughter really, really wants to see the Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden. That’s where Carney’s passage back over to the criminal world begins. Along the way we’re thrown in with a cast of schemers and operators, together making up the fabric of a shadow society. Whitehead writes the city of that era with such assurance, we begin to catch glimpses of the profound, pulsing whole: of New York in its most essential, corruptible form. Whitehead says he’s taken on this project because it’s fun. Because it gives him pleasure to write. From that simple impulse, he’s building something to last generations. I was lucky enough to catch up with him in the lead-up to the new book’s publication. We talked about New York, Blaxploitation cinema, Sidney Lumet, and a kid’s game that is anything but. Dwyer Murphy: Can we start with ringolevio, the kid’s game? It’s a big part of this book. Are you an aficionado? Colson Whitehead: I played it in Long Island. It wasn’t quite as extravagant and wide-ranging as the version in this book. Dwyer Murphy: In Massachusetts we played a version called manhunt. But I gather ringolevio, the classic form, is famous as a New York City street game. Colson Whitehead: I’ve never played in New York. Dwyer Murphy: Me, neither. It sounds great. Are your kids into this? Colson Whitehead: I haven’t heard the word spoken out loud before I started writing the book. Dwyer Murphy: As a thematic tool, it operates a little like the idea of dorveille, the second sleep, in Harlem Shuffle. It manages to tie a lot of stories together. Can you tell me a little about how you threaded it in? Colson Whitehead: There’s a notion involved: of people playing at gangsters, playing at being criminals. playing at being on the right or wrong side of the law. I took that little nugget and tried to make it work for Carney and Munson. In a way, Carney is on the outside looking in at the criminal life. He’s a bit of an imposter, though he understands the proper criminal codes. And then the actors in the Blaxploitation section are of course civilians pretending to be criminals. So ringolevio, it’s this kid’s game, but as you get older, the stakes get higher. In the first book, Freddie and Carney were, as kids, engaged in sort of low-level mischief: stealing comic books and candy. Then as they get older, the stakes get higher. That’s what Munson, too, is ruminating on: where did it all start and what does it mean now? Dwyer Murphy: We spoke a few years ago and you mentioned off-hand you had a crime fiction project going. Now, two books later, with another still to come, this is going to end up the biggest project you’ve ever taken on. You’ve committed a big chunk of your professional life to it. Why? Colson Whitehead: Because I like it. No other reason. I like it, so I’m doing it. Usually when I finish a book, I’m really tired of it. But after Harlem Shuffle, it was the first time I had a character and a world I wanted to pursue for years and years. You know, I wondered if I’d be sick of it, but I’m not sick of it yet. When Harlem Shuffle came out, I was in the middle of Crook Manifesto. I didn’t mention the word trilogy out loud, because what if I got bored? What if I didn’t want to do it? But now, it’s fun and it’s rewarding. I should be writing the books that give me joy and keep me interested, otherwise it’s not worth pursuing. Dwyer Murphy: Is there a special mindset required when you’re writing inside Carney’s world? Do you see everything crooked? Are you walking around seeing the world in terms of its corruption? Colson Whitehead: Well you always have to get into character: that philosophical palate and mood. So, if I’m on the highway, I might think, oh that’s a good place to dump a body, but I did that before, too. At this point, I’m used to turning it on and turning it off. I’m not reading a lot of fiction these days. I’m reading New York stories, and a lot of nonfiction. That takes up my outside, non-work time. Dwyer Murphy: What kind of nonfiction? Colson Whitehead: Well, I was getting a little sick of reading memoirs of criminals and straight, broad histories of New York, so I picked up David Hajdu’s book about the early folk scene, Positively 4th Street, about the early days of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. And of course, now that I think about it, it was a New York book. It’s about New York in the late 50s early 60s and people coming and remaking themselves and trying to find themselves, so it overlaps with the concerns of the Carney story, the Harlem trilogy. Even if it’s not purposeful research, I seem to end up back in New York. Dwyer Murphy: How about for the Blaxploitation section of the book—was there any special research involved? I take it that culture is an interest of yours. Colson Whitehead: I love exploitation pictures. Growing up in the 70s and 80s I saw all those Blaxploitation pictures when I was young. There weren’t a lot of movies with predominantly Black casts when I was growing up, so I gravitated toward them. Then I started out as a critic in my twenties, and when I began writing my early fiction, it was very pop culture oriented, and there’s a lot of Blaxploitation stuff and about Black imagery and pop culture in there. It was interesting coming back to that material in my fifties, trying to figure out how it would serve Carney. Going back to what we were saying about ringolevio—ringolevio is a game where you’re jailing the malcontents and criminals, and there are jail breaks. Blaxploitation is a sometimes cartoonish enactment of lawlessness and criminal activity, so I was thinking about how to play with that while writing a crime novel. I think Pepper says something about how the film crew in the book was playing at being bad, and then something bad came and nipped them in the bud. So Blaxploitation let me talk about playing at criminality, and what happens when reality intrudes on our games. Dwyer Murphy: Did you know Zippo was coming back in the second book in such a prominent way? I’m asking in part because I wonder about how you plan these things out over the course of multiple books. Colson Whitehead: When I finished the first book and started planning the second book, I realized Zippo would be an anchor. Harlem Shuffle was in copy edits then, so I had time to foreshadow a little bit. I think he mentions wanting to be a director at some point. I’m a big planner. When I committed to a trilogy, I tried to figure out what was going to happen in the third book so that I could seed it into the second book. Some people make up their stories as they go along, but I need an outline. And when it’s a trilogy, I think it really helps to know some of the big beats and the ending. Dwyer Murphy: And with Zippo, the idea of arson returns. That’s another notion that’s doing a lot of work in this book. This stuff comes up in all three parts of Crook Manifesto: arson, fires, burning buildings. Colson Whitehead: Well, it was a big part of New York history at that time, especially in poor communities: the Bronx, parts of Harlem. So I knew that was going to be the heart of the third story. It becomes more immediate as the book goes on. In the first section, in 1971, there are a lot of sirens, smoke in the distance, fires seen in passing. In the second section, there’s a more immediate fire. And in the third section, arson plays a much bigger role. If I know that when I’m starting the book, I know I can lace it into the first section and it’ll pay off later in the book. Dwyer Murphy: Speaking of the characters, I wasn’t expecting Pepper to get a little P.I. novel in there. Colson Whitehead: He was so fun in the first book, I thought he should get his own caper. Carney and Pepper, they’re both outsiders. Carney is an outsider in the criminal world. Pepper is an outsider in the normal world. He’s kind of a sociopathic freak who can’t understand normal family relationships. And in the same way Pepper brings Carney into a better understanding of the criminal world, Carney brings Pepper into an understanding of what it means to be a normal human with a family. It’s a big canvas, so there’s room for Carney to drop out and we can see the world through Pepper’s eyes. Then we come back in the third section and have a bit of synthesis. Dwyer Murphy: It reminded me a little of those big 19th century city novels, something from say Balzac, where you know these characters from other books, other stories, and finally they converge. It’s a special literary thrill, when that happens, and kind of a throwback. Colson Whitehead: I’m glad. It was fun for me, too. They’re both characters I have a lot of affection for. It was fun for me to have characters I like so much. Dwyer Murphy: What about a character you don’t like? I’m assuming Munson, your crooked vice cop, might come under that category. Colson Whitehead: No, I love Munson. Dwyer Murphy: He’s a demon out of a Sidney Lumet movie. Colson Whitehead: He is, and of course Serpico was my first introduction to the Knapp Commission and police corruption in the 70s. I didn’t watch Serpico again, I’d seen it enough. I went back to the nonfiction book, the one Peter Mass wrote about him. And the actual Knapp Commission report. It was cool to go to the real-life source after first encountering all this through Sidney Lumet. And Lumet looms large for me as a child of the 70s, whether it’s Serpico or Dog Day Afternoon or Network. He’s someone who introduced to me this institutional corruption: in the FBI, in the police force, in network television. Dwyer Murphy: I just went back to Prince of the City recently. I hadn’t thought about that one in a long time. Colson Whitehead: As a kid, I remember loving Treat Williams because of Hair: The Musical. We were a big Treat Williams house. Dwyer Murphy: So, you’re definitely committed to doing another book? That’s set? You’re saying the word trilogy out loud now? Colson Whitehead: Yeah, it’s a trilogy. A lot of the third book is planned. Not necessarily the names of characters or what cigarettes they smoke, but the big stuff. View the full article

Like many readers, I love a good historical mystery. A mystery that unlocks secrets of the past, reveals a forgotten story, or sheds light on tensions still plaguing the modern world. While most of my work is contemporary, I’ve discovered that the skillful use of history can deepen the traditional mystery, including the cozy. In my Spice Shop mysteries, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, history is in the air—along with the smells of fish, produce, and flowers, the sounds of buskers, and the hubbub of ten million visitors a year. Founded in 1907 and saved from the wrecking ball by voters in 1971, Pike Place is the country’s oldest continuously-operating farmers’ market. It’s a collage of venerable structures with distinct origins and styles, replete with lower levels and secret passages, woven together by a cobbled street, open-air arcades, and an atmosphere of magic. As Pepper Reece, the Spice Shop owner, goes about her business, she feeds us tidbits of history: The early market master who may or may not still dance in the former ballroom windows. The spirits that toss bottles off a bar’s shelves, appeased by a pitcher of brew. The first business in the city licensed to a woman, going strong. The stories that live on. And readers love it as much as I do. Historical mysteries are often based on or inspired by real events. In contrast, history adds layers to a contemporary mystery, bringing a place to life through the characters’ experience of it. A historical event—fact or fiction—may play a part in the main plot or a subplot. Author Connie Berry often uses an object as the focus in her Kate Hamilton mysteries, featuring an American antiques dealer in the UK. In The Shadow of Memory, Kate is asked to appraise items offered for sale by the trustees of a long-closed Victorian sanatorium to finance its conversion into luxury apartments. Kate suspects a prized painting in the collection may be a forgery. Her questions lead to stonewalling and denial, and ultimately to danger. Clues surface in the sanatorium and a nearby house once lauded for its mid-century architecture, appealing to readers like me intrigued by design. Ultimately, Kate discovers the truth about a decades-old murder as well as three recent killings. Iced Under, a Maine Clambake mystery by Barbara Ross, starts with the arrival of a package containing the Black Widow, a black diamond necklace once owned by Julia Snowden’s great-grandmother—and not seen for a century. While tracing the package, Julia meets relatives she never knew and probes a fresh mysterious death. Along the way, she learns more about the history of the ice business in New England, the source of her family’s long-gone wealth. Long-gone except for the necklace and Morrow Island, where the family runs a clambake in the shadow of Windsholme, once a grand summer home. An intriguing slice of history, a rundown mansion, and black diamonds—the perfect late-night read. Authors also blend past and present by weaving parallel stories. Rhys Bowen is a master of dual timelines. A reference in a letter sends a young British woman on the wartime trail of her late father in The Tuscan Child. Not only is the past not dead—it could still kill. And in The Venice Sketchbook, we travel in tandem with two women: one who sketches a city on the verge of war, capturing both love and memories, and her great-niece, seeking solace as she follows clues the recently-deceased woman left behind, rediscovering herself in the process. “The setting feels like a character,” readers sometimes say. The secrets old walls hide and the atmosphere they create is a popular element in suspense novels, eerily illustrated in Carol Goodman’s The Stranger Behind You. When Joan moves into a Manhattan apartment building called The Refuge—just what she’s seeking—she has no idea it was once a notorious Magdalen laundry, a home for wayward girls in the early 20th century. The nooks and crannies of the real building, long demolished, and the story of the mysterious neighbor amplify the fear and danger that dog Joan. The author writes that the building’s existence “seemed to have vanished from living memory, as if it were an embarrassment.” This is the best kind of history—to take us back to a forgotten time. Cleo Coyle’s Haunted Bookshop series brings the past to life in a very different way, through a pair of sleuths: modern-day bookseller Penelope McClure and the ghost who haunts her shop, a PI named Jack Shephard. In The Ghost Goes to the Dogs, Jack’s adventures pursuing a case in the 1940s give Penelope a clue to her own predicament. Readers get the best of both worlds, a delightful combination. A few years ago, my husband and I toured the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. It’s a fascinating place, featuring a replica of a Chinese grocery and tours of the adjacent Kong Yick Hotel, once a community center and boarding house for Chinese laborers. What if, I wondered, a body was found in the basement of a closed residential hotel? A brand-new body, dressed like a lion dancer and found during Lunar New Year festivities. What if Pepper, my Spice Shop owner, was drawn into the mystery not just to name the dead, but to probe the other secrets of the Gold Rush Hotel? I read about the role of residential hotels in the Chinese community and about national and local politics surrounding Chinese immigration in the late 19th century. I pored over websites cataloging historic Chinese pharmacies in rural Oregon and Montana. In my mind, I created shelves crammed with old bottles and jars, boxes labeled in old calligraphy, and other mysterious objects. And when I found a historian’s account of traveling with her immigrant father in the Midwest, selling produce and visiting the old Chinese hotels and restaurants, I felt a mental click. Community is key to every immigrant, but especially to those who have faced extreme prejudice and legal exclusion. That, I realized, was why my fictional hotelier, Francis Wu, held on to the Gold Rush long after the hotel closed. Why he was so determined that it stay in the family, despite his son’s indifference. Why he did not destroy the apothecary in the basement, despite what it had cost him. Last fall, I walked Seattle’s Chinatown-International District again, snapping pictures and feeling the cobbled streets and alleys beneath my feet. I hope you feel it too, on the page. *** View the full article

In 2019, I was just digging into what would become my fourth historical novel. Set in 19th century Pari’s infamous Salpêtrière asylum, it follows two young women: Josephine, who arrives at the hospital stripped of memory and covered in blood, and Laure, a recovered hysteric who helps Josephine navigate the surreal world she’s now trapped in. It’s a world in which Jean-Martin Charcot, the Salpêtrière’s famous director, not only studies, photographs, and publishes on his traumatized female patients, but hypnotizes them into violent, even sexualized manifestations of their illness, often in front of hundreds of curious spectators. It may sound like the stuff of horror novels. But like all my books to date, The Madwomen of Paris draws on real historical figures and events. Charcot was a medical titan; a brilliant clinician to whom medical students worldwide—including Sigmund Freud, Georges Gilles de la Tourette and Pierre Janet—flocked for mentorship and guidance. Over the course of his career he’d identified both Parkinson’s and ALS (still known as “Charcot’s Disease” in some countries), and been christened “the Napoleon of Neuroses” by the press. But for his final medical conquest—the one he hoped would seal his legacy—he’d set his sights on hysteria, a disorder that had puzzled clinicians for millennia, and which by the late 1800’s was infecting so many French women that one Parisian editorialist dubbed it the malady of our age. Using asylum wards as his laboratory, Charcot plucked women he’d diagnosed with the illness, prompting a dizzyingly range of symptoms that included everything from epileptic-style attacks to stigmata. Hysterical episodes were famous for unfolding in such rapid and erratic fashion that most doctors couldn’t make sense of them. But hypnosis—a practice formerly relegated to carnival-style sideshows—allowed Charcot and his interns to slow these attacks down; to separate catatonia from contracted limb and seizure from scream-inducing hallucination. It also allowed them to trigger hysterical attacks on cue in the weekly public lectures for which Charcot was already renowned for within the medical community; lectures that—not surprisingly—became wildly popular among the general populace once they began featuring half-dressed, contorting young women. That some of these women were clearly reliving sexual trauma was a fact he pointedly ignored, dismissing one subject’s wails as “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” and paralyzing another’s tongue­ for days when her chatter annoyed him. He himself was the first to note that he had no interest in what these women had to say. His focus was what their bodies told him about their disease. Researching this little-known chapter of medical history, I was both intrigued and deeply troubled. For all of Charcot’s insistence that hysteria was—like Parkinson’s—a neurological disorder (he spent years examining hysteric’s brain tissue for physical lesions), it was arguably something far more vital for hysterics themselves: the one expression of their trauma that their doctors—not to mention a prurient Parisian public—would listen to. It was therefore all the more ironic that while hysteria provided a vernacular by which hysterics could share their anguish, it gave doctors like Charcot a convenient excuse to dismiss that pain as a mere offshoot of a “real” physical disease—sound and fury, signifying nothing—even he displayed their torment publicly and, in the process, accrued even greater medical celebrity. These were complex themes to unpack, and challenging material to work with narratively. But I was excited by the opportunities Madwomen offered: not just to explore this strange moment’s real-life Gothic aspects, but to give the Salpêtrière’s women back their voices, and to give them a stage of their own—one not constructed by powerful men to leverage female suffering into professional gain. I think I was also hopeful that writing their stories would affirm, for both myself and my readers, how much better things are for women today. Unfortunately, though, over the three-odd years I spent buried in 19th century worldbuilding, the 21st-century world kept offering evidence to the contrary. I’d stumbled on my first photograph of a Salpêtrière hysteric—Augustine Gleizes—in 2017, just as the #MeToo movement gained momentum. The news cycle roiled with revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual assaults, and as I worked through my early chapters, more powerful men were making headlines for similar reasons: Jeffrey Epstein. Larry Nassar. Bill Cosby. U.S. president Donald Trump. I was crafting a scene where Josephine relives a violent sexual attack on Charcot’s stage while Christine Blasey Ford was on national television, testifying that Brett Kavanaugh—Trump’s SCOTUS pick—sexually assaulted her in high school. Her accusations were mocked by Trump and dismissed as a “made-up scandal” by Republican senators, who ultimately rammed through Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Court. There he joined Clarence Thomas, a Justice accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill three decades earlier. It seemed chillingly fitting that as I worked through my final Madwomen revisions four years later, both men voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade, stripping women of the constitutional right to control their own bodies. And of course, it didn’t end there, because it never does. (As Faulkner famously said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”) Just this year Trump—who’s been accused of sexual misconduct by over two dozen women since the ‘70’s—had to answer to one of those charges in New York civil court. The jury found E. Jean Carroll’s claim that the former president assaulted in 1996 believable enough to award her five million dollars, despite Trump’s attempts to paint her as a “nut job” and “mentally sick”. It was a gratifying, if hard-won victory. But it didn’t stop CNN from handing Trump a stage from which to attack Carroll again the following day, calling her a “whack job” as hundreds of his supporters cheered, jeered and whistled. And of course, no amount awarded in a courtroom can erase the profound damages done to the women by Trump and others like him. Like the survivors I write about in Madwomen, they’ll struggle with the repercussions of those attacks for years; with disorders like PTSD, anxiety and depression. With feelings guilt, shame and low self-esteem. With flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, and nightmares that researchers now tell us are on par with those suffered by veterans of war. It’s all the more discouraging given that women already battle mental disorders at significantly higher rates than men; though at least one study hints that that discrepancy might well be because women experience sexual violence at such disproportionally high rates (one in three worldwide, according to the World Bank). And it’s not just our mental health that’s at risk. Other recent research links sexual violence with medical conditions like high blood pressure, dementia and stroke. All of this certainly informed my novel’s historical, fictional narrative, as did a growing recognition of just how arbitrary such designations (reality and fiction, past and present) really are. And yet it’s also made me more aware—and more appreciative—of how powerful women’s voices are today. Unlike Wittman, whose abrupt “recovery” from hysteria after Charcot’s 1893 death was arguably the most potent challenge anyone made to his theories, women today have formidable platforms through which to articulate grievances and effect change. The #MeToo movement was ample evidence of that. But it’s also reflected in the numbers: more women hold positions of political decision-making than at any other moment in history, particularly in policy areas related to gender equality, human rights, and social affairs. Women also make up more than half of the nation’s medical students, and 36.3% of the physician workforce. True, they’re still paid less than men for that work. But they bring something to it my “madwomen” never had: a willingness to really listen. Not just to female bodies, but to what female voices actually have to say. As for me: my growing awareness of the endurance of Madwomen’s grim themes may not have lightened its plot points, or the dark history behind them. I’ll even admit that it did the opposite; that there’s real rage in some of those pages, and I saw no reason to soft-pedal it. But it also inspired me to imbue my characters with the same grit and resilience that I’ve so admired in women like Dr. Ford, Anita Hill, E. Jean Carroll, and so many others I know who’ve suffered and survived sexual assault. They are not the compliant, “hysterical” specimens the men in their worlds wanted them to be, but strong, fully self-actualized heroines; ones who not only reclaim their bodies and stories from men who seek to control them, but who forge their own rich, subversive narratives in the process. *** View the full article

I didn’t set out to write a crime novel. I mean, I did. Obviously. A book isn’t the sort of thing that just happens by accident. But I never thought this would be the genre I found a home in. I’ve loved crime fiction ever since a bookseller put a copy of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River into my hands and I learned it is more than just hardboiled cliches and overwrought metaphors describing women’s legs. Crime fiction is a dark mirror, painting the world’s flaws in stark relief. It is a genre of desperation, where the iniquities of civilization drive men and women to the brink. It asks what we are truly capable of when everything is on the line. Its facets reveal the hidden and unseen that we’d rather be allowed to ignore. It is, most of all, an unflinching portrayal of our cracks and failures, both as individuals and as a culture. It fascinated me as a reader. But as a writer? I didn’t think these were the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. At the end of a Western, the gunslinger rides off into the sunset not because his happy ending awaits him there, but because he will never find a happy ending. The Western’s great tragedy is that its hero never gets to enjoy the fruits of his labors. He drives out the bandits and brings civilization to the frontier, but he is not a civilized man (and he is almost always a man), so his final act must always be to leave. No matter how much Joe Starrett pleads, Shane will never come back. But what happens when there is no more frontier? When there is nowhere left for Gary Cooper to go after throwing his marshal’s badge in the mud? When he is forced to remain in a civilization that doesn’t want him? Well then we get the noir, the story of the uncivilized man trapped in a broken culture. It’s no coincidence Elmore Leonard wrote Westerns before he wrote crime. The hero of crime fiction, whether he is a criminal or a detective, always exists outside the bounds of a society to which he is not suited. As Jack Reacher wanders from town to town, he solves problems, but he doesn’t put down roots. He is guided solely by his own compass. In this broken world the only thing you can count on is yourself. You must gird yourself in the armor of callousness to survive. I know I’m far from the first to draw a line from crime fiction to toxic masculinity. When everything could be a threat, self-reliance is the only safety. Openness is weakness. Tenderness is death. I was midway through a rewatch of The Wire, a show I return to every few years, and I found myself dreading each episode. While the show is undoubtedly brilliant, it is also unrelenting in its cruelty and nihilism. There is no hope in David Simon’s Baltimore. No good intention that doesn’t bring more pain. No amount of effort or stroke of genius that can’t be wiped out by a momentary contact with an uncaring system. It is compelling and brilliant and insightful, but it also left me feeling empty and hopeless. And I’m tired of feeling hopeless. We live in the Anthropocene. It is the age of mass shootings. Fascism is on the rise around the world. I passed a Nazi demonstration on my way to visit friends the other week. Antisemitic and antimuslim violence is commonplace. Income and wealth inequality are at levels not seen since the Gilded Age. Trans and non-binary folk are beaten and killed over bathrooms and book readings. People of color are murdered by neighbors and police with impunity. Carbon pollution threatens an end to human civilization as we know it. There is so much darkness that to simply point it out and cry nihilism feels a bit, well, nihilistic. I’m not so vain as to think that I have the solutions to all of society’s ills, but I wanted to create something that left my reader feeling invigorated to try to find them. So I decided to write a crime novel. For where better to sing a paean to empathy and hope and love than in the genre that so steadfastly insists on rugged individualism over the weakness of emotional vulnerability. A Man of Lies is the result of that effort. My protagonist and narrator, Barrett Rye, is a queer man of color. He is a muscle-bound giant who has been working as a mob enforcer because that is all that society believes him capable of. He is reserved and silent, expressing few opinions and no emotions. He is utterly without hope, trapped entirely in a cruel world of toxic masculinity that denies him all agency and personhood. Then he falls in love and for the first time in his life he feels seen. It is exhilarating and terrifying and upends everything he thought about who he can be and what he can have. Until the man of his dreams is murdered. The book, as much as it is a twisty thriller, is the story of his fight to find that purpose once more. He’s seen a path out. He’s been given hope that the broken world can improve. If you’ll forgive me one final tangent, that rallying cry of the 20th century gay rights movement—“We’re here. We’re queer.”—has always felt profound to me. It is not only a demand that queer people be recognized, but a celebration of the power that comes from being seen. To be invisible is to be powerless. And crime fiction is the fiction of the unseen. The cast off. The society of these books ignores its victims and would rather its heroes not exist. The masculinity at its heart is a direct reaction to that. If you won’t see me, it says, then I reject you. I will rely only on myself. You can’t fix the broken system, but only fight to survive it. That’s Chinatown. But queerness offers a different path to power, and Barrett refuses to fade back into invisible obscurity. The Western’s definition of manhood promised to bring civilization and safety, but it has failed. The world the gunslinger made for us is a dehumanizing and destructive one. Maybe the path forward isn’t to sink further into toxic masculinity, but to insist on radical recognition. To see each other. To demand that we ourselves be seen. Barrett’s fight isn’t easy, but perhaps it offers something new. The hopelessness and the masculinity at crime fiction’s heart are, to my mind, inextricably linked. Nihilism breeds toxic masculinity as a defense mechanism, and toxic masculinity leads to nihilism as an unsupported society crumbles. I can’t promise that my book has a happy ending. It’s still crime fiction, after all. The world is still broken and I don’t have the solution. All I have is a story of a man demanding to be recognized. That, and hope. *** View the full article

\We do love our special events—birthday parties, weddings, family reunions, and such. These happenings give us a chance to acknowledge important milestones in our lives and celebrate traditions that have brought us together for generations. But what happens when these cherished occasions go wildly off the rails? There’s something quite sinister and devilishly fun when a celebration turns calamitous. Despite all our planning and good intentions, the wild card is always other people, and in our hearts, we all know that nothing is quite as safe and secure as we pretend it to be. In my own domestic suspense novel, THE BLOCK PARTY (On-sale July 18), I explore the secrets and lies that lead to a murder on a close-knit cul-de-sac during an annual block party. Let’s take a look at some of my favorite twisted tales of special events that go from pleasant to catastrophic. The Guest List by Lucy Foley Everyone loves a good wedding, and the one depicted in Lucy Foley’s breakout novel is certainly one for the ages. It has it all—a unique setting on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, and a guest list that’s so exclusive even the movers and shakers are feeling left out of the fun. But make no mistake, all is not as it seems as the grand festivities get underway. As the invitees arrive, we discover the secret reasons each has received the coveted invitation, and learn of the special “gifts” they plan to bestow upon the newlyweds. As one might expect from a dark and foreboding mystery novel such as this, the bride and groom would be better off if more than a few of these offerings went unopened. In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware Nora Shaw, a reclusive crime writer, is surprised to receive an invite to a bachelorette party from a friend she hasn’t seen or spoken to in over ten years. The party is to take place in a remote glass house surrounded by woods, which casts an eerie spell over the happy occasion. Nora decides to attend, but as one should expect, she soon realizes something is not right. Trapped together in the house due to a heavy snowstorm, old grudges and secrets begin to surface and the atmosphere turns increasingly fraught with tension. But something terrible happens in the woods that night, and Nora, who wakes up confused in a hospital bed, is unsure if she can trust her own memories or the people around her. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty What could be more harmless and fun than a trivia night fundraiser at a local school? Unfortunately, when you mix secrets, jealousy, and betrayal, the combination can be quite deadly. Moriarty’s novel, which was made into a hugely successful HBO miniseries, centers on three women, Madeline, Jane, and Celeste, and examines issues of domestic violence, parenting, friendships, and the little lies we all tell ourselves to get by, that can have deadly consequences. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett What happens when a lavish birthday party, thrown by a powerful Japanese businessman who is also a devoted opera fan, takes a drastic turn as terrorists storm the mansion where the party is taking place? A weeks-long hostage situation ensues when the terrorists learn their intended kidnapping target is not in attendance. Patchett, a master at conveying the depth and complexity of human emotion and connection, explores the intricate ways in which beauty can enter our lives even under the bleakest of circumstances. You’re Invited by Amanda Jayatissa I’ve never had the good fortune of being invited to a Sri Lankan wedding, but should an invitation reach me, I hope the experience will be nothing like the lavish ceremony depicted in Amanda Jayatissa’s wildly addictive thriller. One needs to rise above when attending the nuptials of a former lover, but Amaya faces an even bigger challenge when she’s accused of murdering the groom, who has vanished without a trace. Naturally, nothing is as it seems, and dark secrets abound, as Amaya is not the only guest in attendance displeased with the idea of a happily ever after. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie This classic of the mystery genre has made generations of mystery lovers question the unexpected invitation. Ten strangers are lured to Soldier Island via an invitation tailored to personal circumstances from a “U.N. Owen.” The reasons for the summons are as varied as the characters themselves: a doctor who thinks he’s there to treat a wealthy woman, a private investigator who believes he’s on a job, a religious woman who is convinced it’s an invite to a holiday resort, and so on. When guests start dying one by one in a manner that mirrors a creepy nursery rhyme titled “Ten Little Soldiers,” those in attendance quickly realize this is one invitation they should have passed up. Black Sunday, by Thomas Harris I can’t think of an event much bigger, more grandiose, and well-known than the Super Bowl. Thomas Harris’s debut novel from 1975 uses this as the backdrop for a terrorist plot to detonate a bomb during the most-watched television broadcast in America. And the bomb in Harris’s superb thriller comes by air—not in a plane, but as a giant blimp that is wired to explode. The tension is non-stop as an Israeli agent named David Kabakov works with US law enforcement to try and thwart the imminent attack. *** View the full article

“There is nothing more dangerous than security” – Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Queen Elizabeth I of England In 1988, I read The Last Ship by William Brinkley which centers on a crew of one-hundred-and-fifty-two men and twenty-six women assigned to the U.S.S. Nathan James when nuclear Armageddon breaks loose and the ship’s captain has to find a refuge from the poisonous radiation that is rendering his men sterile and his women without any healthy sperm to start repopulating the earth. It’s a long book, more than six-hundred pages, but I’ve read it at least three more times in the intervening years. As I recall, the book offers no explanation for how or why this final war started, but that never bothered me. If the missiles ever start flying, the point is likely to be moot anyway. My fascination with non-zombie, atomic-apocalypse “what-if” tales began for one simple reason. In 1938, in a laboratory in Berlin, three chemists changed the world forever. Before then, man, as cruel and destructive as he had proven to be in the millennia leading up to it, had never possessed the potential to end all life as we know it. But splitting the uranium atom was a Pandora’s Box—literally lighting the fuse that could blow up the world. The Manhattan Project quickly followed, as American concern over Germany’s nuclear ambitions became paramount. Those secret activities, like all military operations throughout history, proved hard to protect. Hence, Sir Francis’s remark about the danger of security. Almost as fast as the development of the bomb itself came the first fictional accounts of how it might be the end of everything. Nevil Shute’s pioneering On the Beach was published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when the U.S. and Soviet governments had recently graduated to the hydrogen bomb and were testing them in the open air. It is the first important novel to deal with the horror of what would happen to those of us unfortunate enough to survive the initial blasts. Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon followed in 1959. It was the same year that Klaus Fuchs, a German theoretical physicist and one of the principal scientists on the real-life Manhattan Project, was released from prison after serving his sentence for revealing the West’s nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. He departed for East Germany shortly thereafter where he died almost thirty years later, perhaps somewhat less confident that his decision to spy for the other side had somehow made the world a safer place. Fuchs, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, Morris Cohen—the list goes on, all highly educated people embedded in America’s nuclear program who believed they were serving a higher purpose in serving two masters. Were they? It’s a question I take on in my new mystery The Bitter Past, a dual-timeline story in which the current sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada, is trying to solve the grisly murder of a retired FBI agent. His jurisdiction is just downwind of where hundreds of those warheads were detonated in the 1950s and where that radiation eventually settled to the ground, poisoning everything and everyone it touched. The novel moves between the present and the past and considers two very important “what-if” scenarios: (1) what if the Soviets had sympathizers not only working in the New Mexico lab at Los Alamos but had also managed to place an intelligence asset in the Nevada Test Site, and (2) what if that spy managed to get his hands on a working bomb? When I began outlining this book in 2019, I was already steeped in the fiction of nuclear nightmare. Not only the novels but the movies too. I was transfixed watching War Games (1983) in which a young Matthew Broderick matches wits with an AI nuclear defense computer program which has run amok (boy, isn’t that timely?) and is ready to start a full-scale nuclear exchange. Crimson Tide (1995) was another creative look at what might happen if the two senior officers aboard a nuclear submarine disagreed over their respective interpretations of launch protocols during a period of hair-trigger political tension in the world. The Day After and Testament, both released in 1983, scared me more than The Exorcist ever did. I keep going back to what Walsingham knew five hundred years before the rest of us: there is nothing more dangerous than our efforts to make ourselves safe. We invented the bomb to make sure the Nazis didn’t get it first and used it to end World War II and eliminate the need to invade Japan, an effort that would have cost countless more Allied soldiers and sailors. Best estimates—and there is no scientific consensus on this—suggest that more than 100,000 Japanese people died as a direct result (including decades later) of those detonations. We then rationalized our development of even more powerful bombs with the belief that we needed to stay ahead of the Russians and achieve a strong nuclear deterrent. We could argue from now until we blow each other up over whether that strategy has been sound. It works until it doesn’t. It’s as simple and as deadly as that. I grew up in the harsh sunlight of the Nevada desert not long after and not far from where the Soviet spy in The Bitter Past goes to work. In the 1950s, the prospect of nuclear Armageddon had school children hiding under their desks in Duck and Cover drills and their parents digging fallout shelters. We tested those warheads above the parched, cracked ground of sand and tumbleweeds, lighting up the sky for hundreds of miles and sending shockwaves that would shake buildings and break windows in the small but booming city of Las Vegas only 75 miles to the south. When I moved here at the age of six, testing had moved underground. Still, I remember the rattle on the window and the feeling of impending doom. It never stopped. Now we have the war in Ukraine and a man with his finger on the button. All of us are afraid a bad day or a migraine will be enough for him to press it. I suppose that’s what ultimately drove me to tell this story, that sense of being unsafe and the danger of security. Along the way, I struggled with other notions like What makes us who we are? Is it where or when we are born? Klaus Fuchs and Julian Rosenberg would have probably said no to the former and, most likely, yes to the latter. It’s a complicated question, one that the central characters in my novel grapple with. One is nearing the end of his life while the other is halfway through his. Both have worn the uniform of their country. Both have done the bidding of others. In the end, the only important question that remains is when everything is on the line, do we have what it takes to do the right thing? I hope you’ll come along to find out. *** View the full article

CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON, LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA AUGUST 2018 California State Prison, Los Angeles County, is located in the city of Lancaster, roughly eighty miles northeast of the palm tree–­lined boulevards of Beverly Hills, but it might as well be eighty million. The prison is an ecosystem unto itself, where over three thousand men live sandwiched between a sunbaked terrain inhospitable to much more than scrub brush and a wide, unforgiving sky. In the early morning hours, when dawn lights up the desert in dusty shades of rose, there’s something almost peaceful about the way the outside world recedes quickly, beyond the fifteen-­feet-­high, maximum-­security-­specification mesh fencing. In the flat heat of midday, when temperatures regularly reach one hundred and ten degrees in the shade and the desert winds blow so hot and wild they could sear the eyelashes off your face, the landscape holds a biblical feeling of punishment. The prison campus is strewn with identical two-­story tan-­colored buildings that blend into the expanse of sand and rocks beneath them. The only flashes of color are the garish turquoise doors with industrial grade locks and matching windows the width of butter knives. On the morning of August 8, 2018, after waiting for seven hours for my number to come up, I finally faced its iron security gates, but I kept setting off the metal detector. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten my aunt’s advice. I wound up having to pry the underwire out of my bra with my teeth, because there were no sharp objects available. The prison wives carefully coiffing their children’s hair in the bathroom beside me cheered me on. “You go, girl. Gnaw that shit out. You got this.” It would be my first time inside a men’s maximum-­security prison. It would most certainly be my first time talking to a serial killer that I was aware of. I was as prepared as I could be, but you always forget something. Once I made it through the metal detectors, I waited with a group of ten women and children, as a tall iron gate opened. We stepped into the cage that formed the liminal space between freedom and its opposite. I was an impostor. These people were there to visit loved ones, because they had no other choice. I was there to visit a monster, because I wanted a story no one else had. The gate behind us whirred and clanked closed. We stepped out onto the prison campus. I walked on shaky legs toward B Block, my knees actually knocking together. Such a cliché. But the body is the body, and fear is unoriginal. I carried a clear plastic baggie full of quarters and a key fob. My friend Sasha had once done time in the same prison, and I’d called him for tips. “It’s impossible to get an appointment,” he told me. “You have to show up at six in the morning and wait in a line of cars outside the gate. They don’t start letting you in until nine thirty, but if you line up later than six, you’ll never see him. Bring quarters. You’re not cool if your visitor doesn’t bring quarters for the vending machines.” Criminal psychology had fascinated me since my first fix, Manson—­the gateway drug for many a true crime buff. The outrageous crimes documented in Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s seminal true crime classic Helter Skelter signaled the end of the sixties. Manson and his family upended the burgeoning ethos of tuning in and dropping out. How can you twist peace and love into the evisceration of innocent human beings? In the same way, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood documented not just the brutal murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, but also the end of the fifties white-­bread meritocracy of the American dream. Surely if you were a hardworking, virtuous, cherry pie–­making, white, midwestern nuclear family, you would thrive and succeed. You can be anything you want to be if you just try hard enough! Life is a system of just deserts. Isn’t it? No, it isn’t. For the Clutters, it wasn’t. For the LaBiancas, it wasn’t. What do you do with that lesson? Manson himself was overrated, a mediocre mind at best. At any senior prom, stoned quarterbacks spout deeper platitudes. Manson got press, superfans, fawning groupies for his theatrics, his emptiness, and his “girls.” The gravitational pull of these famous multiple murders could make you give up on not just ideals but humanity in general. How can you still view with anything but cynicism the human animal, capable of such casual cruelty? Or it could be a puzzle. It could be a career maker. I had a voracious and reportedly infuriating level of curiosity, plus a strong stomach for both gore and narcissism. I had a chance. I approached what I hoped was B Block, as the hot wind lashed my hair to my face and sheriff’s deputies passed by me in SWAT vests. Some smiled and said hi or remarked on the weather. I handed the guard my ID. “You here to see Little?” he asked. “How you know Little?” “He’s a friend,” I said. I wasn’t sure how this thing worked, but I knew enough to not say I was a journalist. “A friend? My ass,” the guard said cheerfully as he put an enormous brass key into an enormous brass lock and admitted me to a cinder-­block room full of families huddled together at plastic tables. Along one wall was a play area with Astroturf and a few tubs of oversized LEGOs. Next to the play area was a gray seamless background where you could get your picture taken with your loved one for a two-­dollar token. I used the quarters to buy Funyuns, a Coca-­Cola, and some Little Debbie Honey Buns. I put them on the table and tried to figure out where to train my eyes. At the door? At the red line behind which the inmates stood until given permission to sit? Instead, Little wheeled up on me from behind and startled me. “Hello, Sam.” Sam was wheelchair-­bound, suffering from diabetes and a heart condition. He wore standard prison-­issue shapeless denim pants, a blue cotton T-­shirt with CDC printed on the back in block lettering, and a pair of orthopedic white sneakers due to a toe amputation. The tail end of a baby-­pink heart surgery scar the size of an earthworm peeked out from the top of his T-­shirt. He sported a thinning pelt of kinky white hair and a beard to match. Age spots discolored his skin, giving him the appearance of a molting lizard. At first glance, he appeared a frail and pitiable grandpa, but you could see the evidence of the man he once was: a six-­foot-­one powerhouse with catcher’s mitts for hands. Gravity had done its inevitable work, dragging his jowls into lazy folds around his jaw, but you could still make out the strong cheekbones, the handsome face, the glittering pale-­blue eyes that once put his victims at ease. The sound of children, chatter, and vending machines bounced off the cinder blocks. Sam wagged a finger at me. “You!” he said. “You my angel come to visit me from heaven. God knew I was lonely and he sent me you. You want a story for your book? Oooooeeeee, do I have a story.” I came prepared to do battle with a dragon, and instead I faced a lonely old man over a bag of Funyuns. Sam spoke in a soft patois, cobbled together from what I would soon learn were his Georgia origins and his years growing up in the Ohio steel town of Lorain. I leaned in, then leaned in some more, until I was approximately a foot from the face of the man I knew had strangled and brutalized at least three women and who knew how many more. My eye twitched. Sam and I talked that first day about our childhoods, about our first loves, about his family tree, which includes (it really does) both Malcolm X and Little Richard. We talked about my kids. We talked about baseball, boxing, and his long-­term girlfriend, Jean, who had been a master shoplifter. We talked about travel. We talked about art. He was good at only two things in his life he told me: art and boxing. Later he’d admit to a third at which he was far better. Sam had learned to draw in the Ohio State Reformatory as a young man, and it was still his preferred pastime. “What do you like to draw?” “Oh, girls. I mean women. I mean ladies,” he said, searching for the term I’d find least offensive. Was the answer “victims”? “I can draw anything. Paint, pencils, whatever I can get. I can do all the light and dark. Just like I see you right now.” What was he seeing? What had he seen in them? How do you find someone simultaneously worthy of the kind of deep attention it takes to render them and also disposable? “I live in my mind now. With my babies. In my drawings. Not with these robots in here. The only things I was ever good at was fighting and drawing.” We talked about his hero, Sugar Ray Robinson, and the prizefighting career Sam had almost had. He was once a middleweight champion in the prison boxing ring who’d been called “mad” for his speed and fury. The Mad Daddy. The Mad Machine. The Machine Gun. I sat with him for hours that first day and returned the next, committed to it being my last go at him. If I couldn’t make a dent in his bullshit, it wasn’t worth the gas mileage. After about six hours total, he lingered on a story about a woman in Florida. “I want a TV,” he said. “I want things too.” His eyes went dead flat. I had almost forgotten to be afraid of him. “You going to buy me a TV?” “I don’t know, Sam. Am I?” He laughed and drummed his half-­inch-­long, dirty yellow fingernails on the table. “Okay, okay, you got me! What do you want to hear about for your story, little miss? You want to hear about the first one?” I dug my toes into my shoes. Was this really going to happen? I don’t know why it shocked me. We’re all dying to spill our secrets. It just takes figuring out what will nudge us over the edge into free fall. “She was a big ol’ blond. Round about turn of the new year, 1969 to 1970. Miami. Coconut Grove. You know Coconut Grove? Nah, you wouldn’t know Coconut Grove. She was a ho”—­he corrected himself—­“a prostitute. She was sitting at a restaurant booth, red leather, real nice. She crossed them big legs in her fishnet stockings and touched her neck. That was my sign from God.” With that, he began an incantation of murders. He remembered eighty-­six, give or take a couple. With astonishing detail and near photographic recall, he took me back through his past, when the road was his home and the back alleys and underbelly bars of city after city across the country offered a feast of low-­hanging fruit, women whose eyes were half-­dead already, women who Sam believed in his heart had only been waiting for him to show up and finish the job. Back to better times, when Sam believed God himself gently placed neck after willing neck, still pulsing with life, into his hungry hands. He imagined himself as some kind of angel of mercy, divinely commissioned to euthanize. I put every word in my mind’s lockbox and stayed on track. If I lost the thread, I’d lose control of the interview. Sentiment, horror, shock: these were things that could wait. What could not wait was the confession: a confession I could do nothing but mentally record while I robotically responded, because this confession was fucking nuts. Eighty-­four? Eighty-­six? Could he have possibly killed that many women? My subconscious did the calculus while I looked the man in the face. I kept my legs crossed at the ankles, knees pressed so tight they could hold an aspirin, hands clasped in my lap—­when I didn’t have a friendly, encouraging palm on his arm. I thank my mother for my Emily Post posture. I used to judge it until I realized all that clenching effort can help you keep a calm face. “I only ever told this to one other person in my life. Texas Ranger Jimmy Holland. Him and you. You’re my only friends,” said Sam. Who? Was Sam delusional? Was that a ridiculous question? Had I wasted my time on a killer with imaginary friends? A Texas Ranger? Who was next, Buzz Lightyear? It turned out Texas Ranger James (Jim to his colleagues, Jimmy to his mom) B. Holland, Company B, was real indeed. Passionate about cold cases and famous for eliciting confessions from psychopaths, this cowboy had found what he called a Samuel Little Texas nexus—­Denise Christie Brothers—­a 1991 Texas murder case likely committed by Samuel Little. It was enough to dig into the case. Like Detective Roberts, he also suspected the man of many more murders across the country and was confident that with the support of the FBI and the DOJ, he’d crack him. He was right. Sam told me about a day, just months before, on May 17, 2018, in a windowless interview room off a hallway buried deep in B Block, when he sat across from a real live cowboy. A black hat faced a white hat, deciding whether to hold or fold. It settled in slowly that I’d unwittingly inserted myself into an open federal investigation. In the months to come, I continued my face-­to-­face interviews with Sam. I took any relevant details of unsolved crimes to the cops. During this same time, Holland elicited his mind-­boggling series of official confessions and arranged interviews with law enforcement from jurisdictions across the country. He would later describe me as a headache. I insisted on the essential part played by a free press in any democracy. Just let the law do their job, young lady. In Texas? He sent a rare eye-­roll emoji. I responded, You and me and the devil make three. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Behold the Monster: Confronting America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer by Jillian Lauren. © 2023 by Jillian Lauren. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved. View the full article

My cleaner berated me last week: “Why do you leave me with nothing to do?” Yes, readers, the sad truth is that I would rather clean my toilets than write a book. I would possibly find it easier to commit a murder than to write one. If procrastination were an Olympic sport, I would surely be a gold medallist. When I’ve run out of toilets to scrub, I turn to the next best procrastination technique: socializing. I make new friends almost every time I leave the house. Anyone who tells me that they like my books/husband/shirt/etc. is an auto-friend. I strike up chats with the cashier at the check-out counter. The hairdresser doesn’t have to ask me where I’m going on vacation because I’ve already told them, usually before I’ve reclined my head into the sink. I am a chatty hugger, and this makes me a lively panellist at festivals or on TV and radio. I don’t particularly like my own company, and therefore I am eager to accept every invite that comes my way, whether they are to book launches, writing festivals, parties, publisher promotions, civic receptions, embassy events, book tours, coffee with friends, or indeed strangers asking for advice (God help them). I will do anything to avoid opening the laptop. This makes me just about the polar opposite of Sally Diamond, the eponymous heroine of my new book Strange Sally Diamond. Sally is a recluse who pretends to be deaf in order to avoid engaging with other people; throughout the story, readers slowly learn the roots of Sally’s strange behavior. Sally, as a result of a traumatic past she does not remember, is never lonely. She has learned to navigate the world without any need for human connection. In this respect, and probably only this one, I envy the character I have created. Toilets and humans are my distractions from the blinking cursor. The first time I really committed myself to writing a book, I went away to a beautiful writer’s retreat, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in the beautiful wilderness of County Monaghan. Apart from the stunning scenery surrounding the house, there is nothing to do but work. No radio, no television, and, when I first went there in 2010, no phone signal and no Wi-Fi. I could either read or write, so that was where I wrote the vast majority of my debut novel. Things have changed a lot since that debut novel, Unraveling Oliver, won the Irish Book Awards’ Crime Novel of the Year in 2014. Nowadays, it’s harder to access that isolation and loneliness that made it possible for me to produce my best writing. Loneliness encouraged me to create imaginary friends and enemies – and the more scandalous their stories the better. But now there’s this thing called the internet, and I often feel that I won’t write another word until I finish reading it. The greatest enemy of the modern writer is social media. For the first few years I resisted Facebook—I just couldn’t understand what it was all about… until I did. I reconnected with old friends, stalked ex-boyfriends, and blocked mortal enemies. After I got my publishing deal and about a year before I was published, I attended a free information day on how to publicize your book. Twitter, they said, was key. Maybe it was, maybe it still is? I really don’t know, but I look at my friend Tana French, another Irish crime fiction writer, who does perfectly well without it. John Grisham doesn’t need it. I can only guess what a Donna Tartt tweet would look like (maybe a cool joke in Latin?). And it’s not just the writers who were established before social media became a thing. Sally Rooney has done rather well without it. And now I’m on Instagram, though I don’t really know how to use it. This time, I’m less keen to learn. I have drawn a line underneath it all now. No more platforms. I’ve already noticed it hindering my ability to write, which is already tenuous given my procrastination habits. For example: Over the course of the week I have taken to write these mere 1,400 words, I have digitally thanked every single person who has tagged me and said something nice about Strange Sally Diamond on social media. I feel like it’s just good manners. My husband despairs of the time I take to do this, which he sees as a waste. So I can’t tell you how hard it is to hear from other writers that “it practically wrote itself” or “I don’t even remember writing it; the character took over and told his own story.” Recently, I heard a writer say, “I stumbled on a story that just demanded to be told. It forced its way out of me and there was no work involved.” Really? When exactly is that going to happen to me? I can, when pushed to the absolute limit by agent or editor, arrange words into coherent sentences that, when linked together, can tell a reasonable story, and maybe over the 11 years I’ve been doing this, there are isolated hours here and there where I lost myself in the tale. I’m not calling this Writer’s Block. I’m not sure I believe in the concept. It’s not that I can’t write — it’s that I won’t. When I’m ready to write, the words will come, but they will have to be hewn from my brain with an axe in terrible, awful slow-motion. For a job that is completely sedentary, I find it bizarrely exhausting. Like Dorothy Parker once said, “I hate writing, but I love having written.” Yet somehow, despite all my toilet-scrubbing procrastination, I have managed to write five bestselling books. Once they are published, I breathe a sigh of relief and reward myself with at least a month off, and maybe an extra month because the whirl of publicity, while enjoyable, can be draining. And perhaps another month to allow the well of ideas to refill. The fact is that I don’t like writing and yet it is the only realm in which I display any talent. I show no skill in any other area of the arts. I cannot sing, paint, act, dance, or design. I can teach a bit, but only if I can tell each student that their work is flawless. I am not a good colleague in an open-plan office setting. (I never had my own office back in the day.) Besides writing, my skills are few and far between. I am, as it turns out, pretty thorough when cleaning toilets. But so far, there are no toilet-cleaner festivals. There damn well should be. So perhaps you’re wondering one thing: Have I written one word of my next novel? The answer is YES. I have written 13 words—the opening sentence. I have a rough idea what type of character my narrator will be. Ideas are percolating in my head. No plot yet, but then again, I have never plotted. When I get back to the (now fully connected) Tyrone Guthrie Centre next month, I will splurge the rough first 20k words onto the page after I disable the Wi-Fi on my laptop. The house is always spotless, but perhaps I should pack some detergent just in case. *** View the full article

When I was younger and hungry for escape, I was naively surprised to learn that over a third of Americans have never moved away from their hometowns (based on data from 2008, anyway). If you include people who never leave their home state, that percentage jumps to over half of Americans. Time has humbled me – I now live in my husband’s hometown, and increasingly miss my own, many hundreds of miles away. Considering how many people stick close to their hometowns, it’s amazing what a powerful pull the idea of return has on us. The idea of leaving and then coming back, either triumphantly or in disgrace, either out of obligation or nostalgia, is one that has an enduring hold on our imaginations. When I sat down to write The Wonder State, I focused, particularly, on the ways a “return to your hometown” story changes based on genre. In the hands of a thriller writer, characters are dragged home against their will, worried about unburied secrets. Their hometowns are places they’ve grown beyond, scratching and clawing their way to the top, and being pulled back threatens every shiny success they’ve hoarded. In romance, on the other hand, hometowns typically represent familiarity and belonging. A place where you come home and realize that you left the best parts of yourself behind, just waiting for you. Long-buried secrets are less likely to involve murder, more apt to be about long-simmering flames or youthful rivalries transforming, finally, into adult tenderness. I wanted to play in the space between the thorniness of thrillers and the sweetness of romance. What about a story where your hometown has a lure over you, but it’s not entirely positive? What if returning to the scene of the crime is both a curse and, maybe, a gift? In honor of this, I’ve collected nine favorite novels about protagonists going back home – both thrillers and more lighthearted stories. Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett Emma Starling comes home to New Hampshire, ostensibly to look after her ailing father, but also because she’s feeling rudderless – hardly the success story her small town expects her to be. Hartnett uses her warm sense of humor to straddle the line between showing Everton as a town hindered by addiction and celebrating the complexity of the people who live there. Readers even meet the people who die in Everton, a Greek chorus from beyond the grave. Emma’s reckoning with her “unused” potential triggers some beautifully philosophical moments. By the end, I found myself almost wanting to live in this town. Or at least visit. Whiteout Conditions by Tariq Shah A funeral serves as the catalyst in this poetic, unapologetic debut about a young man returning to his snowy Chicago-adjacent hometown. But while many stories about hometown funerals deal in gentleness, Shah doesn’t pull back from an intense, painful approach to loved ones’ deaths. Ant, the protagonist, makes himself as blank as the cold landscape, loathe to admit how much the various losses in his life have wounded him. The losses spread even to buildings … Ant learns that his childhood home no longer exists, a particular kind of pain that I personally relate to. Returning to your hometown sometimes means reckoning with heartbreaking changes, whole structures now existing only in memory. The Good Ones by Polly Stewart The death of Nicola’s mother sends her back to her Appalachian hometown, intending to sell her mother’s house and swiftly depart again. But the town is irrevocably haunted by Nicola’s previous best friend, Lauren, who went missing under mysterious circumstances. And, as it turns out, the town is haunted by past versions of Nicola, too. In her atmospheric thriller, Stewart deftly explores the ways that our understanding of our younger selves is clouded by the stories we tell, and that others may remember events from entirely different angles. Jackal by Erin E. Adams It’s not always loss that triggers a character’s homegoing. Sometimes it’s a celebration of new beginnings … like a friend’s wedding. Don’t be fooled by the nuptials, though, because Adams’ chilling novel is pure horror. Liz’s relationship to her Rust Belt hometown has always been fraught: as one of the few Black residents of the town, she’s always felt more like a visitor. Plus, there have been too many traumatic deaths in the town, always involving Black girls, never receiving the attention they deserve. Adams doesn’t shy away from the ways racism and classism have robbed Liz of belonging. So We Meet Again by Suzanne Park In this thoughtful rom-com, Jessie has made good in the challenging field of investment banking, and it seems that she’s left her old life and her interfering parents behind. But even after building her dream life, Jessie runs headlong into the ugliness of the industry, and winds up heartbroken and aimless, right back where she started – in her old bedroom, with her parents hovering. Park takes a scenario most of us would dread and turns it into something funny, comforting, and empowering instead. We should all be so lucky to arrive back in our childhood homes and realize that it’s exactly where we can thrive. The Dead Romantics by Tara Conklin Being drawn back by a loved one’s death is a recurring death in return-to-hometown stories, and what’s more painfully relatable than having your adult life shaken up by a loss? In Conklin’s sweetly morbid romance, Florence is a ghostwriter who also quite literally communes with ghosts. Her father’s death requires Florence to plan an elaborate funeral, and along the way, she’s also slowly getting back in touch with her stifled dreams and reigniting her relationship with surviving family members. For a book about ghosts, this one is also full of life, exploring the ways a return can resurrect your focus. A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh This aptly named thriller takes place in New Zealand, in a town with endless natural beauty but also the creeping dangers of a small town that can turn a blind eye to poverty and abuse. Anahera has escaped, and she swears she won’t ever return to her hometown’s old wounds. But a death sends her back – not a death in her hometown, in this case, but her husband’s funeral in London. Once she’s flung into her past, Anahera realizes she can potentially help a young woman who’s gone missing, and at the same time solve a long-ago mystery. Even if hometowns aren’t welcome refuges, sometimes your presence there is a necessary piece of a puzzle. THE FAMILY FANG The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson In Wilson’s wryly dark comedy, Annie and Buster, adult siblings, watch their lives fall apart. They come home to the state of Tennessee, and to parents who stray far beyond the usual level of familial dysfunction: their parents are performance artists who treat their offspring less as children and more as cast members in chaotic, unpredictable stunts. Pretty much everyone has grievances with their parents, plus a primal need to question the stories we absorbed as children. But in Wilson’s world, going back to the source of childhood trauma has results as sharp as the family’s surname suggests. Cottonmouths by Kelly J. Ford Arkansan-born Ford explores the painfulness of growing up marginalized in a place like Drear’s Bluff, Arkansas, where homogeneity is the highest virtue. Her protagonist, Emily, escapes with the promise of a college degree – but higher education only saddles her with debt and overwhelms her with pressure, powerfully illustrating the ways that routes out of a small town can double back without warning. When Emily realizes her former crush is in town, hiding a dark secret, the two are tugged into a story that combines queer desires, small-town prejudice, and desperate crimes. * View the full article

Let’s say you have a successful series of detective novels, anchored by a core set of well-established characters — a private detective, his wife, and his sidekick — who, in book after book, are threatened by and finally defeat formidable criminal antagonists. This detective is smart, smooth, logical, obsessed with his work, and sometimes troubled by that obsession. His equally smart wife respects his ability and devotion to his work, but keeps pushing for more balance in their life together, more closeness. His sidekick is skeptical of everything and everyone, constantly challenging the detective’s ideas, but he’s always there when the chips are down. The cases that draw the detective’s involvement are invariably complex murders with cleverly concealed motivations. An anonymous narrator tells the stories from the detective’s point of view. The reader sees everything the detective sees and is privy to his thoughts and feelings. The genre is an amalgam of police procedural, classic puzzle mystery, and contemporary thriller. The setting is rural, pastoral, economically depressed. The tone is objective, the descriptions realistic. Main characters are three-dimensional, minor characters are two-dimensional. (I believe it was E.M. Forster who made the interesting observation that the essence of a two-dimensional character can be expressed in one short sentence, while three-dimensional characters have internal contradictions and a range of possible behaviors that make a one-sentence summary impossible.) Finally, let’s assume that this multi-volume series has a large audience of loyal readers who look forward to the next installment with eager anticipation. In a situation like that, does innovation make sense? As the author of the internationally bestselling Dave Gurney mystery-thrillers, I faced this exact question when my editor suggested that it was time to “shake up” the series — to change the familiar plot dynamics in a way that would push the characters in new directions. To avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal the details of how this shake-up was accomplished and how the changes made the latest Gurney novel, The Viper, different from the seven that preceded it. However, the process incorporated some principles that I believe would apply to any series. Let’s look first at that basic question: Why change a winning formula? Well, right off the bat, I can think of two reasons. The first is that familiarity is a double-edged quality in any relationship. It can provide readers with a sense of comfort and pleasant anticipation. On the other hand, it can lead to a diminishing sense of excitement and even boredom. The second reason for change is that, no matter how fond we are of the familiar, we also like to be surprised. So, the challenge for the author becomes how do you introduce the sort of changes that are likely to strengthen rather than weaken the all-important bond between the series and its reader? Let’s look first at the elements of a series where it might be possible to introduce something dramatically new and different. Some obvious ones are narrative tone, setting, degree of realism (especially in the treatment of sex and violence), cast of characters, and character relationships. The first thing that occurred to me is that the risk-reward ratio of introducing changes varies considerably from element to element. For example, narrative tone — breezy, grim, ironic, intimate, comic, etc. — is so basic to the spirit of a series that it would be difficult to change it without so disrupting a reader’s experience that the bond would be broken. I’m not saying that a series can’t, like a dramedy, mix genres — only that a dramedy needs to be that from the beginning. Similarly, the degree of closeness that the author establishes between the reader and the details of a crime is so viscerally linked to matters of taste and tolerance that alterations in that area run the risk of reader alienation, particularly in the matter of vividness — for example, how much of a sadistic murder occurs in close-up real time as opposed to offstage. A change of setting can provide some renewed interest, and there’s not much risk in it — unless the original setting is essential to the concept and feeling of the series. I wouldn’t want Miss Marple to start solving crimes in urban slums. But I’d happily follow Sherlock Holmes anywhere. And part of the interest in a James Bond adventure is a new exotic locale for each one. Changes of setting alone, however, may not be enough to give a series any real refreshment. That brings us to two areas in which I believe major changes can be introduced and, with some care, major downsides avoided. The first is in the cast of characters. A colorful new player can be brought into the arena, either as an addition to the existing cast or as a replacement for a departing member. This can be a game changer, with two caveats. If the new character is an addition, care must be taken to give them an appropriate role. By this I mean the manner in which they relate to the protagonist’s quest (e.g., a central detective’s search for the truth). Are they supportive or obstructive? Are they cynical or trusting? Are they rule followers or mavericks? Most important of all, does their fundamental way of relating to the quest contribute a new element to the series, or is another character already performing that function? If the latter is the case, the basic orientation of the new character may need some rethinking. If the new character is not an addition but a replacement, the challenge will be how to incorporate in them the essential contributions of the departing or incapacitated one — but with significant differences in look, tone, and style. (If there’s no substantial difference, why make the change?) Another promising area for series refreshment lies in the various relationships among ongoing characters — and this brings us back to Forster’s comment on two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional characters. The more complex a series character is, the more opportunity there is for behavior that is both surprising and credible. Conversely, the flatter and more limited character is, the more difficult it is to change their outlook or actions without obliterating their one-sentence identity. Cardboard cut-outs lack flexibility. So, perhaps our best and safest chance of shaking up the dynamics of a series without turning off our loyal readers is through the application of new pressures on our three-dimensional characters — pressures that change their behavior and their relationships dramatically yet believably. Putting familiar characters under pressures they’ve never experienced before can produce decisions and actions they’ve never taken before. This in turn creates for the loyal reader a substantially different experience — an eye-opener, if you will. In the process of introducing changes like this in the latest Gurney adventure, it became clear that the new behavior — however startling it may be — must have roots in the established world of the series. For example, if a key relationship suddenly breaks apart, it should do so along a previously established fault line. The change must ultimately be a believable one, consistent with the core identities of the characters involved. Major unanticipated behavior and the ongoing consequences of that behavior can add new life to a story and, by extension, a series. But unbelievable behavior, whether major or minor, does exactly the opposite. It’s a bit like the old dramatic truism that if a character shoots someone in act three, the audience should get a glimpse of the gun in act one. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Liz Nugent, Strange Sally Diamond (Gallery) “Nugent fashions an unforgettable protagonist in Sally, and never loses sight of her characters’ fundamental humanity, even as she piles on twists and steers the narrative into exceptional darkness. Inventive, addictive, and bold, this deserves a wide audience.” –Publishers Weekly Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) “Dazzling … a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game … [Whitehead] uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time… “Crook Manifesto” gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people.” –Walter Mosley, New York Times Book Review Samantha Downing, A Twisted Love Story (Berkley) “Toxic relationships, dark deeds, and a cast of unreliable narrators. All the best ingredients for a deliciously disturbing read. Twisted indeed.” –Alice Feeney John Verdon, The Viper (Counterpoint) “Verdon’s stellar eighth mystery featuring retired NYPD detective Gurney captivates from the first page . . . [The Viper] cements Verdon’s reputation as one of the best contemporary fair play mystery novelists at work.” –Publishers Weekly Chandler Baker, Cutting Teeth (Flatiron) “Complex and gripping…Dark secrets, retribution, and the lengths a mother will go to to protect her child all feature in this twisted, disturbing story that will keep readers off balance from beginning to end.” –Booklist Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate (Del Rey) “Moreno-Garcia takes readers behind the scenes of 1993 Mexico City’s horror movie industry in this powerful and chilling thrill ride. . . . The narrative shifts effortlessly between fantasy, horror, and romance, helmed by a well-shaded cast. The complex female characters are particular standouts. This is a knockout.” –Publishers Weekly Laura Sims, How Can I Help You (Putnam) “A novel about two librarians caught in a deadly web of intrigue….a high-stakes game of cat and mouse.” –Bustle Sarah Flannery Murphy, The Wonder State (MCD/FSG) “Across two timelines, a band of friends explores the secrets of an Arkansas hot springs town… influences of Stephen King, Donna Tartt, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are clear here.” –Kirkus Anika Scott, Sinners by Starlight (HarperCollins) “A ‘Godfather’-esque tale of revenge set at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, Sinners of Starlight City invites readers into the lives of women determined to make their own lives at any cost.” –Popsugar Jillian Lauren, Behold the Monster (Sourcebooks) “Sam Little is the monster in this story and Jillian Lauren is the slayer. She is the one who stuck her nose into it, saw something was not right, was dreadfully wrong, in fact, and did something about it.” –Michael Connelly View the full article

“Whistle!” my friend Mel told me as we pushed our way down the overgrown trail to the beach, surfboards under our arms. “What?” I asked, confused. “To let the snakes know you’re coming,” she said. “So they have time to crawl away.” Unsure if she was joking, I added my unsteady whistle to her piercing one. Minutes later, we were in the ocean, sitting on our surfboards with the blood-warm water lapping around our waists. Before either of us could catch a wave, a jet ski zoomed towards us. “Get out of the water!” the rider shouted. “There’s a shark in your area.” The shark, we later learnt, had attacked a surfer at a nearby beach and the coast guard were following it down the coast. This was one of my first surf trips in Australia. It didn’t put me off surfing but it certainly opened my eyes to the risks. Other dangers of the beaches here include powerful rip currents, large swell, storms and cyclones, jellyfish and countless more deadly creatures. All in all, a remote Australian beach seemed like the perfect setting for my latest thriller The Swell! I will never tire of books set on beaches and here are some of my favourites! Alex Garland’s debut The Beach is the ultimate beach read! I read it years ago as a backpacker in France. When I reread it recently, I loved it all over again. Young movie-obsessed Richard is backpacking in Bangkok when he gets handed a map to a secret beach. Along with a French couple he has recently befriended, he follows the map to a tiny island with an idyllic beach. A multi-cultural, oddball group of young people have claimed the beach as their own and formed a community. Cracks soon appear in this apparent paradise. The climax is unexpected yet somehow inevitable, as all the best climaxes are. The Hunted by Roz Nay is pitched as The Beach meets The Woman in Cabin Ten. There are major echoes of The Beach – I love that one of the characters in the story is reading it! – but it also feels totally fresh with an African beach setting and a twisty thriller storyline. Stevie and her boyfriend head to a beautiful secluded island off the coast of Tanzania, where the boyfriend has landed a job as a diver. On the way, they meet a gorgeous British couple at a backpacking hostel. The chance friendship leads to an obsession that has deadly consequences. The novel shows how even on the other side of the world, we can’t escape from our pasts and might make you think twice about befriending strangers on holiday. Jane Harper set her fourth novel, The Survivors in a rugged coastal community on the small Australian island of Tasmania, saying the beauty and brutality of the Tasmanian coast was the ideal setting for a story. The beach in this story is a cold and inhospitable place. It has sea caves accessible only at low tide and sinister statues on the cliff above in memorial of a ship lost at sea. The novel begins as a body is discovered on the sand, bringing back echoes of a tragedy years earlier. Harper sets up a terrifying scene, gathering a small group of characters, making each of them seem as suspicious as possible, then sending them diving in the treacherous cold waters to see a shipwreck. A memorable and vividly described mystery. The Honeymoon by Tina Seskis has an exotic Maldives setting and a jaw-dropping twist partway through that had me flipping the pages back and forth to see how the author had pulled the rug on me so completely! Newly-wed Jenna wakes up in her luxury resort to discover her husband is missing, and her dream honeymoon turns into a nightmare. The lush jungle seems to cave in on her as she slowly becomes mad with dread. The novel has an ending you will never see coming! The Castaways by Lucy Clarke is set on a remote desert island in the South Pacific. A plane has crashed, stranding a handful of strangers at the mercy of the elements – and each other. As the days pass, the darkness of each of the characters oozes out of them as they fight for survival. Meanwhile, the sister of one of the missing passengers tries in vain to discover what happened to the plane and if anyone onboard is still alive. This is one of the most compelling mysteries I’ve read and is currently being made for TV! Lucy Clarke writes from a beach hut in Cornwall, so it’s not surprising that all her novels have strong ocean themes. Her thriller One of The Girls is the tale of female friends on a hen weekend on a sundrenched Greek island; The Blue, set on board a yacht is a major international TV series. How to Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliott is about a group of friends who have known each other from college swim team. When Lissa drowns, her friends gather to honour her life at the luxury island resort she owned with her husband. Slowly the friends begin to question why Lissa died, when she was the strongest swimmer amongst them – and what made her do a night swim in dangerous water? Many of the scenes take place in the ocean and I loved all the detail of swimmers’ bodies and techniques. Hell Bay by Kate Rhodes is the first of a series set on a tiny windswept island off the south coast of England. The body of a young girl is found on the beach and it’s clear her death is no accident. The attacker must still be on the island as no boats have been able to leave during the recent two-day storm. Detective Ben Kitto questions the island’s suspicious and often non-too-friendly bunch of inhabitants, with crash of waves and bawl of Arctic terns in the background. I could feel the sea spray on my cheeks in this atmospheric ‘locked island’ mystery. Sara Och’s debut thriller The Resort, out in February 2024, has major vibes of The Beach. It’s a vacation thriller with a cast of troubled young characters with secrets, set on Koh Tang, Thailand’s famous party island. The main character Cass, a diving instructor, leads a group of students out into the tropical water for their first dive, but disaster strikes. On this beautiful remote island, a killer is lurking in the shadows. * View the full article

In 2019, Meagan Lucas floored me with her debut novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs, a gritty tale of one woman’s fight for survival amidst generational poverty and depravity, written by an author who not only openly embraced the Southern grit lit tradition, but knocked down some of its conventional walls with the authenticity of her female characters. With her sophomore release from Shotgun Honey, Here in the Dark, a collection of sixteen stories rooting her firmly now in the crime fiction world, Lucas’s work is even more startling and more unapologetic. It is, and she is—read on and you’ll see why—absolute fire. Steph Post: I’m going to start with the obvious—and something I’ve written and spoken about quite a bit in the past: Badass Women. And you write them like no one I’ve ever read. Your female characters, always at the center of your work, are tough, but also vulnerable. They’re scrappy in a way that women aren’t often portrayed, but which resonates with me so deeply. They’re not afraid to do what needs to be done—including bashing in the hood and taillights of a cheater’s pride-and-joy truck—and you’re not afraid of writing them in all their desperate, mascara-running ugliness. What draws you to these characters? And how are you able to write them so well, so authentically? Meagan Lucas: Steph! Thank you. That means so much to me coming from you. I’ll never forget reading the first page of A Tree Born Crooked, putting the book down, and saying, “ho-ly shit.” I’m not sure how to answer this question without admitting that I, personally, am a hot mess, but I’m afraid that might be part of it. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer, I was always a reader. I came to writing in my 30s to survive postpartum depression, and part of that was learning to be real honest with myself. I wanted to explore all of the difficult things I was feeling, and I was tired of hiding the ugly. So, from the very beginning of my writing journey, I was drawn to writing about women who were dealing with these same feelings as me, in these terrible, but often realistic, situations. I’m not really interested in heroes (ahem heroines), or princesses—I want to write about myself and people I know. Also, while I might not call myself an adrenaline junkie in a traditional sense, I’m bored with my own work unless I’m pushing boundaries, trying something new, or scaring myself with my own vulnerability. As a result, we get a lot of these very real women characters who usually have a piece of me in them, and usually a piece I’m not all that proud of. Steph: Okay, if I wasn’t already enamored of you and your work, I would be now. The fact that you want to go there—to dig into the ugly, the underbelly—and also admit that it’s a side that comes from you as well, is what I think we really mean, or should mean, when we talk about an author being “authentic.” I think all too often when authors “write what they know,” they only write what they’re comfortable with. You write what you know, but don’t flinch. You don’t shy away. It’s one of the reasons I think Here in the Dark is so powerful. Not a single story flinches. But while I admire this so much about you, I can imagine some readers have found your work troublesome. Have you ever had someone tell you that you went too far? Or that your stories are too much? I’m thinking of the equivalent of “you should smile more, honey,” but from a reader critiquing your work. Meagan: I have had plenty of people tell me I cuss too much. Or ask why I don’t write anything happy. Or ask if I’m *okay,* assuming that there must be something wrong with me to be able to write what I do. Steph: Oh my God, same! Meagan: And you know, that’s fair. I guess I’m flattered that it’s reading real enough that people assume I must have experienced all these things. But more than anything, I get people pulling me aside after readings, or sending me DMs, telling me they thought they were alone before they read my work. They didn’t realize that someone else might feel the same as them. They didn’t realize that they were allowed to talk about their feelings, let alone publicly. Last year I had the pleasure of presenting at Western Carolina University’s Spring Lit Fest. I read “The Only Comfort” and “Sitting Ducks,” both of which are in this collection, and after, a student hugged me and sobbed on my shoulder for five minutes. This spring when I read “Glass Houses” at the Appalachian Studies Conference, I had many people come up to me and share that they had experienced similar trauma as a child. It feels like the harder the story was for me to write, the more people connect with it and I think that says a lot about us as a society. A lot of us are yearning for a connection, and I get it, that’s one of the reasons I started writing; I was looking for community. It’s hard to admit that this ugly stuff is me, but I also know I’m not alone. Many of us are hurting. Many of us are survivors. There is this quote, that’s been attributed to everyone from Banksy, to Cesar Cruz, to David Foster Wallace that says that art should “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” and I guess I’m pleased that I have a tendency to hear more from the disturbed that I’m comforting, than the comfortable who are being disturbed. Steph: Damn, you might have just given me chills, because you actually own up to that quote. You don’t talk the talk, you walk the walk. Okay, diving into your latest work—you are a prolific short story writer, but, of course, a collection can only house so many. How did you go about choosing the sixteen stories that make up Here in the Dark? Was it an organic process or were you building around a specific theme? Meagan: I noticed, a couple years ago, that my short work was moving away from straight literary fiction, to pieces that embraced genre fiction, like crime or horror. I think it’s entirely a reaction to the fact that the novel I had just finished writing, Soft Animals—currently being shopped by my agent—is very literary. Instead of placing these stories in my regular lit mags, they were getting picked up in crime or noir anthologies, which lead me to reading more crime stories, and trying new things. My work has almost always included some aspect of lawlessness, but I was now writing more stories that included law enforcement, or mystery, or elements of horror like monsters or gore. And so, I started thinking about my obsession with writing about women and girls, and how a collection of crime-ish stories about women would be a collection that I would really like to read. Because of my lit fic background, I think, my work is usually more interested in the why of the crime, than the how; more character than caper you could say. So, as I was looking through my portfolio of stories to curate this collection, I was looking for pieces that connected the experience of being female, with crime, but so often women are just portrayed as the victims of crimes in more traditional crime writing, so I wanted to do something a little different, to see women in all types of roles. Steph: Yes! I’m so glad you brought this up. I love that your female characters are more often than not the criminals, not the victims of a crime. And when they are the victims, they’re ambiguous. They’re not just the faceless “dead girl” who springboards the story into action. Nor are they the pretty “final girl,” still standing at the end. Your “girls” are women who fight, who make questionable choices and who aren’t always redeemed by the last page. Aside from drawing on your own strength and experiences, are there any characters in fiction or film who match your ethos on this and who have inspired or encouraged you to keep writing women this way? Meagan: I’m just really drawn to complicated people, I think. And not enough of these “people” get to be women in most media—although, I think that’s changing. I love books where the female characters are not traditionally “likeable.” Dorothy Allison and Bonnie Jo Campbell are my heroes ’cause they’ve been doing this since forever. More recently we have work from: Laura McHugh, May Cobb, Kelly J. Ford, and Heather Levy. TV wise, I’m loving Yellowjackets—these complicated, incredibly flawed women who are over 40 and interesting and not traditionally beautiful but still have great sex lives. Steph: Ohhh, Yellowjackets is on my “to-watch” list! Meagan: I think Abbott Elementary is doing this, too. I’m encouraged by what’s coming out of Reese Witherspoon’s production company, and that obviously people want stories about women who aren’t always young, beautiful, rich and perfect; they aren’t always the victim or the mastermind. I’m also loving independent publishing more and more. I think some of the most exciting books are coming from small presses; they are much more willing to take a risk and that makes me want to write something challenging. Steph: Still focusing on short stories in general, in addition to this collection you’ve also published a novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs, which first introduced me to your work. How is your approach to writing short and long forms different? And do you prefer one over the other? Meagan: Steph, this is such a tough question! I love that with a novel the author is really able to dig deep, that those characters become actual people in our minds, almost like our children. And I like that novels sell! Short stories though are so much fun—they are the perfect place to try something new, or something scary, push some boundaries—because a short story is only a couple of months of my life, and not years the way a novel is, I’m less afraid of failure. I’m also really, really drawn to how a short story forces the participation of the reader in a way that a novel can’t. Because the author is only giving the reader a tiny piece of the short story, they have to bring so much more, especially to endings. I love the endings of short stories, and I think that my readers can see that even in the ending of Songbirds and Stray Dogs. Ben Percy says in his essay “Designing Suspense” (Thrill Me) that people who read short stories love endings that make them want to gargle with Drano or nosedive off a skyscraper, and people who read novels want a gladder, luckier closure, and I just personally feel much closer to the former. Steph: Okay, diving straight into the collection right in front of me. Every story within Here in the Dark is a firecracker, but I’d have to say that I’m partial to “Picking the Carcass” and the title story, “Here in the Dark.” I first read “Picking the Carcass” in an advanced copy of Jacked: An Anthology from Run Amok Books and I was delighted to see it included in this collection. Your writing—always—is blistering, raw and unabashedly authentic, but in “Picking the Carcass” there’s just a tinge of perceived Magical Realism. Reading it, I was reminded of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. While there’s an explanation for why Janelle begins to find gold nuggets hidden inside dead animals, there’s also a slight suspension of disbelief. Janelle is firmly grounded in the reality of desperately trying to take care of her family, but also caught up in the absurdity of finding this wealth, as though she were a heroine in a fairy tale. Are you deliberately playing with readers here? Are you flirting with the fantastical while writing such down-to-earth stories? And, if so, why? Meagan: I think that magical thinking pairs perfectly with desperation. Who among us, when faced with an unwinnable situation doesn’t start dreaming about “what if I found a treasure?” When we look at fairytales, this is such a common trope—for the needy to find golden eggs, or magic beans, or a house made of candy. And then, of course, because all of us raised in a certain economic background have learned that if it seems too good to be true, it is. And then that, too, is a really fun (and heartbreaking) idea to play with. This never happens to me, I never start with the title, but with “Picking the Carcass” that’s where it began. I was thinking about that phrase and motherhood, and how especially when my children were younger and they needed me so badly, I just felt like there was nothing left of me, and I wanted to explore that metaphor so I started mixing it with that fairytale trope, and out popped some sort of magical realism, which definitely is a departure for me. Steph: And then we come to the concluding story “Here in the Dark.” From the very first paragraph, I thought to myself 1) holy shit and 2) Meagan is as brazen as they come. Your protagonist Cora, just out of rehab and desperate to get some loving from the man she imagines spending the rest of her life with, is unapologetic, but so are you as her author. I love how you so bluntly write about female desire and women’s complicated relationship to intimacy and sex. Cora’s attitude towards Lee, but more so, her own introspection of her wants and limitations, her expectations and their inevitable, disastrous conclusions, feels at once so familiar and so fresh. In short: I’ve spent time with many “Coras,” but I rarely see them in fiction. Are these types of characters something you deliberately set out to create? Or do they seem natural to you? And have you felt any push-back from writing about women with such honesty? Meagan: Cora is a character from my first novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs, that I felt never really got her due and I get lots of questions about from book clubs. So she’s been living in my head for a long time, and when I decided to revisit her, I knew I only had this one chance to do her justice. I think, too, that as I’ve aged, I’ve gotten stronger not only as a writer, but as a person. I give a lot fewer fucks about what people think of me, and that enabled me to really do her right. I think Cora needed me to turn 40 before I could write her story. Steph: That’s fascinating! And, yet, makes so much sense. Meagan: I mentioned earlier that I’m embracing being terrified of my work—pushing boundaries, being vulnerable. That’s how I know I’m doing the work that I want to, when I’m scared, and honestly, that last phrase, at the end of the first paragraph of “Here in the Dark” scares the shit out of me. It’s so…honest. It makes me blush. It makes me feel naked in front of a crowd. But, I tell my students, when drafting, to pretend that no one is going to read their writing. Steph: This reminds me of Stephen King’s metaphor about writing with the door closed. When you’re ready, you can remember your readers and open the door, but you should always start with the door closed. Meagan: To be as vulnerable, honest, and brave as they can—to write that one true sentence—because they can always revise something to be tamer. And that line is just so perfectly Cora. Shortly after I wrote it, I saw someone on twitter asking people to post the first sentence of their WIP, and so I thought, what the hell and put it up, and the response it got was so good – particularly from women – that I knew it needed to stay, no matter that my grandmother is probably going to read it. Steph: Okay, I’m not going to lie, posting that line on twitter—”But it wasn’t her hunger for drugs or alcohol that had Cora sweating on the sidewalk in front of Mountain Rehab, but her desperate need to sit on Lee’s face”—that’s ballsy as hell. Meagan: “Here in the Dark” is really honest about sexual desire, and that does feel bold to admit, that I feel those feelings and I know I’m not alone. But this whole collection is terrifying to me. It’s so intensely personal. I stomp all over all the topics that it’s not polite to bring up – money, religion, body image, sex – it’s all in there. It’s a departure from my first novel, it’s a lot more political, a lot angrier, and vulnerable, and honest, and a lot less subtle than my previous work. It’s a risk, but I think it’s one worth taking, if only so that I can show my students, and my children, that even though I was afraid, I still did it. Steph: And it’s a risk that I think pays off for sure. You’ve got something in these stories that I haven’t seen elsewhere and I’d put money down right now that you’re going to make a name for yourself by writing about women as women. As we truly are, when confronted by the true reality of our lives—raw-edged and multi-faceted, reckless and yet exceedingly capable of survival. Are there any “impolite” topics that you didn’t touch on in this collection, but which you still want to write about? Is there a new or different thematic approach you didn’t get to explore in Here in the Dark, but which we’re sure to see in some future work? Meagan: Oh yes!! I recently had a story published in Dark Yonder called “Big Bob’s Donuts at 3am” about a stripper who just wants to be seen as a person, but it’s really about the male gaze and the constant sexualization of women. I have a story coming out in Rock and a Hard Place called “The Stillness at the Bottom” that might be the most brutal story I’ve written, and it’s about misogyny and the pain of bringing daughters into a world that is so obviously against them. These pieces aren’t in Here in the Dark but a new collection I’m putting together that I’m calling Furies. Steph: I am sooooo here for this, by the way. Meagan: It’s angrier than Here in the Dark (if that’s possible!) and I’m working on pieces that explore the foster system, fatphobia, same-sex domestic abuse, believing women victims, and the complicated ethics of emotional adultery. My novel work-in-progress is about police corruption, BDSM, politics, immigration, poverty and racism—so I guess you could say I’m still not going to be a hit at the next family dinner. Steph: Probably not! But still, if you’re getting glared at over the sweet potato pie, remember this: you’re inspiring the hell out of readers and writers, new and established alike. I’m so excited for the rest of the reading world to discover Here in the Dark, Furies, Soft Animals and all of your work to come. ___________________________________ Here in the Dark is available from Shotgun Honey, July 14th, 2023. Meagan Lucas is the author of the award-winning novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs and the forthcoming collection Here in the Dark (Shotgun Honey, 2023). Meagan’s short work can be found in journals like Still: The Journal, Cowboy Jamboree, BULL, Pithead Chapel, Dark Yonder, Rock and a Hard Place. She is Pushcart, Best of the Net, Derringer, and Canadian Crime Writer’s Award of Excellence nominated and won the 2017 Scythe Prize for Fiction. Her novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs was chosen to represent North Carolina in the Library of Congress 2022 Route 1 Reads program. Meagan teaches Creative Writing at Robert Morris University. She is the Editor in Chief of Reckon Review. Born and raised on a small island in Northern Ontario, she now lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina. (Author photo: Ellie Navarro) www.meaganlucas.com Steph Post is the author of the novels Miraculum, Lightwood, Walk in the Fire, Holding Smoke and A Tree Born Crooked. She graduated from Davidson College as a recipient of the Patricia Cornwell Scholarship and holds a Master’s degree in Graduate Liberal Studies from UNCW. Her work has most recently appeared in Garden & Gun, Saw Palm, and Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Rhysling Award and was a semi-finalist for The Big Moose Prize. She lives in Florida. www.stephpostfiction.com View the full article

If there is one truth in this life, it’s this: in Texas, it’s hot as hell in the summer. Scorching, unrelenting, and punishing, summertime calls for icy swimming holes, cold beer, and most of all, scorching thrillers. Lowdown Road by Scott Von Doviak “Pursuit doesn’t get any hotter” is the tagline for Doviak’s latest, masterful white-knuckle suspense, a Dukes of Hazard-esque thrill ride set in the summer of 1974 in which two cousins form a plan to drive a taco truck full of marijuana, stolen, nonetheless, across state lines to where Evil Knievel aims to jump over the Snake River on his motorcycle. The NYTimes recently raved, “with its’ hapless good ol’ boy antiheroes clad in aviator sunglasses, crotch-hugging Levis and Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts clearly takes inspiration from the (Dukes of Hazard) series.” Girls and Their Horses by Eliza Jane Brazier Set over the course of a summer in a posh, Southern California enclave that revolves around the ruthless, competitive world of show jumping, Girls and Their Horses is like Big Little Lies meets Dallas. Juicy, soapy, and simmering with suspenseful, Girls and Their Horses is a razor sharp examination of mean girls, misfits, overbearing mothers, and toxic wealth. More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez “The dance becomes an affair, which becomes a marriage, which becomes a murder,” is the official tag line of this spellbinding, scorching suspense which follows Lore Rivera who, in 1985, leads a double life both in Mexico City and also in Laredo, Texas, marrying two different men, one of whom eventually goes to jail for murdering the other. Or did he? That’s what Cassie Bowman, a true-crime obsessed writer who stumbles across Lore’s story sets to find out in this twisty novel full of secrets, betrayal, infidelity, and lies. Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Koller Croft A devious, cat and mouse thriller about an “enterprising woman” named Bea, who, after a lifetime of being groomed to be a con artist by her mother, longs to finally escape that life by marrying into the arms of the filthy rich suitor, Collin Case. But she comes against his blue-blooded bestie, Gale, who will stop at nothing to keep Bea away. Hailed by Good Morning America as a “…delicious, twisty tale of deception and daughterhood will have everyone holding onto their wallets.” *** View the full article

Penned by an unknown hand towards the end of the sixteenth century, Arden of Faversham is the first surviving drama based on an actual domestic murder. From beginning to end, the play’s eighteen scenes are centered around the motive, planning, and execution of an assassination instigated by a wife against her husband. The real-life murder took place on Sunday, February 15, 1550, at seven o’clock in the evening. Thomas Arden was a landowner living in the town of Faversham, county of Kent, England. He was a man in his fifties. His wife, Alice, thirty years younger and described as “tall, and well favoured of shape and countenance,” fell in love with one Thomas Mosby, a servant in the household of a neighboring lord. The adulterous relationship became so widely known that even the gullible husband eventually perceived it. Nonetheless, weak-minded and still enamored with his wife, Arden cowed to her vehement denials and even offered his friendship to Mosby. Alice Arden got in touch with a local painter, who was reportedly versed in the art of poisoning. The painter prepared for her a lethal dose with directions to put it into the bottom of a porridge and pour milk upon it. But Alice, mistakenly, poured the milk first, and then the poison. Arden took a spoonful or two, disliked the taste and vomited, thus temporarily escaping his doom. Undeterred, Alice continued to hatch schemes to murder her husband, soliciting the help of Arden’s own valet, Michael, and even hiring professional assassins. After several unsuccessful attempts on Arden’s life, his lurid end came in his own home during a stormy night. Sitting down for supper and conversing with Mosby, he was unaware that Black Will, a notorious ruffian, was hiding in the closet. Michael chained the entry’s wicket door and stood behind his master with a candle in hand. Upon a signal by Mosby, Black Will emerged from the closet and threw a towel around Arden’s neck, strangling him. To insure Arden’s death, Mosby struck him with a pressing iron, Black Will slashed his throat, and Alice struck him with a knife seven or eight times in the chest. Black Will took money out of the victim’s pocket, rings off his fingers, demanded his pay from Alice, and rode away on a horse. Alice Arden and one of her maids cleaned the parlour, wiped off the blood with a cloth, and threw the stained cloth and knife into a courtyard’s well, where they were later found. Simultaneously, Michael and Susan, another maid and Mosby’s sister, carried the dead body into an adjoining field. Under a downpour of snow, they laid the corpse on its back, in its night-gown and slippers. Alice then sent out her servants and maids to the village, supposedly in search of their master, directing them to go to places he frequented. Concerned neighbors came by, and found her in tears. The Mayor and a search party came at last to the ground where Arden’s body was laid. They noticed footsteps in the snow, leading to the Arden house. The Mayor inquired further and found some of the victim’s hair and blood near his home. Upon the discovery of the bloody knife in the well, Alice Arden confessed to the murder and named her guilty accomplices. Mrs. Arden, her two maids, and Michael were seized and sent to prison. The Mayor and his men went to a nearby inn, Flower-de-Luce, where they found Mosby in bed. They soon discovered drops of the victim’s blood upon Mosby’s stockings, and he too confessed to the horrid deed. Several months later, the trial was held in Faversham. All the prisoners were arraigned and convicted. Michael, the errant manservant, was hanged, while the accomplice maid was burned – both executions taking place in Faversham. Mosby and his sister Susan were hanged in Smithfield, near London. Alice Arden, the leader of the pack, was burnt in Canterbury. Black Will was apprehended abroad and burnt on a scaffold in the city of Flushing, Zeeland, the Netherlands. * * * Arden of Faversham begins on a cheery note, when the title character learns from his best friend Franklin that the Duke of Somerset has granted him and his heirs “all the lands of the Abbey of Faversham.” Franklin submits to Arden the official deeds, sealed by the king. Despite the good news, Franklin notices that Arden is melancholy and apprehensive. Arden explains that he has discovered love letters exchanged between his wife Alice and a neighbor, Thomas Mosby, and he spied a ring on Mosby’s finger which he had given his wife on their wedding day. Arden cannot comprehend the situation, for while he himself is a gentleman by birth, Mosby is a former tailor who has managed to “creep, by flattery and fawning,” into the services of a next-door neighbor, Lord Clifford, where he became the steward of Clifford’s household. Franklin suggests that Arden not jump to a quick conclusion and try to win his wife back with gentle words. Arden confronts Alice and accuses her of calling Mosby’s name in her sleep. Alice allays her husband’s fears by reminding him that Mosby was a topic of conversation between them earlier in the evening, so naturally the neighbor became part of her dreams. Arden apologizes profusely. He then notifies his wife that he must travel to London for business affairs; he’ll stay there for a month at most. “A month?” cries Alice. “Ay me! Sweet Arden, come again within a day or two or else I die!” Arden sends his manservant Michael to fetch the horses, and exits with Franklin to unload some goods. Left by herself, Alice wipes off her congenial demeanor and in a soliloquy wishes “that some airy spirit would, in the shape and likeness of a horse, gallop with Arden across the ocean and throw him from his back into the waves. Sweet Mosby is the man that hath my heart.” Michael, Arden’s servant, enters. Alice has subverted him by offering him the hand of her maid, Mosby’s sister, Susan. Michael believes that Susan has been promised to a local painter named Clarke, but Alice assauges his fears. Michael vows that Arden will be dead within a week. Michael exits and Mosby enters. Alice confers with him about their “decree to murder Arden in the night.” Mosby calls in the painter Clarke, who assures them that he can draw a poisoned picture which can be used to kill Arden. Clarke says that he’ll do it for a marriage with Susan, and Mosby promises his sister to him. Alice, however, is skeptical about the picture idea. Clarke subsequently gives her some poison that she can mix with food or drink. Arden and Franklin enter. Arden confronts Mosby and rebukes him for courting his wife. Mosby says that he loved Alice once, but no longer. He came to the house to see his sister. Arden apologizes, declares that he is “appeased,” and offers Mosby his friendship. Alice brings in breakfast but Arden finds the broth “not wholesome.” Alice dashes his meal to the floor and rants, “There’s nothing that I do can please your taste.” Arden asks for her forgiveness, then departs with Franklin for London. Alice tells Mosby that they can have her husband killed as he walks the streets of England’s capital – “In London many alehouse ruffians keep, which, as I hear, will murder men for gold.” A man called Richard Greene arrives. He has a claim to some of Arden’s lands but Alice contends that all claims are void as long as her husband is alive. Greene says that he’ll be avenged on Arden for usurping his estate. Alice goads him to hire “some cutter for to cut Arden short,” and gives Greene 10 pounds up front with the promise of 20 more and the return of his possessed lands, after the job is done. Greene promises to leave for London immediately. In London, Greene meets with Bradshaw, a goldsmith who introduces him to a former comrade-in-arms, the mercenary Black Will. Black Will is described as a ruffian who “for a crown will murder any man.” Greene pays him and his shady associate, George Shakebag, an advance of 10 pounds to murder Arden. “I’ll stab him as he stands pissing against a wall,” promises Black Will. Here follows a series of failed attempts by Black Will and Shakebag to kill Arden. When the duo is waiting in the corner of a house to ambush Arden, a boy brings down his shop window on Black Will’s head. A bawl ensues, and in the tumult Arden passes by unscathed. On another occasion, taking place at night in a London apartment, the servant Michael leaves the doors unlocked for the two murderers to enter, but before going to sleep Arden tries the doors, rebukes Michael for his negligence, and fastens the bolts. Next, Black Will and Shakebag are waiting, with pistols cocked, to ambush Arden and Franklin as they are horse riding back to Faversham, but in the nick of time enters Lord Cheiny, a friend of Arden, with his men, and invites Arden and Franklin to lodge with him for the night. The murderers’ follow-up attempt is thwarted by a foggy mist, and when at last Black Will and Shakebag encounter Arden and Franklin face to face, a fist fight ends with the villains, handily beaten, limping away. Finally, Mosby hatches a plan to kill Arden when he returns home. Black Will will be hiding in a closet. He, Mosby, will play backgammon with Arden and upon saying a watchword, “Now I can take you,” Black Will will stealthily come behind Arden, pull him to the ground, and then “stab him till his flesh be as a sieve.” They will then drag the body to an alley behind the Abbey, so that “those that find him murdered may suppose some slave or other kill’d him for his gold.” Alice promises Black Will and Shakebag forty more pounds and two fresh horses to ride to Scotland or Wales. Black Will hides in the closet. Michael prepares tables for the game. Mosby greets the arriving Arden and stays for supper. Alice suggests that they play backgammon while she prepares the meal. As they play, Mosby announces, “Now I can take you.” Black Will crosses stealthily to Arden and pulls him down with a towel. Mosby strikes him with an iron. Shakebag: And there’s for the ten pound in my sleeve (stabs him). Alice: Take this for hind’ring Mosby’s love and mine (stabs him). They carry the body out. Alice pays Black Will and Shakebag, and they leave. Susan, Mosby’s sister, helps Alice wash the floor but, in a touch of divine intervention, the women find it impossible to scrub away the blood. “The blood cleaveth to the ground and will not out,” says Susan fearfully. For the first time, Alice expresses some misgivings about the murder of her husband. Mosby tells them to throw some rushes on the stains. The Mayor and his men arrive on the scene, followed by Franklin, who enters with the news that Arden’s body has been found. He produces the towel and the knife which Michael should’ve disposed of. Alice says that the stains are pig’s blood that they had for supper. Franklin points at the incriminating “print of many feet within the snow.” The Mayor uncovers splashes of blood near Arden’s “place where he was wont to sit.” Some rushes found in the victim’s slippers prove that he was killed at his home. Confronted with the evidence, Alice and Mosby admit to the murder. Shakebag confides in an aside to the audience that he sought refuge with a former mistress, the widow Chambley. When she spurned him, he killed her. He plans to cross the River Thames and seek sanctuary. Pursued closely, Black Will flees to Flushing in Holland. Mosby and Alice turn against one another. He calls her “a strumpet;” she says that if it wasn’t for him, none of this would have happened. Susan wonders why she should die since she didn’t know about the murder “till the deed was done.” Michael says that he doesn’t mind dying, as he shares fate with his beloved Susan. The Mayor decrees “speedy executions with them all.” In a short epilogue, Franklin recounts that Shakebag was murdered in Southwalk; Black Will was burnt on a gallows in Flushing; Greene was hanged at Osbridge, Kent; the painter Clarke fled, his whereabouts unknown. Franklin adds a curious tid-bit: A print of Arden’s body remained visible in the field’s grass for more than two years after his demise. * * * The title page of the play’s first edition, printed in London by Edward White in 1592, states: “The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent, Who was most wickedlye murdered, by the meanes of his disloyall and wanton wyfe, who for the love she bare to one Mosbie, hyred two desperate ruffians, Blackwill and Shakbag, to kill him. Wherin is shewed the great mallice and discimulation of a wicked woman, the unsatiable desire of filthie lust, and the shamefull end of all murderers.” A second edition was published in 1599, and a third in 1633. Scholars advanced several theories in an attempt to decipher the authorship of Arden of Faversham. William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Kyd were considered, even a collaboration by two or all three of them – but, when matching phrases, style and quality, these assumptions were dismissed. “Few plays of Tudor times deal with other folk than kings and nobles,” reports theatre historian Joseph T. Shipley. “The drama that finds importance in the lives of ordinary folk, through [George] Lillo and [Henrik] Ibsen to the domestic dramas of today, Tennessee Williams and such popular probing as The Death of a Salesman, has an early forceful forerunner in the tragedy of Arden of Faversham.”1 There are no records of any production of Arden of Faversham until the eighteenth century, but it is believed that the play was performed frequently both before and after its publication in 1592. The first documented showing was in 1730, at Faversham, in Kent. George Lillo’s five-act version was condensed to a one-act by John Hoadly in 1763; it was presented by the Elizabethan Stage Society at St. George’s Hall, Langham Place, London, on July 9, 1897. William Poel directed a cast of ten that included D.L. Mannering (Arden), Paget Bowman (Franklin), Alice Isaac (Alice), and Leonard Outram (Mosby). In the twentieth century, there were numerous productions of Arden. In 1955, the play was mounted by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Paris International Festival of Theatre as the English entry. In 1970, the Royal Shakespeare Company of London presented the play under the direction of Buzz Goodbody, with Emrys James as Arden and Dorothy Tutin as Alice. The RSC offered Arden again, with great success, in 1982, featuring Bruce Purchase (Arden), Jeffrey Dench (Franklin), and Jenny Aguttar (Alice). Terry Hands directed “a bold and striking production, a gripping piece of theatre,” according to Shipley.2 In 2001, the play was performed for a summer season in the garden of Arden’s house in Faversham, the scene of the murder. In 2010, it was shown at the Rose Garden in Bankside, London, staged by Peter Darney. In the United States, Arden of Faversham was presented Off-Broadway by La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, directed by a Romanian, Andrei Sherban, in 1970, and by The Ohio Theatre, directed by Daniel Crozier, in 1990. The University of California at Berkeley produced Arden three years later. The Metropolitan Playhouse of New York City’s East Side presented a notable production of the play in 2004. Its adventurous director, Alex Roe, strayed from the original by treating the relationship between Arden and Franklin in an amorous vein, and the bungling efforts of Black Will and Shakebag in a broad comedic style. “This play – entirely new to me, though it was written more than four hundred years ago by ‘an author or authors unknown’ – is delightful,” opined critic Martin Denton, “an authentic black farce, the kind of thing Blake Edwards would have written if he had been a contemporary of Shakespeare’s… Kudos to Roe and Metropolitan Playhouse for serving up this delectable, little-known romp.”3 Reviewer Nicholas Seeley was somewhat reserved: “Roe’s staging is clear, and the actors play their villainous roles with gusto, but the show doesn’t develop the kind of comic sensibility that could make an audience laugh out loud at the play’s hijinks, hijackings and twists of fate … In the end the play is still a tragedy, and nearly everyone ends up hanged or burned alive, which could lead one to question the wisdom of trying to play this grim fable of human stupidity for laughs – but it’s so tantalizingly close to working.” *** From Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Vol. 1, edited by Amnon Kabatchnik. Used with the permission of the publisher, BearManor Media. Copyright © 2023 by Amnon Kabatchnik. View the full article

When I first wrote about my experience in the Marines as a college student, the work was unreadable. The fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction I produced for my undergraduate workshops scarcely transcended the angry thoughts in my head to amount to more than angry rants on the page. I was upset about my experience in the military, to say the least, especially while serving in Afghanistan. That experience stayed with me because nothing about it had been resolved. I spent seven months in Afghanistan in 2010, but the work that my friends and I did on the deployment seemed to amount to nothing then. In the years after, we struggled to see evidence that it ever would. In a way that’s best described as Kafkaesque, I was deeply haunted by the War in Afghanistan and the footprint I left behind. The rants I wrote in class took shape after hours of creative writing workshops. My characters finally had lives and thoughts of their own. My sentences felt natural rather than aching with the effort of a student. My figurative language began to make literal sense. After completing a workshop in trauma writing, I was convinced that creative writing as a practice was about making a complex work of art with moving parts before it was about achieving emotional catharsis, but Afghanistan was ingrained in my body and I needed it out. I could not stop thinking or writing about it. I wondered if there was something I could do as an artist to escape the haunting that seemed to follow me throughout my waking life. I had already worked on The Militia House as a shorter project when I set out to expand it into a novel, but I had not yet considered some of the bigger picture issues in terms of character and theme. Obviously, the book was going to be anti-war, but I needed a character and a character arc that would resonate. I thought I had something important to say, but I wondered how I could ground the experience for the reader and how I could use the project to get Afghanistan out of my body. I secretly hoped that writing this book would exorcize the weight of Afghanistan that I carried around with me equally as much as I wanted to write an entertaining horror novel. I was fascinated by writers such as Anne Rivers Siddons, Sarah Waters, and Jac Jemc who had all written the extremely effective haunted house novels The House Next Door, The Little Stranger, and The Grip of It respectively, though were not often, if ever, listed among authors most well known for horror writing. Were these authors moved to write haunted house stories as the result of their own personal hauntings in order to somehow release whatever haunted them? I imagined this was their strategy and I tried it myself. After all, their writing experiences were productive in the sense that they lead to book publication, and for me, publication tends to alleviate the space that a project takes up in my mind. If something is published, I no longer have to work on it, or in turn think about it. Initially, I struggled to write The Militia House partly because I had never completed a novel and partly because of the baggage I carried. I wondered if I had any right to tell this story or if the perspective of the book’s narrator would matter to readers. Was there anything new worth saying about the things I was upset by? The documentary Combat Obscura was released during my thesis year and further caused me to question my efforts, especially my role in the war in 2010. It takes place partly where I served, and it’s truly an outstanding film, but I was shaken up for weeks after viewing it. Too many unfavorable emotions were stirred up in me. It turns out that in re-visiting the experience in order to complete a book-length project, I had re-haunted myself. But still, I thought, if I finished the book, maybe I would be releasing a burden that had become a demon. But we lost the war and we did so in a way that made it impossible for anyone to easily ignore in contrast with the rest of our time in Afghanistan which was often overlooked in the mainstream media. In August 2021, I sat at a computer at my hourly job and watched twenty years of war suddenly trivialized by what appeared to be a chaotic, nearly unconditional withdrawal. Not only was Afghanistan officially in our rearview mirror now, we were barely even glancing at the reflection. This was upsetting all over again, as I had relied on writing The Militia House as an endeavor that would resolve some of my personal questions, but I found myself haunted by the war, yet again. I still am. I wonder what the point of it was if it took us twenty years to simply turn around and leave, what causes anyone there died for, and whether the conflict will prevent future wars or violence. I still have mostly questions. I’ve now written a book which shares this haunting with readers, so in one sense that diffusion of grief does not put me back at square one. But if I learned something about writing toward catharsis, it’s that undertaking a gothic horror project cemented in personal grief or trauma may not be a writer’s best option if they prioritize a good night’s rest. *** View the full article

SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich had an idea. It was not an unusual event, for the feared head of Nazi Germany’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office, the RSHA) – the umbrella organisation that would run the Hitler regime’s chief organs of terror – was a constantly fertile source of schemes to better control, intimidate and persecute the country’s cowed population. This plan, however, first formulated in Heydrich’s mind shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, was audacious and amoral even by the debased standards set by the man known as ‘Hitler’s hangman’. It was, in the vulgar words of a modern German historian, to ‘fuck for the Führer’. Heydrich intended to take over Berlin’s most notorious and exclusive brothel, known as ‘Salon Kitty’. Using a combination of hi-tech, state-of-the-art eavesdropping devices, and specially selected and trained women, distinguished both by their erotic charms and their devotion to the Nazi cause, the scheme would be to spy on the brothel’s male clientele. Important foreign visitors to the Reich’s capital would be cultivated by Heydrich’s agents and discreetly directed to sample the joys of the city’s leading ‘house of pleasure’. With his cynical view of human nature and his knowledge of the moral frailties of his fellow Nazi leaders, Heydrich knew that visitors to the brothel would also include leading National Socialists – indeed, he himself made frequent use of such establishments. And he had no qualms about spying on his colleagues and rivals. The information thus gleaned would be added to the stock of damaging secrets gathered in the files that that were steadily accumulating in his office safe. Heydrich envisaged that once through the doors of Giesebrecht-strasse 11 in Berlin’s prosperous western Charlottenburg quarter, visitors would be warmly welcomed by none other than the establishment’s famed owner and ‘madam’, Kitty Schmidt herself. After plying them with Champagne, fine wines or spirits in the relaxed high-bourgeois atmosphere of the salon’s luxurious reception lounge – all plush velvet chairs and curtains, reproductions of Old Master paintings and ornate wall mirrors in the cosy Biedermeier style – Kitty would produce with the utmost discretion her special ‘private’ album. This picture book would feature alluring photographs of the twenty girls who worked at the salon and – a fact unknown to the men eagerly turning the album’s pages – who were also agents in the employ of Heydrich’s SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the secret service of the SS. Rigorously chosen for their physical attractiveness, high sexual appetites and erotic skills – and with some originating from the upper reaches of the Reich’s high society – these women were also selected for their intelligence, were fluent in at least one foreign language, and above all were blindly devoted and indoctrinated adherents of National Socialism. Specially selected for their roles, they would be initiated into the ranks of the SS and trained to combine professional ‘business’ with their more subtle secret work: extracting indiscreet information from their clients in post-coital pillow talk. At the same time – and unknown to their unwitting clients – their conversations would be recorded on some fifty hidden microphones carefully placed in the salon’s ‘love rooms’. The sounds and words picked up by these bugs, then the very latest technology available in the armoury of the SD’s surveillance weapons, would be fed down through hidden tubes to Salon Kitty’s cellar. Here a staff of five SD technicians – sworn to secrecy on pain of death – would be on permanent round-the-clock duty, recording and monitoring the results on wax discs or more advanced magnetic tapes. This belt-and-braces approach to his project was typical of Heydrich’s thorough perfectionism, making assurance doubly sure and doubly secure. All these plans were but gleams in Heydrich’s narrow gimlet eyes on the day in 1939 when he summoned his subordinate Walter Schellenberg to his office to put the proposal to his most trusted and efficient lieutenant. The meeting that was the genesis of Salon Kitty was held in Heydrich’s office in the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, a vast and sprawling eighteenth- century rococo palace that had once belonged to Germany’s former ruling imperial family, the Hohenzollerns. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the palace and surrounding buildings, including the former Prinz Albrecht Hotel and the neighbouring arts and crafts museum, had been taken over by the Nazi’s mushrooming security services as the headquarters of their feared organs of terror. The Gestapo, the secret political police, had their HQ inside the complex, along with the SS – the Nazis’ elite security force who staffed the regime’s concentration camps and would provide the personnel to carry out its dirtiest future task, the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews. Also located there were the SD, the SS’s own intelligence and espionage division. The palace’s cellars had been converted into narrow windowless cells in which the regime’s open opponents – and those even suspected of being so – were imprisoned, abused, brutalised and sometimes executed. By the late 1930s the mere words ‘Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse’ had become a feared euphemism known to every German as the location of terror, torture and disappearance into the Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) of the concentration camp system, and ultimately in many cases to their deaths. The spider at the centre of this web of terror was Reinhard Heydrich himself. Fiercely bright, and just as fiercely brutal, cynical and ruthless, Heydrich was both a meticulous and permanently suspicious bureaucrat who imagined that everyone – loyal Nazis, obedient subordinates and open enemies alike – shared his own malign nature. He was therefore building a mountain of information about the character flaws and weaknesses of hundreds of officials who worked for him, ready to use it against them should the opportunity and necessity arise. The idea of converting an exclusive brothel into a spy centre suited such a purpose perfectly. Answerable only to his own immediate boss, the SS overlord Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, and to Hitler himself, in 1939 Heydrich was busy finalising his bureaucratic plans, which would be completed within the year, to centralise the organs of terror into a single umbrella organisation under his personal control: the Reich Security Main Office – or RSHA. As master of the Reich’s machinery of terror, spying and repression, Heydrich, still only in his mid-thirties, thoroughly deserved Hitler’s awed tribute to him as ‘the man with the iron heart’. Feared and hated by even his closest colleagues – his intelligence service rival Admiral Wilhelm Canaris described him as the Reich’s ‘most intelligent monster’ – the cruel and ice-cold Heydrich’s formidable but twisted brain was forever devising devilish fresh schemes to spin his web of control over new areas; which is why he had called Schellenberg in to see him. Walter Schellenberg was a man cast in Heydrich’s own malign mould. Even younger than his boss, the thirty-year-old lawyer turned SD functionary came from a similar middle-class and musical milieu. Where Heydrich’s father Bruno had been a composer of unsuccessful Wagnerian operas and head of the musical conservatory in his native city of Halle, Schellenberg’s father was a manufacturer of pianos in the western Saarland province. Both families had suffered the economic impoverishment caused by rampant inflation under the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. This had reduced many middle-class families like the Heydrichs and Schellenbergs to genteel penury, and had made them enemies of democracy and easy prey for the extremist message of the rising Nazi movement. The Schellenbergs had even been forced by economic need to leave Germany for neighbouring Luxembourg. Returning from there, Walter Schellenberg had been recruited by the SD as an informer while studying law at Bonn University. He joined the SS in 1933. The young man’s intelligence and his cynical willingness to put the demands of the party and his ambitions for his own career above formal legal restraints soon attracted Heydrich’s admiring attention. After efficiently performing various espionage tasks in France and Italy by way of initiation into the secret intelligence world, Schellenberg joined Heydrich in preparing the ground for creating the RSHA as the central body of the Nazi terror state above and beyond the rule of law. It was Schellenberg who had suggested both the title and the structure of the RSHA, and it was during his work preparing this that Heydrich tasked him with the extra job of setting up Salon Kitty as a spy centre. Heydrich and Schellenberg were hardly models of the official public line on sexual morality and marital fidelity preached but rarely practised by the Third Reich’s leaders. Heydrich had been forced to resign from his first chosen career in the navy in 1931 by a court of honour for ‘conduct unbecoming an officer’. He had broken his promise to wed the daughter of an influential friend of the head of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. But that disgrace had led to the launch of his spectacularly stellar second career in Nazi intelligence when the woman he did marry that year, Lina von Osten, a keen Nazi, encouraged her unemployed husband to apply to Himmler for the job of creating an intelligence service for the SS. Though without any experience in the intelligence field – in the navy he had been a signals specialist – Heydrich, a keen consumer of spy pulp fiction, used that and his own innate intelligence to sketch out within half an hour the outline of what would swiftly become under his leadership the SD. Himmler was suitably impressed by the plan, and by the tall young man’s blond and impeccably Aryan appearance, and gave him the job. Though he remained married to Lina, and would father four children with her, Heydrich had a high sex drive and was a regular visitor to Berlin’s brothels. It was almost certainly such visits that had planted the seed of his idea of using a bordello as a listening post. Schellenberg, though less of a sexual adventurer than his boss, was equally ruthless and amoral. He had recently ditched his first wife, a seamstress of humble origins who was eight years older than him, for being an unsuitable partner in his future career ambitions. The first Frau Schellenberg, Käthe Kortekamp, had generously paid his way through university. In dumping her, as a consolation prize for her loss, Schellenberg gave his jilted spouse a clothing company confiscated from its Jewish owners. Schellenberg saw his second wife, Irene Grosse-Schönepauk, a tall and elegant middle-class woman whom he would wed in 1940 after divorcing Käthe, as a more suitable spouse for the future senior role he envisaged for himself. If he had any bourgeois misgivings about venturing into the underground world of commercial sex, Schellenberg was quite prepared to suppress them on Heydrich’s orders in the higher interests of pleasing his boss and furthering his promising career. According to Schellenberg’s self-serving post-war account, Heydrich’s first unexpected question at their meeting was to ask whether he was faithful to his wife. On Schellenberg answering in the affirmative – despite the fact that he was in the midst of exchanging his first wife for his next – Heydrich proceeded to unfold a sketch of his grand plan. He was finding it difficult, he told Schellenberg, to gather information via the usual methods and channels – reports from informers and paid agents. Wouldn’t it be more effective and fruitful to overhear targets in an informal setting and atmosphere where tongues loosened by alcohol would be more likely to wag? What he had in mind, he added, was to post young and attractive women in a restaurant, or perhaps somewhere even more intimate, to listen to their drunken dates and pick up information that would be of value to the secret services. According to Peter Norden, author of Madam Kitty, published in 1973, Schellenberg, after hearing these details, begged to be entrusted with the execution of the scheme. Heydrich was a busy man. He speedily ordered Schellenberg to produce his first preliminary report within a week and sent him on his way. There may have been another secret reason why Heydrich had selected Schellenberg for the task of setting up Salon Kitty, and one that would have appealed to the SD chief’s devious and malicious nature: he suspected that his young protégé might have been enjoying a secret extra-marital affair with a young married woman. With delicious irony, the woman in question was none other than his own wife, Lina Heydrich. There is no doubt that in the late 1930s the Heydrich marriage was in deep trouble. As he built his empire of terror, Heydrich spent less and less time with his wife and young children. Lina strongly suspected that her husband, with his strong sexual appetite, was taking time off to visit bars and brothels and indulge in casual erotic liaisons. Lina, for her part, was not a woman to accept her husband’s infidelity without complaint and keep quiet as a good Aryan wife should. A forceful personality in her own right, Lina took her revenge by indulging in affairs herself. She is reported to have had relationships with the Nazi artist Wolfgang Willrich, who painted and drew portraits of her husband in 1935, and with an SS officer named Wilhelm Albert. Most significantly for the Salon Kitty story, however, was her ‘friendship’ with Schellenberg. It is certain that Lina and Schellenberg had formed an intimate bond soon after they first met at an official function in 1935. After the war, Lina admitted that she had deliberately and publicly flirted with the handsome young functionary in order to arouse her husband’s jealousy. But it is quite likely that the liaison went further than that. Certainly, Heydrich had good reason to think that it had. In his own post-war account, Schellenberg relates an extraordinary story. After enjoying a typical drunken evening letting off steam with his boss and another sinister police official, Heinrich Müller, Schellenberg claimed Heydrich told him that he had spiked his drink with a deadly poison and would only give him the antidote if he told the truth about his relationship with Lina. Schellenberg blurted out some sort of confession of intimacy, after which, he said, he decided that it would be best if he never saw Lina Heydrich again. If there is any truth in this story, it is highly likely that giving Schellenberg the Salon Kitty assignment was a twisted form of revenge that would have appealed to Heydrich’s warped mind. * Excerpted from The Madam and the Spymaster: The Secret History of the Most Famous Brothel in Wartime Berlin, by Nigel Jones, Julia Schrammel, Urs Brunner. Copyright, 2023. Published by Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article

In a completely fictional world, characters can be designed to suit your plot. But in my historical fiction (the Hunt & Hooke novels, published by Melville House Publishing) I use real people and real events of the 1670s and 1680s, mixing them with made-up stuff. I’m very lucky that one real person, who happened to live where and when my books are set, was the scandalous, outrageous, and transgressive Ortensio (Hortense) Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin (1646 – 1699). No amount of designing could surpass her. Her father, Baron Lorenzo Mancini, was a Roman aristocrat—the Mancini family traces its lineage back to the time of Romulus—and an astrologer and necromancer, none of which stopped him dying young. Newly widowed, their mother, Girolama Mazarini, took her five daughters (Hortense was the fourth) and three sons to Paris to benefit from her brother’s influence. As its chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin effectively ruled France, and accrued a huge fortune doing so. Charles II proposed to Hortense, but timed it badly: a year before his Restoration, he was still in exile. The Cardinal rejected him, but changed his mind when Charles became King of England Even though Mazarin offered a dowry of 5 million livres*, Charles refused. His refusal was partly because of advice from his courtiers, anxious to avoid undue interference from France—little did they know—and also because of his pride. The following year, fourteen-year-old Hortense was married to—note, not just ‘married’–the Duc de La Meilleraye instead. He was one of the richest men in Europe, if not the richest. He was granted the title of duc de Mazarin, so Hortense became the duchesse de Mazarin. When her uncle died, he gained access to his wife’s huge inheritance. Sadly, after this promising start to their marriage, the duc’s behaviour became very odd. He had his female servants’ teeth knocked out to make them less distracting, forbade his milkmaids from milking—too sexual, apparently—and censored his art collection, damaging it by doing so; genitals were beyond the pale. If he had only left it there, Hortense could probably have tolerated him, but he insisted she spend most of her day at prayer, avoid all other men, and he moved her from Paris to the countryside. After seven years of this, Hortense made her escape. Leaving her young children (astonishing that they had children, I know), with her brother’s help, she travelled to Rome, taking refuge with her sister, Marie, who was now the Princess Colonna. She, also, had an abusive husband—she feared he might kill her. Their memoirs, published together, detail what they suffered. The two women then escaped to France together. Louis XIV, who had loved Marie before her marriage, helped them by granting them pensions. Hortense set up home in Chambéry. This became a ‘salon’, a meeting place for authors, philosophers, and artists. Unfortunately, her husband went to law and managed to freeze her income, so, hoping for help from Charles II, Hortense travelled to London. To do so, she apparently disguised herself as a man, perhaps only because male clothing was more comfortable and practical. There have been some very ‘modern’ interpretations of her choice of clothing. It was seen as transgressive then; she certainly anticipated the impact it caused. Very shortly, Hortense became Charles II’s mistress. (Of course she did). He provided her with a generous pension and a house—her ‘petit palais’—in St. James’s Park. But she either overplayed her hand or chose to alienate him. She embarked on a relationship with one of his illegitimate daughters—Charles had several—Anne, the Countess of Sussex. Famously, the women conducted a fencing match in St. James’s Park; to spice up the spectacle both dressed in their nightgowns. After this scandal Anne’s husband removed his wife from London. Supposedly, Anne pined terribly for her lover, repeatedly kissing a painted miniature of her. (I take this to be a small painting rather than a tiny doll.) Then Hortense took up with the Prince de Monaco, Louis I de Grimaldi. The King angrily stopped her pension, although soon he changed his mind But this was the end of Hortense’s position as the king’s favourite. Aphra Behn, author and dramatist, also seems to have had a relationship with Hortense. The introduction to her The History of the Nun includes the words how infinitely one of Your own Sex ador’d You, and that, among all the numerous Conquest, Your Grace has made over the Hearts of Men, Your Grace had not subdu’d a more intire Slave … And how few Objects are there, that can render it so entire a Pleasure, as at once to hear you speak, and to look upon your Beauty? Following the death of Charles II, Hortense was looked after financially by his brother, James II, who had inherited the throne as Charles left no ‘legitimate’ children. One reason was that she was his wife’s aunt. Hortense’s continuing charm may be guessed at; when James fled England, replaced by William III and Mary II in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ Hortense remained in place. During this time, she set up another salon, which became one of the most celebrated in Europe. As well as learned men of London, women attended, including Nell Gwyn, Barbara Villiers and Louise de Kéroualle. (It’s interesting—to me, at least—that Charles II’s mistresses got on so well.) Hortense is celebrated for popularising champagne in English society. Women—high status women, undoubtedly—could gamble and converse with playwrights, theologians and ‘new philosophers’, as the scientists of their day were called. The last four years of her life were spent living in Paradise Row, Chelsea. Her servant Mustapha was still with her. Sadly, it seems not to have brought her happiness. After her death, in 1699, John Evelyn wrote of her that she ‘hastened her death by intemperate drinking strong spirits.’ Weirdly Her husband managed to continue the drama after her death; he carted her body around with him on his travels in France, before finally allowing it to be interred by the tomb of her uncle, Cardinal Mazarin. *I’ve tried to convert this into today’s money, but such things are difficult. 5 million livres equated to around £375,000 at the time. In today’s money, taking the Bank of England’s conservative valuation of 1 penny being worth about £1 now, I come up with £75 milllion. Other economic historians suggest a higher value for the penny at this time, as high as £5 in today’s money. Ouch. *** View the full article