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For almost as long as Hollywood has existed, there have been stories about cursed movie productions. From the freaky weather that threatened to derail The Omen (1976), to the fires that ravaged the sets of The Exorcist (1973), to the tragic deaths of some the Poltergeist (1982) cast, stories of “haunted” films have become legendary. Sometimes, those stories are even more famous than the films themselves. It’s a fantastically Hollywood phenomenon. Tinseltown is, after all, a place where stories come to life, and there’s something tantalizing about the idea that the filmmaking process can summon a kind of magical energy that spills into the real world, reshaping it in its own image — like when Freddy Krueger crosses over into “reality” in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994). If you want to find any kind of origin to the madness, you’ll have to go back to July 1924. That’s when Universal Pictures began constructing Stage 28 on its lot in Los Angeles. The 21,000 sq ft stage was built to house the enormous sets for The Phantom of the Opera (1925), including the extravagant opera house at the heart of the story. Tragedy struck when, during filming, an electrician fell from the catwalks above and died. The set would go on to double for the Royal Albert Hall in Dracula (1931), and Stage 28 also housed Frankenstein’s laboratory for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and the Bates Motel for Psycho (1960). Workers routinely reported sightings of a ghost on the sound stage over the years before its demolition in 2014, although it’s telling that most claimed they saw the ghost of Lon Chaney, star of The Phantom of the Opera, rather than the unfortunate electrician who died. Of course, the horror genre is overflowing with these stories. Now, the concept of a “haunted movie” is so well-known, it has become a PR angle itself. There will always be a filmmaker trying to convince you that weird things happened during the making of their horror movie. Everybody from Ti West (The Innkeepers) to James Wan (Insidious, The Conjuring) has talked about lights going off, strange feelings in certain rooms, and cast members waking up in the middle of the night, certain they’re not alone in their hotel room. The stories I find most interesting are the ones that are harmlessly silly — such as the long-held belief that you can glimpse a ghost kid in Three Men and a Baby (1987) — and the stories that are pre-internet. Films such as Apocalypse Now (1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) already belong to another age, and their behind-the-scenes tales have become their own kind of ghost story, passed down through generations of horror fans who, like me, were raised by Blockbuster and Roger Ebert. Impossible to fact check. Chilling in their timelessness. You probably know about The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the theory that a hanged “munchkin” can be glimpsed in the background of one scene (that one’s definitely fake, by the way). But that legend looks positively quaint next to a grisly subset of the cursed movie phenomenon that emerged in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Films like The Exorcist, The Omen and, in particular, Poltergeist, became renowned for their troubled productions, in which cast and crew members died in tragic circumstances. On The Omen alone, there’s the story about Gregory Peck’s plane being struck by lightning, the stuntman who was attacked by Rottweilers for real, and the awful car wreck that claimed the lives of the special effects director and his assistant. Meanwhile, Poltergeist is famous for the deaths of its cast, including young Heather O’Rourke, who died from septic shock aged just 12. Claims that these people fell victim to a “curse” can feel spectacularly tone deaf, and continued interest in the stories could be categorized as “ghoulish” at best, “bad taste” at worst. After all, real people lost their lives. What is interesting, though, is just why audiences want to believe an otherworldly force was responsible. Could it be that it gives them an explanation for the inexplicable? That it restores their sense of order and control in a chaotic world? It makes me think about that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Andrew (Tom Lenk) keeps making up stories in order to cope with a personal trauma. Human beings want nothing more than to feel in control. Whatever the truth behind these stories, they provide a fascinating insight into Hollywood’s unnerving knack for self-mythologizing. Meanwhile, interest in them shows no sign of waning. An entire streaming series has been made on the topic (Cursed Films, available on Shudder), and books about cursed movie productions are on the rise — my own tip of the hat is Burn the Negative (Putnam), which is about a journalist who visits the set of a streaming horror series, only to discover that it’s a remake of the cursed 1993 horror film she starred in as a child. Naturally, it all then goes horrifically wrong. For what it’s worth, my belief is that these stories function as an extension of the movies themselves — they prolong the movie experience and provide fans with something to pore and puzzle over, long after the credits have rolled. They keep the movie alive. That excited feeling of fear and unease only magnifies if we believe that, somehow, the horror films we love are living entities themselves, capable of reaching out and touching not only the real world, but us, too. *** View the full article

What does home turn into when a stranger steps inside? Have you ever considered yourself a trespasser? In many ways, all of us are. The setting of The Guest Room revolves around the concept of home. The spaces we create for ourselves which at their foundation are meant to be safe – somewhere to retreat, breathe out and do whatever we like away from the eyes of society and the scrutiny of people. My story subverts this, picking apart the nature of a home, and the selves we are within it – how this can be intruded into, both physically and psychologically. The environment my narrator lingers in most is a small London apartment – one of the millions of boxed spaces inside buildings across Britain’s capital, the same as all people living in a city. Tess’s world shrinks to this place because it belonged to her sister, Rosie, who was found dead in a park a few months before. The police investigation is ongoing, the mystery still unsolved. So the depth of Tess’s attachment and meaning is twofold within her grief – the apartment was her sister’s home, which she doesn’t want to let go of, and there could be clues among Rosie’s possessions. This setting holds tangible power – in objects. Our belongings speak for us. What we like and buy and surround ourselves with say a lot about our character. I’m intrigued by the fact we call these material items possessions. Thinking of the broader meaning of “possess” and what possesses us – to occupy, hold, dominate or even have knowledge of. For Tess, her sister’s possessions hold memory and love. There is a kind of intensity to them which leaks into other people’s possessions, once she starts BnBing Rosie’s old room. On the surface, her guests’ belongings are a distraction, a curiosity, but below that there is something in Tess trying to reach for relationship and cling to connection of any kind. Looking through someone’s things is a way to know them in secret. It’s an underhand avenue into a person’s life. A form of trespass. What starts as poking about through suitcases takes a much deeper turn when Tess reads her guest’s diary. Here, the term invasion of privacy flashes to the fore. Yet, this diary and her guest’s belongings are in Tess’s home. She’s invited people in and they are trusting her with their things. Through this, the notion of boundaries and intimacy takes on an interesting tone. In our culture, we create boundaries in order to keep ourselves safe. A home space is mine and unless I’ve asked or said it’s OK, you’re not allowed entry or access. But if you’re invited, then it shifts. Especially if you’re a stranger. As soon as you’re inside my home we are intimate and those boundaries become fluid. Of course, we are meant to respect those boundaries. But the opportunity is created to encroach. Tess takes this opportunity, to extremes. The home environment that shrinks around her, into objects, becomes an obsession through the diary and what the entries reveal about her guest, Arran. She ignores and crosses his boundaries, trespassing into his personal life, first by reading, then by following him through the streets of London. The small narrowing backdrop of her apartment contrasts in its sudden expansion to crowded city roads. Yet in both settings it’s possible to be an intruder. We all have this possibility. Looking at someone’s phone screen over their shoulder on the underground. Eavesdropping on a conversation. Analyzing the belongings poking out of someone’s bag. Opening the wardrobe in your friend’s parents’ bedroom. Watching the way that woman rubs the underside of her chin, or that man places one hand inside the sleeve of his shirt. Even glimpsing the cover of the novel the person on the bus next to you is reading. How many of us can say we’ve never done any of these things? In what ways could you have trespassed on someone’s life – either purposefully, or without even realising? In this context, awareness is significant. The security we’ve constructed around ourselves can be unknowingly undermined or infiltrated by other people. Even by those we think of as friends, or by family. Trust is a key theme through the story. We take for granted that we can trust the people close to us. They are our known environment and so we feel safe. But how well can we truly know a person, even when they’re living in proximity, on the other side of our bedroom wall? People creep in. And it’s fascinating what we fail to notice. We forget how powerful the brain is, in its filtering process. Once in a workshop the facilitator got us to look round the room and remember everything blue. Then we closed our eyes for a few minutes and she asked us to say out loud what’s blue. We could all name a few things. Next, our eyes still closed, she asked: can you tell me an object that’s red? None of us could remember. We weren’t looking for red things so our brains hadn’t noted them. The implications of this are compelling. What are we not taking in? How many things do we overlook? Especially when we get hooked on particulars, our vision focusing in and getting stuck inside a narrow lens. Tess plays this out, needing to know, desperate to find out – about her sister, about Arran. And she fails to notice the person trespassing on her. Invading her privacy, her personal space – both within her home and on the London streets. There is a creeping sense of eyes on her back. Edging into unwelcome intimacy, close enough to touch her hair, her skin. Claustrophobia. Created in various layers of The Guest Room. I explore it through the interactions of Tess and Arran in her apartment, in that physical space, but also in psychological space. Arran’s diary is a kind of setting within that exploration. And this other unnamed narrator who is watching Tess. Their psychology and observations close in on her, and close in on the reader’s experience, each character adding pressure to the atmosphere and situation – the hub of which is home. In a city or town, all you need to do is look out of your window and you can see into another person’s life. Across the road or the back of another building, we can easily watch our neighbours. We peer in or intrude day to day, in diverse ways. There are all kinds of windows. Who among us isn’t curious? How many of us have never spied or had a quick look? Never been drawn in? *** View the full article

One of the things I love most about thrillers is that the stakes are always so high—never more so than when the mystery or conflict threatens a supposedly sturdy relationship that’s central to the protagonist’s identity. Often, in domestic suspense, that relationship is a marriage, but perhaps there’s even more on the line when it’s a friendship that’s jeopardized. After all, love comes and goes, but friendship is forever. Right? In my latest thriller, Thicker Than Water, Julia and Sienna are not only sisters-in-law, but best friends and business partners, too. They believe that theirs is a perfect, unbreakable bond—until, that is, the man who connects them (husband to one, brother to the other) is accused of a brutal crime, and the two women find themselves on opposite sides for the very first time. Writing this book allowed me to explore what we hide from each other—and ourselves—in order to keep a friendship alive, as well as the possibility that our closest bonds might actually be our most fragile. Here are seven other thrillers where friendships are tested—by old secrets, dark truths, and a few dead bodies. Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here Emily and Kristen are having the time of their life in Chile when Emily returns to their hotel to find that Kristen has killed a backpacker in self-defense—an act that’s eerily similar to what happened on their trip the previous year in Cambodia. Now, as they return to their homes on opposite sides of the world, Emily gets to work trying to process the horror of their latest trip. But when Kristen shows up unexpectedly, inserting herself into every corner of Emily’s life, Emily wonders what really happened in Chile—and who Kristen really is. While this book is a ton of page-turning fun from start to finish, it’s also a deeply sobering look at gaslighting and toxic relationships, imbued with Bartz’s trademark vivid writing that powerfully examines complicated female friendships. Kate Alice Marshall, What Lies in the Woods When Naomi, Cassidy, and Olivia were only eleven, they put away a serial killer with their testimony after one of them was viciously attacked—but they also lied, and now, decades later, the truth about that night is threatening them again. This book delves deep into the dark secrets we keep, even from those we claim are our closest friends, as well as the struggle to maintain friendships in which there is shared trauma. Is what bonds us to someone else the same thing that will break us? Kate Alice Marshall deftly explores this question in a story with enough twists and turns to give you whiplash. Leah Konen, The Perfect Escape This is a book about a girls trip gone very wrong, and to say much more than that risks spoiling the fun of finding out exactly how wrong it goes—and how all the story’s strange events and coincidences are connected. Each chapter leads you to a new question, or a new surprise, or a new twist, and all the while, Leah Konen investigates how delicate and unknowable new friendships can actually be, especially those that feel fated from the start. And as the women in this book learn, it can be a treacherous thing, trusting someone too soon. Kimberly McCreight, Friends Like These When five friends from college plan a weekend getaway in the Catskills, old secrets come back to haunt them in devastating, and deadly, ways. Kimberly McCreight’s intricately plotted multi-POV narrative makes for a layered, compelling story where literally everyone has something major to hide. After reading this one, you might think twice about planning a vacation with your favorite former classmates, but you won’t be able to resist this fun, juicy look at the darker side of friendship. Bethany C. Morrow, Cherish Farrah Seventeen-year-old Cherish and Farrah are best friends, and the only two Black girls in a country club community. Cherish, who was raised by white parents, seemingly has everything, but when Farrah manipulates her way into Cherish’s home and family, she discovers disturbing secrets about her best friend’s life. This is a tantalizingly slow burn that rewards its reader with a fiery ending. Bethany C. Morrow increases the tension with precision, until it’s nearly boiling over, all the while proving that, when it comes to co-dependent friendships, there’s a razor-fine line between devotion and danger. Megan Miranda, The Only Survivors While the characters in this book have known each other since high school, calling them friends might be a bit of a stretch. Still, every year, they gather for a weeklong trip at a house on the Outer Banks, intent on feigning closeness as they remember the tragic event that keeps them tied to each other. But on their tenth anniversary trip, it’s clear that someone is intent on exposing the truth of what happened in the past—a truth they were so sure they’d buried. Brimming with surprises, beautiful prose, and emotional insight, this book is a chilling reminder that nothing bonds people together better than a secret. Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People Stella and Violet are best friends with wildly different backgrounds; Stella is from a rich, well-connected family, while Violet had to cut ties with her parents upon entering adulthood. But when Stella wants a piece of Violet’s new life as a producer at a TV news program, the two realize that their friendship cannot carry on as before; only one of them can be on top. This book is a darkly intelligent exploration of ambition and toxic relationships, as well as a tense, startling look at what we’re willing to do—and who we’re willing to destroy—to get what we want. *** View the full article

Some readers hate ‘unlikeable characters.’ But I love them. Well, let’s be clear: I love complicated, charismatic, devious, utterly compelling characters. The kind who keep you guessing, keep you flipping the pages, wondering, are you good? Are you bad? Or something in between? Writing my own historical heist, The Housekeepers, was my chance to play with just that sort of duality. My protagonist, Mrs King, is a sharp-witted, cool-headed housekeeper to one of West London’s grandest mansions. We meet her in 1905, an era of big hats and big houses captured in the popular imagination by TV shows like Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs. She’s just been dismissed from her job after twenty years of loyal service. And as she marches through the back gate and into her untethered new life, she starts unfurling a plan many weeks in the making: a dazzling and dastardly burglary, the kind high society has never seen before… Playing with Mrs King’s morality, unpeeling her motivations, understanding her reasons for wanting to rob the mansion she served so loyally – well, this was delicious detective work for me as an author. And it also gave me the chance to play with a person who could be compassionate and loyal one moment, and ferocious and devious the next. I knew I wanted Mrs King to be multidimensional, to have a chip of ice in the heart – because it takes a certain ruthless gumption to rob a seven-storey mansion on the night of the grandest ball of the London season. I also wanted her to operate in accordance with her own personal, private moral code. And indoors, upstairs, lives her former mistress: the elusive Miss de Vries. Aged twenty-three, she is the fabulously wealthy and entirely formidable heiress to the most glamorous house on Park Lane. At first glance, she is Mrs King’s antagonist. But as we get to know her better, I hope the reader begins to wonder: is she really bad? Or misunderstood? Or something more complicated altogether? Here are four novels (and one film) with characters shifting from good to bad to the delicious grey areas in between… My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier A masterclass in historical suspense and threaded with the most glittering psychological details, this luxuriant 1951 novel tells the story of Philip Ashley, raised by his bachelor uncle Ambrose on a stunning Cornish estate. But then Ambrose marries the mysterious Rachel and dies in mysterious circumstances, forcing both Philip and the reader to wonder: did Ambrose perish from natural causes, or did Rachel have a hand in his demise? Jealousy, envy, lust, poison, betrayal… it’s all there. And at the heart of the novel is a single gripping narrative question, twisting first one way and then the other: is Rachel good or bad, good or bad…? She is compelling, mercurial, authoritative, tender – and I love her, and this book, so much. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante Really this is a sequence of four sumptuous and immersive novels, set in Naples, telling the story of Lenu and Lina, two friends destined to be rivals and soulmates all their lives. Lina is the elusive, enthralling ‘brilliant friend’ of the title: devious, ferociously intelligent, creative, manipulative, brave, wronged – and she grips the protagonist and the reader alike. Kind and gentle she is not. Cruel and vicious she can be. And yet we are entranced by her, and from page to page, chapter to chapter, book to book, we wonder: who will you be, in the end? And by reflection, who are we? Rarely has a novel moved or absorbed me more. The Secret History by Donna Tartt You’ve read it already, haven’t you? Good for you! You’ll know why I had to put it on the list. A group of friends who commit an unspeakable crime – it’s there in black and white in the prologue. But the reasons, and the aftershocks, are what keep us tearing through these elegant, icy pages. For we can’t help but hope that this group of chilly, strange, morally complex friends will escape persecution for their crime… The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith Talk about charismatic criminal: Tom Ripley has it all. Charm, anxiety, ferocity, and a determination to stay ahead of the game. We can’t help but care about him, even as we are disturbed and dismayed by his crimes. This is the kind of calculation and cunning that keeps a story motoring forward without mercy. Ocean’s Eleven (2001) Okay, I’m cheating – it’s not a novel. But The Housekeepers has been described as Downton Abbey meets Ocean’s Eleven, so it would be criminal (get it?) not to mention this masterclass of the heist genre. The 2001 version was directed by Steven Soderbergh. At the heart of the story is Danny Ocean, the charming, sardonic hero, with an unshakeable determination to carry out an eyewatering robbery of a glittering Las Vegas casino. His swagger, his sentiment, his loyalty and his audacity – these traits (even more than lasers and gunfire) keep us on the edge of our seats. And it showed me that you can play with a little moral complexity, a certain icy hauteur, when I started creating my very own Mrs King… *** View the full article

As a kid, I was mesmerized by the eerie tales my grandmother told about ghosts from her childhood in Croatia. My older sisters and friends captivated me with creepy stories when Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board took our slumber parties into séance mode. In dark bathrooms, the neighborhood kids swore that Bloody Mary showed up in the mirror when we chanted her name. I was excited to play along, but I never opened my eyes. Was I afraid of seeing her? Or was I afraid of not seeing her? I didn’t want to encounter a scary ghost, but I did want proof they were real. Profoundly afraid of death, I clung to the belief that when my loved ones died, I’d never really lose them. My Catholic upbringing told me to believe they’d be in Heaven, but I wanted more. I wanted my dearly departed to come down from the clouds and visit me now and then, like the spirits in my grandmother’s tales. This longing for the dead to stick around made ghost stories my favorite kind of stories. And they still are. As a writer, ghosts keep showing up in my novels. Recently I was asked by a reader if I’ve had real experiences with the other side. My answer is a definite I think so. Or maybe more accurately, I hope so. My grandfather, who often told me I was his favorite and died when I was eighteen, helps me find things I’ve lost. Once when I’d misplaced my keys and spent hours looking for them, I asked my grandpa out loud if he could show me where they were. Within minutes, he guided me to the couch cushion they’d slipped under. My old neighbor and dear friend Bob, who died in his 80s, sends me pennies to say hello. How do I know this? At the funeral, a neighbor told us that her son dreamt about Bob throwing pennies from a roof. The next morning she received an email chain about angels throwing pennies from Heaven. I took it as a sign and began paying attention. Once, on a walk with my husband and kids, I brought up a memory of Bob, and right there on our path were four pennies placed neatly in a row. I’d often find them in front of his old house, and on difficult days, a penny sometimes appears in the most unexpected places. Then there’s our close friend Rus, who sets off our smoke alarm when he wants us to send his wife Temre a message. At 2am, the night after he died our smoke detector blared for no reason. It had never done that before. It happened again on the first Father’s Day after he passed, which was also his wife’s birthday. It went off a handful of other times, including the night we had a book launch party at the house and I was telling a writer friend about this phenomenon—shortly afterwards, with all the guests still there, the alarm started howling upstairs. I’m not certain who the ghost was that turned on music downstairs one morning at 3am, waking me with an eerie song I’d never heard before. I did recognize Chris Martin’s voice, so the next day I looked up Coldplay songs and discover “Death and All His Friends” had woken me. Really. That was the name of the song. I have no explanation for this one, but since I was writing a ghost story at the time, I told myself that someone was trying to come through. I have plenty more examples that don’t sound as convincing in writing as they do in my head. My rational brain doesn’t really buy into these coincidences. It’s my imagination that drinks up this stuff like sugar water. It’s too delicious to deny. So when Shirley Jackson, the queen of ghost stories, showed up while I was writing my novel MAGDALENA, which is also a ghost story, my cup overflowed. I hadn’t ever read Jackson’s work when I randomly came across a quote online that was the absolute perfect epigraph for Magdalena. “No live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” Who was this writer? I wondered. The quote was breathtaking! Magdalena is very much a novel about the power and need for imagination. This eloquent sentence set the tone beautifully, and every time I opened my manuscript, I reread her words that kept me in the dream of my novel. I was working on rewrites when I finally read Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I fell in love with her writing and quickly picked up another novel. You can imagine my surprise when I opened The Haunting of Hill House to find that the quote I had chosen for my epigraph was the very first line of the novel! I had no idea it came from a ghost story. I’d only chosen it for its take on imagination. This discovery made the presence of Jackson’s words even more meaningful. As I sat thinking about this fantastic coincidence, the magic grew, and my mind went to that far off place it always goes when I write, the place where serendipity gives my stories wings. Perhaps the queen of ghost stories had sent that quote to inspire me. My rational brain tried to stop the nonsense, reminding me that the spirit of Shirley Jackson had far more important people to haunt than me. But maybe I was the only one listening. I decided that Shirley Jackson had given something to me, not necessarily through the intervention of a ghostly hand, but through the magic of words—the way one’s words live on after death. I took in her profound sentence whenever I opened my manuscript and, as Dottie says in Magdalena, “…her words were little ghosts themselves,” visiting me every day. They gave me permission to write a novel that doesn’t fit within the confines of absolute reality, a novel that wanders into the peculiar mysteries of this wondrous existence. Shirley Jackson influenced my writing by giving me permission to dream. Just like the larks and katydids. For she knew that staying too grounded is not how you give a story its wings. *** View the full article

There’s a vast number of good YA thrillers and horror novels out this year, most using genre tropes as wider metaphors for the human experience, fierce fights against injustice, or lush groundings for romance. There’s also a whole lot of campy slashers and dead influencers….and there can never really be enough of those, can there? Courtney Gould, Where Echoes Die (Wednesday, June 20) Two sisters head to the desert to find the truth behind their mother’s death in this moody, atmospheric detective story. Their journalist mother had been obsessed with a small town with a reputation for miracles—and lost memories. People return over and over again to the unremarkable desert town, and the sisters may never be able to escape. Kalynn Bayron, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight (Bloomsbury YA, June 20) Charity is the manager of a full-contact haunted horror experience at Camp Mirror Lake, the setting for a classic summer camp slasher now reenacted each summer for paying customers. It’s near the end of the season, and Charity’s staff keeps disappearing. Then things start to get…unpredictable. Charity’s been playing a Final Girl for so long, she’s certain that if anyone has the skills to survive the night, it’s her. But can she also save her friends? Amy Goldsmith, Those We Drown (Delacorte, June 27) Another Sea-mester book! But quite complementary to the other book set at sea, as this one is horror. Those We Drown features a group of wealthy kids and one scholarship student on a weeks-long cruise where they must mingle with influencers, the elderly, and soon enough, sea monsters. Those We Drown gets bonus points for cheekiness—some of the villains are literally named the Sirens, and one of those keeps singing sea chanties. Delightfully campy and creepy! Kim Johnson, Invisible Son (Random House, June 27) In this powerful sophomore effort from Kim Johnson, set during the early days of the pandemic, Andre Johnson has just been released from juvie for a crime he didn’t commit. He wants to know who framed him, but he’s got to stay out of trouble under the terms of his probation, making it complicated for him to find answers, but the questions keep piling up, including the biggest one of all: where has his neighbor’s adopted son vanished to, and what did it have to do with Andre’s incarceration? The pain and loss of the early pandemic and the soaring fight for justice during the summer of 2020 are viscerally brought to life in Kim Johnson’s deftly crafted sentences, and Invisible Son grounds itself well in the particularisms of its Portland scenery. I can’t recommend this book enough, for readers of all ages. Joelle Wellington, Their Vicious Games (Simon & Schuster, July 25) A high school senior has her college acceptance rescinded after she claps back at a racist classmate. She has one chance to get back into the Ivy Leagues: win a prestigious, but secretive, scholarship contest held by the most powerful local family. She soon finds out the young women who’ve entered the contest aren’t trying for a scholarship: they’re there to become the next bride to the family’s louche heir. And they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get out ahead… Jennifer Dugan, The Last Girls Standing (Putnam, August 15) Sloan and Cherry are the only two counselors to make it out alive from a brutal massacre at a summer camp, bonding in their fight for survival and embarking on a romance for the ages. But now Sloan is starting to wonder about if her girlfriend did more at that sleepaway camp than just survive. Campy, queer, and perfect for the doldrums of summer! Dashka Slater, Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers, Whose Lives It Changed (FSG, August 22) The only nonfiction title on this list, Accountable seeks to answer uncomfortable questions about a disturbing incident in the Bay Area town of Albany, desperate to protect its reputation of tolerance without doing the work to create a genuine culture of restorative justice. When a racist instagram account run by several students becomes public knowledge, students targeted by the account are furious—and they become ever more so, as their demands for consequences are redirected into limited measures aimed at optics. Slater is deeply empathetic in her approach, but still maintains a strong moral thread of condemnation and commitment toward a clear path of advocacy. Kit Frick, The Reunion (Margaret K. McElderry Books, August 29) In this delightful family mystery with echoes of Knives Out, Kit Frick takes 11 members of the fractious Mayweather clan to an exclusive Cancun resort. They’re supposed to be there for a wedding—but soon, one member of the family is dead, and the rest must figure which highly suspicious/self-consciously eccentric relative is at fault. Perfect for fans of Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. Jamison Shea, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me (Henry Holt, August 29) In this ballet horror novel, a young ballerina is given a chance at power after a star of the company takes her under her wing. But all power comes at a cost, and this power derives from an ancient source with its own agenda. I’m not sure what it is about dance that lends itself so well to horror—think Black Swan or Suspiria—but add this one to the list of stories that take the bloody feet and brutal precision of the dance world and turn them into visceral horror. Lisa Springer, There’s No Way I’d Die First (Delacorte Press, September 5) Influencers! Halloween games! And a KILLER CLOWN!!!! There’s no way the narrator won’t make it to the end of this book, with all her Final Girl brilliance, which means there’s no way that you, the reader, will not also make it to the end of the very fun, very campy slasher novel. Springer’s heroine is trying to get attention for her horror film club and invites her prep school’s most influential students to an exclusive Halloween party at her parent’s mansion. Unfortunately, the party entertainment she’s hired has their own agenda, and it’ll take all her knowledge of horror tropes and household chemistry to outwit the clown’s righteous fury and grotesque gags. Adam Sass, Your Lonely Nights Are Over (Viking Young Readers, September 5) In this delightful YA homage to the slasher, a serial killer is a targeting a school’s queer club, and two besties find themselves ostracized from the club after suspicion falls on them for the murders. They must clear their names, in between going to drive-in movies, settling scores, and occasionally hooking up. Will they solve the murders? Will they end up together? Do I even care who the murderer is when I’m desperate for these two to smash? Anyway, file this one under, Very Fun and Not at All Scary (at least, compared to other slashers). Anise Vance, Hush Harbor (Hanover Square, September 5) Hush Harbor is an epic novel of utopian hope in a dystopian world. When another Black teenager dies at the hands of the police, an armed self-defense movement establishes an intentional community in an abandoned housing project in New Jersey. How far will the revolution be able to go, before the unjust status quo is imposed on them? I loved this book’s pragmatic take on revolution and occupation, and kind approach to collective movements. Anise Vance demonstrates the thin line between utopian, dystopian, and thriller, in this genre-bending novel of ideas and action. Olivia Worley, People to Follow (Wednesday Books, October 31) 10 influencers head to a remote location for three weeks turned off from their phones, convinced they’re the stars of a new reality show—but not long after they arrive, influencers start dropping like follower counts, as their darkest secrets are revealed to their legions of fans. I’m really enjoying this trend of “books where annoying people who are internet famous kill each other.” Linda Cheng, Gorgeous Gruesome Faces (Roaring Brook Press, November 7) In this high-concept horror, Cheng’s narrator Sunny is a disgraced former member of a manufactured girl group that was meant for K-pop stardom—at least, until one of the members killed herself, and the other cuts off all contact with Sunny. When Sunny finds a chance to reconnect with her bandmate, and finally understand what went wrong, she leaps in without hesitation: there’s a new contest to become to the next big pop idol, and she’ll stay in the program until she discovers the truth, no matter how dangerous. View the full article

Everyone knows that horror novels are meant to be read on a winter’s evening, curled up in the dark while the wind howls and rain drums the windows. We’re supposed to imagine the ghosts breathing down our necks as chill drafts leak through door frames and night descends earlier with each passing day. But I relish the experience of rising dread under the glare of the summer sun. To look up from the page – distressed, wary, pulse racing – and encounter the world in neon reality. I love reading horror in the summer, I love the contrast of being sucked into a dark, spooky story during the bright cheer of a sunny afternoon. Not very Goth of me, I know, but try it for yourself with my top ten list of summer horror reading, and you’ll be a convert. Jaws, Peter Benchley Iconic. Where else to begin? Take your summer vacation on the picture-postcard beaches of Amity Island, where mainland dollars reign supreme and our dogged hero, Detective Brody, slowly loses his mind over the course of an interminable summer in the pursuit of Nature’s greatest predator. Never mind that the biggest threat to Amity is in fact its passively murderous town council, whose decision to leave the beaches (and cash registers) open to frolicking, juicy swimmers results in the death of a child (chomp!) – it’s the unseen menace lurking in the glittering ocean that has inspired decades of readers (and moviegoers) to declare they’ll never go in the water again. The shark persists, rapacious and invisible, making mincemeat of both the tender tourists and a small community’s psyche. I, for one, have never since swum in a lake or a pool without picturing a dark shadow moving slowly beneath my vulnerable, naked feet, a black-eyed killing machine perfected over millennia. Frankly, a perfect beach read. Needful Things, Stephen King King at his pinnacle, in my humble opinion. Set in Castle Rock, Maine, mysterious stranger Leland Gaunt arrives and opens up his curiosity shop, ‘Needful Things’. It has something perfect for every Castle Rock resident, and isn’t that just a happy little coincidence? And such good prices! Why, they’re practically a steal. But Mr Gaunt would like something in return, if you don’t mind… As in the best King novels, the real threat is the friendly neighbour, the unassuming gym teacher, the local cop. Spurred on by Leland Gaunt, a small town goes to war with itself over items that turn out to be nothing but cheap knockoffs, over simmering tensions escalated by Gaunt’s gleeful encouragement. Violence intensifies – knives are drawn and the town looks on as two former friends stab one another to death in the square. King’s magic is his ability to reveal the worst in us to ourselves, and in doing so creates the lasting fear that the only true evil in this world is one another. Never mind demons (which Leland Gaunt is eventually presumed to be), it’s the people next door you need to watch out for. Last Days, Adam Nevill Look, I don’t scare particularly easily. It takes something especially disturbing to prevent me from sleeping like the proverbial baby, and Last Days kept me awake several nights in a row during a sun-soaked Sicilian holiday (would absolutely repeat for the pleasure of reading this novel for the first time again). We follow indie film-maker Kyle Freeman, who is being paid a suspiciously large amount of cash to put together a documentary about the Temple of the Last Days, a now-defunct cult which rose to prominence in the 70s until their grisly – and self-inflicted – end in a cave in the Arizona desert. Kyle’s creative benefactor is an ex-cult member determined to prove that their more supernatural efforts, supposedly ceased all those decades ago, in fact yielded distressingly tangible results. Meet the Blood Friends, physical manifestations of hell-bound souls that first appear as vaguely skeletal shapes on walls and inside cupboards, but become horrifyingly real the longer Kyle investigates the cult and its sinister, charismatic leader, Sister Katherine. Nevill builds the creeping terror with relish; his flair for the grimy, desperate quality of truly excellent horror is unparalleled. Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay Intense, dreamy, inexplicable – the mysterious disappearance of three boarding-school girls and their teacher continues to unsettle, to frustrate, to send summery shivers down the spine. Valentine’s Day, 1900, Victoria, Australia. The students of Appleyard College set out for a picnic at local landmark Hanging Rock, an unusual geological formation out in the countryside that surrounds the school. The girls and their teachers eat, converse, nap in the heat. Shoes are removed, the day takes on a languorous and surreal quality. Four decide to climb the rock, despite the temperature, and are followed by a teacher. One turns back, delirious with fright, and the rest are simply never seen again. Theories abound, but none bear fruit. Search parties are mounted to no avail and Appleyard falls apart at speed. Based on a dream had by the author, Picnic at Hanging Rock is deeply imbued with layers of confusion, of helplessness. There’s something about an unsolved mystery that sticks, isn’t there; no closure, no explanation. Surely, that’s the true terror. Just Like Home, Sarah Gailey Vera Crowder returns to her childhood home one hot summer to care for her dying mother. The Crowder house is special, constructed by hand by Vera’s father to shelter and safeguard his beloved family. It has everything two loving parents could provide: a pretty little kitchen, a shady plot in a nice neighbourhood, a cosy bedroom for Vera, and a purpose-built cellar where Father Crowder can perform his serial killings in sound-proofed peace, complete with drainage channels. Vera knows her father wasn’t perfect, but she loved him anyway, and eventually she loved him enough to follow in his footsteps… Protected and spurred on by the house itself, which is as much a malignant, revolting, oddly sympathetic character as Vera, we watch through spread fingers as she wrestles with her history to find a twisted form of closure. As terrifying as Vera’s father was, it’s the present-day shell of her mother that’s the real horror, full of mucus and malevolence. The novel is a gruesome and profound meditation on nature, nurture, and reckoning with your past. Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry An impressively detailed chronicle of the Manson Family, Helter Skelter is the best-selling true crime book in history for a reason. Vincent Bugliosi was the lead prosecutor for the state of California’s case against Manson (most famously for the Tate-LaBianca murders), and with the help of ghostwriter Curt Gentry, he produced an account that is thoughtful, exhaustive, respectful. Sensational? Absolutely, how could it not be? But the work is meticulous, almost dry in places, and the understated tone serves only to heighten the erratic brutality of the Family. He recounts the various missteps made by the LAPD during their initial investigation with both accuracy and grace; the reader can’t help but admire how much Bugliosi did personally to gather evidence in a case that was forensically limited – it was Bugliosi who secured Linda Kasabian’s explosive eyewitness testimony in exchange for immunity. The dusty, arid landscape of Southern California hums in the background, a psychedelic heat fuels the social and political tensions that, Bugliosi argued in court, underpinned the haywire logic of Manson’s ‘Helter Skelter’ race war theories, and the resulting murders. There’s no fiction that can match this kind of horror. The Whistling, Rebecca Netley Nanny Elspeth Swansome arrives on the remote Scottish island of Skelthsea in 1876 to care for her new charge, a small and silent girl named Mary who hasn’t spoken a single word since the tragic death of her older brother. Mary lives with her aunt in their grand old family home, Iskar, which has all the beloved hallmarks of the classic haunted house: dark corridors that hum with the wind, ancient creaky floorboards, gloomy hanging tapestries and inadequate fires in freezing rooms. Elspeth’s attempts to rehabilitate Mary are broadly unsuccessful, until mysterious objects begin turning up under Elspeth’s pillows and hatchet-faced locals make enigmatic allusions to darker deeds at Iskar. I love classic Gothic, and this novel has all the familiar qualities of the very best in historical haunted-house literature. For fans of The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House, The Whistling guarantees some welcome shivers on even the hottest of summer days. Plain Bad Heroines, Emily E Danforth Clearly, I can’t get enough of boarding-school creepshows. Plain Bad Heroines is a Gothic meta-delight; the whole novel a sly, sexy wink to camera. Brookhants School for Girls is both cursed and haunted, a perfect stage-set for turn-of-the-century Sapphic yearning, for teenage hysteria, for death made legend by generations of over-excited and under-sexed girls. In 1902, Clara and Flo are boarders at Brookhants and desperately in love with one another, until a night-time tryst leads to their deaths by way of a swarm of vicious yellowjackets. Their ghosts haunt the grounds (allegedly), and the reputation of the school never recovers. In the present day, a production company secures the abandoned site for filming a movie of Flo and Clara’s story starring two up-and-coming young actresses. Mysterious events occur (don’t they always?) and the cast and crew grow convinced that Flo and Clara have never really left… Expertly weaving together these dual timelines, Danforth conjures a gorgeously Gothic backdrop for her characters, queer and in love and unabashed. Footnotes provide an academically authentic feel, a ‘found footage’ realness that underpins the deliberately B-movie atmosphere which is particularly effective in the contemporary narrative. Funny, tender, with plenty of bumps in the night. The Terror, Dan Simmons There’s nothing like a good Arctic cannibalism story to lend a chill to your summer afternoon. Based on the real-life story of Captain John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to discover the fabled Northwest Passage to Canada, Simmon’s novel takes an historic mystery rife with gory reality and ratchets up the fright. Leading ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, Captain Franklin, his second-in-command Captain Crozier, and their men end up marooned for two years in pack ice following an unusually cold Arctic summer, never to be seen again. What became of them was gleaned over the following several decades, mostly from snippets of information from local Inuit who glimpsed skeletal white men staggering through the hostile landscape. Some remains were found by search parties in the later years; notably, bones bearing marks of cannibalism. An horrific fate on its own, Simmons introduces a supernatural element in the form of a shape-shifting Arctic spirit that stalks the men across the ice, in the dark, in the endless blinding snow. It tears men limb from limb, it inspires mind-bending fright in the crew trapped by the limitations of their weak humanity in such an inhospitable world. Survival horror at its finest. Water Shall Refuse Them, Lucie McKnight Hardy Sixteen-year old Nif and her five-year old brother, Lorry, arrive with their parents at a shabby little holiday cottage in an isolated Welsh village. Their father, reeling from the recent drowning death of Lorry’s twin, has decided a change of scene for the summer is just the ticket. Their mother, disaffected and functionally catatonic, doesn’t care either way, and the children are left to languish in the brutal heatwave of 1976. Nif is visited by a mysterious force which she has named ‘the Creed’, manifesting itself as a compulsion to control, care for, and harm the living beings around her, including Lorry. Nif collects talismans of this dawning belief system, her ‘relics’; bird skulls, feathers, bone. An herbalist neighbour delivers unidentified potions to Nif’s stricken mother, who sees her dead daughter in every cobwebbed corner of the run-down house. Hyper-religious churchgoers brand the family as wicked outsiders, unwelcome and un-Godly. Folk-horror elements abound, intensified through the lens of adolescent emotion. The narrative is propelled by the perpetual mystery of exactly how Nif’s little sister died; the resolution is both shocking and satisfying. * View the full article

Growing up in New England, you learn to worry that you’re not sufficiently of the region. That your roots aren’t deep enough, your attitudes aren’t pure, your accent has been watered down. It has to do with the Puritans, or maybe the Red Sox. Or it comes out of the rocky soil, the rugged coastline. All that doubt and dread and self-interrogation, it yields a proud kind of art, too. The region is known for its literary output: six states, a few hundred years of history, and a disproportionate number of American classics. But it’s not immediately the place that comes to mind when you think about “noir.” For that, we often go to California, New York, or Florida. But almost from the beginning, New England and noir have been bound together in a dark, elegant dance. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851) was there to kickstart the American gothic tradition; later, Edith Wharton added her own tragic notes in Ethan Frome (1911). More recently you have the sprawling, unsettling world of Stephen King, whose novels are so distinct and overpowering I won’t include them on this list, though obviously almost any installment would qualify as a defining “New England” novel. Instead, I want to focus on a few strands, which together make up a complex tradition worthy of considering together: modern novels of suspense and strangeness, contemporary gothics, and a few more or less hardboiled crime stories from the region’s big city. These were some of the books I looked to when I was writing my own New England story: The Stolen Coast, about a village in southeastern Massachusetts full of fugitives, hustlers, and strivers. I wasn’t sure—I’m still not sure, in truth—whether my New England bona fides are strong enough. Over the years, my accent has faded, my morals have wilted, and yes, I wear a weathered Red Sox hat and have my order ready for the Dunkin’ drive-through (coffee roll, light no sugar), but is it enough? These authors give me comfort that the tradition is always evolving. * Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez (Tin House Books) Talty’s story collection, set around the Penobscot community in Maine, is full of hustles, robberies, and curses—just enough to fit it under the “noir” label. Really, it’s a kaleidoscopic portrait of the many and varied lives being led in one isolated pocket of Native land in modern America. Talty brings inventive style and deep empathy to his unforgettable characters’ journeys. He also brings out a side of New England life few have access to and more ought to know. Kaitlyn Greenidge, We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books) Greenidge’s debut follows the Freeman family as they uproot from life in Dorchester for the Toneybee Institute in the Berkshires, where they’ve been chosen to participate in a peculiar study. The family is supposedly going to live with a chimpanzee and attempt to communicate with the animal in sign language. Once they’ve arrived at their new home, the experiment appears more sinister. Greenidge plays with elements of gothic and manor house fiction as readers (and characters) try to figure out what is going on at this Institute, and who exactly is being experimented on. The result is deeply disturbing and calls to mind an American tradition of racism and evil lurking behind pseudo-science. Adam White, The Midcoast (Hogarth) White’s debut novel was one of last year’s breakout hits. With elegant, searching prose and a commitment to understanding, White charts out a compelling story that feels intensely contemporary and, in its own way, timelessly New England. It’s a story of clashing privileges, tight-knit community, and the rise and fall of families. A high school English teacher pays a weekend visit to a pair of old friends who have suddenly and surprisingly come up in the world. That idyll soon comes undone, and we’re brought along for a painful exploration of the family’s sins. White’s rendering of Maine, with its blue collar ethos and mix of old, new, and no money makes for an intoxicating read. Peter Swanson, Before She Knew Him (William Morrow) Swanson brings consummate craftmanship to the modern psychological thriller. His best well might be Before She Knew Him, about a woman living in a quiet suburb outside Boston who struggles with her mental health while delving into the real possibility that her neighbor might be linked to a killing. We’re on uncertain footing here, with pressure coming from all sides and the tranquility of an affluent Massachusetts sleeper town showing cracks along the seams. Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys (Random House) Strout is the ultimate observer of small-town New England life, bringing its subtleties and tragedies out with a hardened poetry. In The Burgess Boys, likely her most ‘noir’ work, we’re in a Maine town, where two brothers have been called home. They left years before, after their father’s death, and both went to New York to practice law. Now their sister needs them: her son has been implicated in a devastating crime. The complex family and community dynamics play out against a backdrop of the tough northern life and the people who carve out a living there. Dennis Lehane, Mystic River (William Morrow) Any number of Lehane novels might well claim a place on this list: Shutter Island (2003) is a perfect gothic thriller, A Drink Before the War (1994) launched the Kenzie and Gennaro series, a defining private eye series that would run over the course of six novels. But for my money, Mystic River is Lehane’s masterpiece, a slow-burn investigation into the depths of human suffering, bottled up over time and memory in the confines of an isolated Boston neighborhood. Chris Bohjalian, Midwives (Vintage) New England loves a good moral crisis that emanates from an intimate predicament and soon becomes the obsession of an increasingly fervent small-town mob of moralizers. In Bohjalian’s rendering, a midwife in a small Vermont village is forced to perform an emergency procedure on a dead mother in a last-ditch attempt to save a baby: only later, it’s called into question whether the mother was really dead in the critical moment. The aftermath turns into public bloodsport, as the midwife herself wrestles with memory and conscience. Bohjalian’s novels are hugely popular, with good reason: he has a deft touch with the nuances of human frailty and quiet pain. Donna Tartt, The Secret History (Vintage) No list of New England Noir could be complete with Tartt’s twisted vision of cloistered university life and privileged students experimenting with some very dangerous games. Many writers have tried to recapture the magic of The Secret History, but it’s impossible to beat Tartt’s strange, heady memorial of those wildly impressionable days and the unexpected cruelties of that hothouse atmosphere. Maybe the story would have worked at a university just about anywhere, but somehow this one feels distinctly of the region. Robert B. Parker, Promised Land (Dell) In an era when the crime novel was spreading outside traditional locales (for several decades, the genre mostly orbited around L.A. and New York), Robert B. Parker’s Boston-based Spenser series was a notable success and put Boston firmly on the map. The novels now read as period pieces, and Promised Land is no exception, with its militant feminists and digressions on Massachusetts race politics, but it’s also a vivid snapshot of the era and a highly engaging private eye novel, with side trips to the cocktail lounges of 1970’s Cape Cod and the introduction of Hawk, a series mainstay who would go onto become one of the genre’s most beloved characters. George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Picador) Although Higgins was never particularly enamored of crime fiction, or of being included in the category, he wrote what is, in all likelihood, New England’s best entry in the genre, a tough and dizzying story about a small-time arms dealer trying to navigate conscience and strategy as he hopes to evade an upcoming jail term by cooperating with an ATF agent and informing on a local gang of bank robbers. Higgins delivers the story mostly through a series of conversations. It was an aesthetic decision, but one that also makes the story somehow hypnotic, as we get brought deeper and deeper into this odyssey through the region’s underworld, in its own terms. ___________________________ Dwyer Murphy’s The Stolen Coast is available now from Viking Books. View the full article

As a guy who loves mysteries, thrillers, and horror, my favorite types of books are the ones that crisscross genres, mixing classic thriller stories with supernatural elements that, in my mind, elevate the novel to a whole new level of delicious mayhem. I enjoy those slipstream / cross-genre books so much that when I wrote my debut novel, A Child Alone with Strangers, I specifically wanted to create a book that mashed together all my favorite genres into one gonzo opus. To that end, I thought it would be fun to share ten of my favorite novels that meld supernatural horror with awesome mysteries and breakneck thrillers. Ready? Buckled in? Good. Let’s do it. Ronald Malfi, Come With Me Malfi might just be the king of crossing between classic thrillers and supernatural horror. Come with Me is a perfect example, in which a man is searching for his wife and the plot twists in ways readers won’t see coming. Also check out Bone White, Floating Staircase… hell, just read them all. Lauren Beukes, Broken Monsters Beukes is another writer who is masterful at blending the thriller genre with supernatural forces. Her novel, The Shining Girls, could easily be the pick here, but Broken Monsters is so totally batshit I decided on that being the headliner. Alex North, The Whisper Man The Whisper Man is one of those mystery/thrillers that relies on the supernatural as misdirection in such a way that it ratchets up the suspense and broadens the possibilities of what’s really going on behind a multi-generational series of grisly murders. Killers whisper at windows, imaginary friends play psychological havoc, and there might just be a ghost or two. A knockout classic that perfectly blurs the line between reality and the imaginary. Riley Sager, Home Before Dark Sager is another modern master of blending classic horror tropes with plot-driven mysteries. In Home Before Dark, he tosses haunted houses into the thriller blender to create a unique tale that keeps the reader guessing at what’s real and what’s from realms beyond our normal, every-day experience. Much like Malfi, you could throw multiple titles by Sager into this spot, but Dark is the one that leans the heaviest on supernatural elements playing into a classic murder mystery. Laird Barron, Worse Angels Barron’s Coleridge trilogy (Blood Standard, Black Mountain, Worse Angels) begins as a somewhat traditional crime thriller episodic, with an ex-mafia enforcer looking to restart his life as a civilian. But by the third book Barron has infused his storylines with monsters and mayhem to such an extent that the lines between traditional thriller and straight-up horror are properly demolished. A wonderful trilogy of novels by a generational master of the macabre. Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts Released almost a decade ago, Tremblay’s debut horror novel (he’d published two crime novels previously) became an instant classic of the genre and single-handedly rejuvenated the concept of “ambiguous horror”, leaving it up to the reader to decide what’s supernatural and what’s simply a very dark, twisted reality. One could argue this is straight horror, but in my mind it’s much more of a family drama wrapped within a mystery that keeps the reader guessing as to where the darkness in the story truly lies. Sarah Pinborough, Behind Her Eyes What happens when you combine the fast-paced structure of Gone Girl with a spirit-swapping supernatural horror story? You get Behind Her Eyes, a major leap for Pinborough who went fully mainstream with her body-swapping tale of murder and betrayal. C.J. Tudor, The Burning Girls Tudor is probably best known for her smash debut novel, The Chalk Man, and an argument could be made that her first novel also played at the fringes of supernatural events while solving a decades-old murder mystery. But it’s her novel The Burning Girls that goes full ghost, including strange visions and a small town that could very well be haunted. A thriller that expands deftly into horror without losing its way. Stephen King, End of Watch Obviously, King is known almost exclusively as a horror writer, but with his Mr. Mercedes trilogy he showed that he can write a crime thriller with the best of them. It wasn’t until the third book of that series, however, that King could no longer restrain himself and allowed his villains to breakthrough into some serious paranormal territory. Psychic abilities? Body swapping? Check. Check. Hey, he got two-thirds of the way through the trilogy before letting the supernatural slip into the plot. Not too shabby. J. Todd Scott, The Flock Crime writer J. Todd Scott (The Chris Cherry trilogy, Lost River) entered new territory with his novel, The Flock, which incorporates bizarre elements involving mystic cults, the apocalypse, and borderline paranormal elements surrounding the weather and the unusual deaths of thousands of birds to create an intriguing, multi-layered thriller. Readers will be kept on their toes as they wade through action-packed chase sequences, epistolary clues in the form of coroner reports and news articles, and (quite possibly) the end of the world, all wrapped-up together in this taut, electrifying genre-mashup. *** View the full article

I have described my new novel Lowdown Road (out July 11 from Hard Case Crime) as the ‘70s drive-in movie playing in my mind. In telling the story of cousins Chuck and Dean Melville and their ill-fated marijuana run from Texas to Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon event, I draw on a deep well of Americana from the not-so-distant past. For those too young to remember, there was a time before movies lived on streaming services following a fleeting theatrical release (or none at all). In the early ‘70s, the theater was the only place to see a movie until it turned up on television years later. Films would hang around for months in their first run, and many would resurface later as part of a drive-in double bill. But the drive-in wasn’t exclusively the home of recycled Hollywood hits; American independents were churning out exploitation films specifically geared for rural, often Southern, audiences. Very often, these “hixploitation” flicks shared a handful of ingredients: fast cars, good ol’ boys gone bad, the Daisy Dukes-clad women who love them, and the redneck sheriffs determined to catch them. Some of these movies featured just enough excitement to fill a two-minute trailer, while others toyed with the formula enough to be memorable. The year 1974 was a particularly fertile one for this type of entertainment. Though it boasts name actors in Peter Fonda, Susan George, and Vic Morrow, the true stars of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry are the vehicles, in particular the 1969 Dodge Charger our outlaw anti-heroes use to flee the cops after extorting $150,000 from a supermarket manager. The film has little going for it besides automotive mayhem; the script is mostly witless banter as Fonda and George exchange insults that sound like placeholders for the real dialogue that was never written. Its most memorable moments come in the last reel. Those who recall how Morrow met his end on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie will find the scene in which he rides shotgun in a dangerously low-flying helicopter more than a little queasy-making, while the nihilistic final shot feels like the hammer coming down on whatever remains of the ‘60s counterculture. A much more polished outing the same vein, The Sugarland Express suggests an alternate path for ‘70s cinema had its director stuck with the highway-bound thrills of this film and the TV-movie that preceded it, Duel, rather than inventing the modern blockbuster with Jaws. Goldie Hawn and William Atherton star as the Poplins, an outlaw couple who take a patrol officer hostage as they race across Texas to spring their child from foster care. Spielberg populates the movie with authentic Lone Star faces and locations and wrings a great deal of humor out of the premise before things turn dark in the end. He subverts the expectations of a chase picture as the pursuit turns into a slow crawl toward its final destination. The independently made Macon County Line is probably best remembered for turning The Beverly Hillbillies’ lovable chucklehead Jethro Bodine (co-writer/producer/actor Max Baer Jr.) into a malevolent redneck sheriff bent on misguided revenge. What’s fascinating about it is that this plot doesn’t emerge until the last 30 minutes of the film. For its first hour, Macon County is a hangout movie paced like an old man sipping iced tea on the porch on a hot summer day in Georgia. Brothers Chris and Wayne Dixon (played by real-life siblings Alan and Jesse Vint) are joyriding around the 1950s south before returning to military service. They pick up pretty blonde hitchhiker Jenny (Cheryl Waters), but their car breaks down in a backwater town where they meet the acquaintance of Sheriff Reed Morgan (Baer). Menace slowly seeps into the movie. Morgan seems genial enough at first, but the mask keeps slipping. He’s not happy that his son has started playing with black kids after school. He harasses Jenny and the Dixons at the gas station where they stop for repairs, seemingly for no other reason than that they’re from somewhere else and he’s bored with maintaining law and order in his sleepy town. But that town gets a wake-up call when two real criminals tear up the highway, and when Morgan’s wife is raped and murdered, the sheriff assumes the innocents he pushed around earlier are to blame. This supposedly true story (as so often in these cases, it’s not) becomes a horror movie in its final minutes, building to what must have been a shock ending at the time, but feels inevitable now. By the year of our nation’s Bicentennial, the good ol’ boy formula was well-worn enough to deserve a feminist rebuttal. The Great Texas Dynamite Chase is right up there with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the annals of “Texas-based film titles that tell you exactly what you’re going to get.” Two young women go on a crime spree, robbing banks across the Lone Star state with sticks of dynamite. By the time they pick up a denim-clad boy-toy, you may be thinking this all seems familiar, and indeed you wouldn’t be the first to notice the similarities to the later, slightly higher-budgeted movie Thelma and Louise. Dynamite Chase doesn’t boast the star power of that film, but it does have secret weapon Claudia Jennings, the queen of the hick flicks, who tragically died in a car accident just a few years later. The hixploitation trend reached its apex the following year with the release of Smokey and the Bandit, a movie that transcended its drive-in roots by becoming the second highest-grossing movie of 1977, right behind Star Wars. Technically Smokey qualifies as a crime movie, even if the transportation of Coors beer from Texas to Georgia is the lowest stakes crime imaginable. (It was illegal at the time!) It’s all played for laughs, with Jackie Gleason transforming the menacing redneck sheriff into a blustery figure of fun with toilet paper stuck to his shoe, and thanks to the chemistry of the cast, it still goes down easy all these years later. (The less said about the sequels, the better.) For a time during the pandemic, a drive-in movie comeback seemed plausible, but now we find ourselves in a world where automotive mayhem on the big screen is the domain of the billion-dollar Fast and the Furious franchise, not disreputable, scrappy independents. The good news is that most of these cheap thrills of yesteryear can be found on anything-goes streaming services like Tubi. The drive-in has come home, which isn’t entirely a bad thing. Have you seen the price of gas lately? * View the full article

There’s a region touching on three areas of fiction that I like to explore when writing. It’s the region where mystery story meets horror story meets psychological thriller. You can play with a lot of ambiguity in this zone. Does an odd and creepy situation connected to a crime have a rational explanation, or will the final revelation involve the supernatural? If the narrative is told in the first person, how reliable is the narrator? How much of what we are told is supposed to be real and how much has been distorted, if not outright imagined, by this central character? My new novel, The Screaming Child, is a first-person tale told by a woman trying to go on with her life after her 12-year-old son has vanished. Perhaps he was abducted, perhaps murdered. When she moves out of the city to a rural location to make an effort at recovery, she hears what she thinks are her child’s screams coming from the nearby forest. Her explorations begin, leading her toward a certain discovery. That is, of course, if we can trust what she is telling us… Here are some books that influenced The Screaming Child, works that all to one degree or another straddle the area where mystery, horror, and psychological distress meet. Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz (1921) It’s Vienna, 1909, and on a September night, a narrator named Baron von Yosch is invited to the house of famous actor Eugene Bischoff. The gathering starts well, with several guests in attendance, but it ends tragically when Bischoff, alone for a moment in his garden pavilion, shoots himself. It appears that his death is a suicide, but some there suspect the Baron drove Bischoff to it somehow. Bischoff’s wife was once the Baron’s lover, and before Bischoff died, the guests rushed to the garden and saw Bischoff give the Baron a hate-filled look. Some there even think the Baron murdered Bischoff. Not pleased to be under a cloud of suspicion, the Baron decides to investigate why Bischoff took his own life, and soon enough he is wondering whether two cases of suicide that Bischoff talked about just before he shot himself are linked to his death. There is also the question of a phone conversation the Baron has at Bischoff’s house after the suicide. The Baron picks up the phone when it rings, and his puzzling talk with a woman on the line ends with her bringing up “the Day of Judgment”. What is she talking about, especially in light of the fact that the last words ever spoken by Bischoff, as he lay dying, were “the Day of Judgment”? Leo Perutz’s novel blends the bizarre with Agatha Christie-like plotting. It charts a series of mysterious deaths – apparent suicides – and throughout it has a macabre atmosphere. Dread and suspense continually build, and the search for an explanation leads in a direction that no one involved in the deadly events could have foreseen. The solution to the series of locked room deaths is ingenious, and more on the rational side than not, but a final postscript muddies the waters in a fascinating way and leaves the reader wondering what precisely did happen. And were otherworldly forces, decidedly beyond the merely natural, in any way responsible? Leo Perutz is a writer who had a successful literary career but who is all too little known today. Still, people as different as Graham Greene, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ian Fleming expressed admiration for his work. Jorge Luis Borges listed Master of the Day of Judgment among his favorite mysteries, while the horror writer and anthologist Karl Edward Wagner put this work on his 13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror novels list. There you have it. Borges saw Perutz’s book as belonging to one genre, Wagner to another – an indication of how the book straddles genre lines. And though the story, as I said, does have a detailed explanation at its climax, that explanation does not provide any feeling of comfort. Into a world of order comes fear and disruption, but at the conclusion, is any sense of order restored? As the Kirkus review for a 1994 reissue of the book said, “The identity of the Master provides a solution that, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is more disturbing than the mystery itself.” The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (1936) “In life there are wounds that, like leprosy, silently scrape at and consume the soul, in solitude…” So begins the novel considered among the greatest in 20th century Iranian fiction. The narrator is an utterly isolated soul, who tells us that he “came to this understanding that there existed a dreadful chasm between myself and others”. Despite his alienation, he feels an intense desire to recount his story. He wants to write his story if “only to introduce myself to my shadow – a bent shadow on the wall, and it is as if the more I write, it devours it with an even greater appetite – It is for him that I wish to carry out an experiment: to see if we can come to know each other better – because from the time that I cut myself off from others, I have wanted to know myself better.” With the mention of his shadow, the psychic division within himself, the motifs of doubling and repetition are established, and the nameless narrator then embarks on a tale replete with mirrors, reflections, and twins. There are dead bodies that appear alive and live people who look dead. Raised by an aunt, the narrator as a baby shares a wetnurse with his aunt’s daughter, and when he gets older, he marries his cousin because she looks like her mother, the aunt he loved. But did he ever truly love his wife? He describes how she carries on frequent affairs and won’t let him touch her, but should we be surprised? We get intimations he may have forced himself on her to make her family accept a wedding between them. Over and over he says he hates her, but he alternates these outbursts with descriptions of the times he has endured humiliation in his displays of love for her. His jealousy and sexual frustration are obvious, but is what he says about her accurate? Did he, at some point in his past, stab her to death, whereupon all his hair turned white? And what about the entrancing woman he once met, whose loss he mourns. She provided a ray of hope for him in his wretched existence, but when she came uninvited to his room and lay down in his bed, he found after touching her that she’d turned cold, a sudden corpse. I think you get the picture. Sadegh Hedayat’s narrator is a tormented and perverse human being. His obsession with death and ever spiraling paranoia, to say nothing of his liking for wine and opium, bring to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators. Hedayat read and admired Poe, and when his narrator says that the shadow he is writing for resembles an owl, a pitiless owl, you cannot help but think of Poe’s tormenting raven in the poem. The owl may represent wisdom in the West, but in Iran it has often been associated with bad omens. Born in 1903, Sadegh Hedayat committed suicide in 1951 while in France. His birthplace was Tehran, and he spent time in India. The Blind Owl is set in Iran and India, but this is one of those novels whose terrain is overwhelmingly psychological. While part one recounts what seems to have been an upsetting vision the narrator had, part two explains, at least in part, where the narrator’s obsessions come from. But you are inside his mind the whole time, and dream and memory, hallucination and reality, past and present, all ooze into one another. Images and motifs recur in different forms, giving everything a nightmarish quality. Two gaunt, black horses keep showing up with hollow coughs, and people everywhere have grating laughs to set a person’s hair on end. Blue morning glories get damaged, dried blood won’t wash off human bodies, old men have no eyelids, and lips that are kissed – it doesn’t matter whose – taste like the “stub-end of a cucumber”. This is a delirious book with a most unreliable narrator, pitch-black and scary, a howl from the heart, but if you like darkness in your novels, it’s irresistible. Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier (1971) Parents who have recently lost a young daughter, a blind clairvoyant, Venice as a place of both beauty and foreboding, a series of murders committed in the city’s twisting alleyways – this novella fuses mystery and the occult and psychological unease beautifully. It’s also a probing look at a marriage and how a husband and wife who love each other struggle in their different ways with the worst kind of grief a parent can have. While Laura, the wife, responds positively to the clairvoyant’s claim that she saw their dead daughter’s spirit sitting between her parents at a café table, John rejects all notions of ghosts, benign or otherwise. Without saying so outright, he views his wife’s acceptance of such things as magical thinking. Laura is open to what you might call supernatural phenomena, John closed, but as Du Maurier’s story progresses, it seems as if the one who may have second sight is John. He sees things he can’t explain, but since he doesn’t understand the ability he has, he gets confused. “My eyes deceived me,” he says, when tying to explain to the police why he told them something inaccurate. And his eyes will continue to fool him. Mourning produces unusual mindsets, but a committed rationalist like John doesn’t trust the perceptions that are new to him, apparently unlocked by his daughter’s death. It’s this misperception that leads him to his final doom, making him think he can rescue a child when in fact he’s pursuing a malevolent adult. In her short stories particularly, Daphne du Maurier excelled at producing horror-tinged fiction. She’s adept at creating and holding tension, and as author Patrick McGrath writes, she often demands that readers “devise for ourselves explanations for the uncanny events she describes.” We share the sense of disorientation her characters feel, and in Don’t Look Now, like John, we realize only at the very end what exactly has been unfolding and the meaning of the odd vision he had. Du Maurier, by the way, liked and approved of Nicholas Roeg’s film adaptation of her story. Despite a few changes and additions, the film overall is quite faithful to what Du Maurier wrote. Don’t Look Now, the film, is among the greatest horror films of all time, but if you like the movie and haven’t read the story, you should. It’s a gem. Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg (1978) The word “uncanny” gets thrown around a lot when people talk about stories that have weird events. A definition of the word I like comes from writer/philosopher/historian Tristan Todorov, who wrote an excellent book on the subject called Introduction a la literature fantastique. Published in English as The Fantastic (1973), the book describes a difference between two types of the fantastic in fiction. Each type has specific characteristics. One, Todorov calls the “uncanny”, but the other he labels “the marvelous”. An “uncanny” story would be one where seemingly remarkable or inexplicable phenomena have a rational explanation by the end. The reader may think the supernatural is in play in the story, but it’s really not. Conan Doyle’s glowing hound stalking the moors is not, finally, a hound from hell but a dog covered partly in phosphorus. Master of the Day of Judgment, though it has ambiguity, leans in the direction of the “uncanny”, too. By contrast, the “marvelous” resolves unexplainable phenomena with some degree of the non-rational or supernatural, as in, let’s say, Rosemary’s Baby. A prime example of the “marvelous” intruding, so to speak, into a mystery novel is William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, which wonderfully fuses a Raymond Chandler-style hardboiled tale about a private eye on a case with an all-out horror component involving voodoo, black magic, and the devil. The book is structured in such a way that final proof of supernatural manipulation is not revealed until the denouement, but clues about what is actually going on have been planted all along. The reader looking for a classic mystery solution will be disappointed or say “not fair”, but if a reader accepts the book’s premise that the devil was in on things from the start, then everything in the narrative hangs together. The book is airtight. What seemed to be proceeding according to the rules of one genre winds up adhering to the operating procedure of another genre. It’s striking how, through the use of the supernatural, Hjortsberg ties his novel to the original detective story, Oedipus Rex. His private eye, Harry Angel, undertakes an investigation that serves as a quest to understand himself. He’s no king, just a low rent PI working for The Crossroads Detective Agency, but like Oedipus Rex, who sealed his fate at a crossroads, Harry’s search leads to a devastating revelation. Investigator and criminal turn out to be one and the same. What the Greeks ascribed to Fate, Hjortsberg depicts as the devil. With Fate, you can make no deals. With the devil, you should never make a deal because once you do, you can’t get out of it. And if either of them has it in for you, Fate or the devil, you’re destroyed. Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (2014) The Spanish title of this novel is Distancia de rescate, which literally means “rescue distance”. This is something that Amanda, the mother of a young daughter named Nina, constantly broods over. It has to do with the ever-present distance a mother is aware of in relation to her child and the possible dangers that could strike her child. How quickly could the mother cover that distance to her child if danger struck? And if she could cover it fast, would that change anything? Would she be able to “save” her child from danger? If this sounds like the thinking of a dangerously overprotective parent, it’s not; the world Schweblin’s characters inhabit is rife with hazards, especially of the environmental kind. The book takes place in rural Argentina, where pesticide-heavy farming has gone on, and what becomes clear is that children in the region have been poisoned, and forever altered, by toxins they ingested from a stream. There’s more, including a supernatural element that might involve the transference of souls, but this is a novel where the less said about the plot, the better. Though it’s a horror story, with much mystery and many surprises, the book above all conveys shifting emotional and psychological states, and it does so without using the conventional rules of horror or mystery fiction. As Jia Tolentino says perfectly in a New Yorker piece, the “genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether.” It’s a dialogue-driven novel, but the voices filling it come from the void. They are ghostly and haunted but eerily calm and spare. As you turn the pages, you feel increasing apprehension, and Schweblin offers no respite from the dread because this is a 180 or so page novel that has not a single pause or chapter break. Nightmares don’t come in discrete sections to give a person sleeping restful intermissions, and neither does this book. One last comment about Fever Dream: in an interview with Schweblin I read, she expresses an enthusiasm for novellas, a love I share. She says that novellas “are so intense and accurate and precise. I have the feeling that if you write a novella, your main wish is that the reader is going to read it in the two or three hours it would take, without even going to the kitchen to get a glass of water.” I didn’t get up for a glass of water, or anything else, when I read Fever Dream, finishing it in one three-hour sitting, and I think she’s dead-on about short books and what, ideally, you’re trying to accomplish when you write one. * Featured image: Harry Clarke, Poe illustrations View the full article

It is not the greatest moment in Hitchcock’s Suspicion but it’s a good one: when Joan Fontaine fends off Cary Grant as their car skirts dangerously close to the edge of a cliff. We watch in horror to see what happens next. That deadly stretch of road with its jagged drop to the sea, the reckless speed at which Johnnie is driving and Lina’s terrified conviction that he is a killer add up nicely enough on their own, without our suspicion that Hitch was rooting for an ending where Johnnie pushes her out. Suspicion is based on Before the Fact, an English novel by Anthony Berkeley Cox writing under the pen name Francis Iles. The novel has an ending far closer to Hitchcock’s preference but no hair-raising race along a razor-blade of a road between dry land and deep water. Rather the novel’s ending plays out at the lethal threshold between Lina’s love for Johnnie and her urge towards self-sacrifice – a liminal space of another, less literal kind. Within a genre that relishes grey areas and tipping points, it is perhaps not surprising that crime novels so often use cliffs, coasts and liminal spaces to explore what drives us, or might drive us, over the edge. There is of course Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, where eight people receive mysterious invitations to a small, isolated island where they take turns to fall prey to a killer. The shore and sea play important parts in the story, and are among the first things that spring to mind when recalling the plot. Rebecca is perhaps the most famous thriller set beside a sea where mists roll in, boats are beached and waves threaten almost hourly to reveal the deadliest of secrets. There are other crime novels too where the threshold between land and water is used to great effect, luring us closer even as we suspect danger lies ahead. In Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith, cuckolded husband Vic Van Allen starts a rumour that he may have murdered a man. The rumour becomes a daydream and the daydream becomes a plot to carry out just such a murder. Having successfully despatched one enemy in a swimming pool, he advances to a second murder, throwing his wife’s new lover from a cliff before weighing his body and hiding it in water. None of the tension sits on the surface here, yet the whole story ripples with it. Highsmith traps us in the undercurrent of what some call ‘evil’, drawing us further into her nightmare and towards a conclusion that’s unguessable yet entirely convincing—the only conclusion in fact which we would accept. In Your Blue-Eyed Boy by Helen Dunmore, 39-year-old Simone is fending off bankruptcy, finding her feet as a local magistrate and trying to keep her family safe from blackmail. Much of this battle is fought in bleak marshland where bodies have been lured and lost for centuries. The blackmail has the effect of pulling Simone back to summers spent near very different water, in a small New England coastal town. Caught between her past and present, with the danger inching ever closer, Simone must navigate dark waters in order to survive. The Night Season by Chelsea Cain pits her protagonists Archie and Susan against a backdrop of rising floodwaters and deadly toxins wielded by an ingenious psychopath. The setting itself is a masterclass in how to establish suspense by using landscape and natural disaster: permanent dusk, steamy streets, falling rain and rising floods. Add to this the spectacle of a derelict fairground and – best of all – a flooded aquarium, and you may never look at water the same way again. In Serenade by James M. Cain when his cast are cut off by floodwaters, the novel takes a sudden turn towards danger. From bullfighters and brothels in Tupinamba via a cafe-bordello in Acapulco, John Howard Sharp and Juana seem destined to inhabit dry desert settings until a storm breaks and rising water traps them in a Catholic church where, drunk on sacramental wine, they desecrate the shelter in unforgettable ways. The fact that this noir, surely Cain’s greatest, is fraught with suppressed homosexuality, makes the metaphors of both desert and irrepressible water all the more effective. In two fantastic novels by Mo Hayder, Ritual and Skin, her central character is a police diver who is sent more than once into the murky depths of Bristol’s harbour where all manner of strangeness lurks. There is undoubtedly something about bodies of water and what they hide that fascinates crime writers and readers alike. Laura Lippman’s Sunburn is another noir where water creates a tipping point for the story’s plot. A trip to the beach at Ocean City provides Polly with an opportunity to flee her brutish husband and catch a ride to a small town in Delaware. Belleville represents the threshold between city and coast: ‘it’s like this whole town was put together from someone else’s leftovers’. It is a place that draws people with problems, too. A place where, we suspect, a thousand stories are stewing under the surface. The seaside at the heart of Brighton Rock by Graham Greene is a place where people go for a day rather than live for a lifetime. A place of holidaymakers, secret liaisons and escapes from reality, often marked by outbursts of passion or violence; kiss me quick slides into kill me quick, to a soundtrack of drunken fairground music; over-sugared, sunburnt, deadly. Those who plan to escape more scrupulously might like to make for Greece or the islands nearby. Just look out for hapless egotistical holidaymakers who can’t see the noose in front of their own neck, such as Paul in Sabine Durrant’s Lie With Me. A reminder that no man is an island but, should he find himself on one, he might wish he’d been better at making friends. One final noir, then, where the liminal space is laid out in the opening sentence: ‘It was good standing there on the promontory overlooking the evening sea, the fog lifting itself like gauzy veils to touch his face.’ When Dix Steele finds himself In A Lonely Place, his dreamlike awareness of the ‘dark restless waters’ and ‘pale waste of sand’ persuade readers of Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel that something is very wrong with her protagonist, long before the action unfolds. It is as if in this moment spent contemplating the threshold between land and sea, her disturbed anti-hero discovers himself on the brink of an awkward and incomplete self-awareness which will make what follows all the more monstrous. * View the full article

“Wherever there is human nature, there is drama.” –Hercule Poirot in “The King of Clubs,” by Agatha Christie I often think of murder mysteries and magic tricks as complementary art forms. Both feature a “performer” attempting to bamboozle an audience via elaborate methods of good-natured deception. That has been my underlying principle when writing my first two books, Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel. In fact, The Murder Wheel is mainly set backstage in a fictional London theatre – the Pomegranate. I love the theatre in all its myriad forms, from the classical to the commercial to the experimental, so I suppose you could say it’s my second great passion (after the Golden Age locked-room mystery). With that in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why exactly the theatre is such fertile ground for crime writers. I believe there are several practical reasons, not least of which is the fact that the setting offers an unlikely collection of characters and personality clashes under one roof, which lends itself neatly to creating a closed circle of suspects. But the theatre is also a place of high passions, not to mention deception and intrigue. Whatever the rationale behind it, though, there’s no getting away from the fact that theatre and mystery go hand in hand. Just look at Agatha Christie, who remains the best-selling crime writer in history. As well as several titles taken from Shakespeare (Sad Cypress, Taken at the Flood, By the Pricking of my Thumbs, plus the pseudonymous romance novel Absent in the Spring), many of the Bard’s favourite themes are also present in her work: revenge, witchcraft, and disguise, to name a few. Likewise thespians and other “theatrical types” take frequent prominent roles; case in point Poirot’s chum Sir Charles Cartwright in Three Act Tragedy (1934), and Jane Wilkinson in Lord Edgeware Dies (1933). But this sense of theatricality not only informs the style and characterisation of Christie’s work, but also in many cases the plots. Impersonation and mistaken identity, for instance, are often employed as part of ingenious murder schemes; in some cases even gender-bending akin to Twelfth Night or As You Like It. And of course Christie was also a playwright herself; her drama The Mousetrap remains to this day the longest-running theatrical production of any kind in the world, and has been playing for over seventy years in London’s West End. Ultimately a rather conventional whodunit, the play has nonetheless attained mythic status thanks to its unprecedented longevity. This is reflected in the recent cinematic outing See How They Run, a comic caper with charming performances from Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan, which sees a murder mystery unfolding backstage during the first London production of the play. Though ultimately unsuccessful as a mystery, the film nonetheless has its charms – not least of which is the obvious affection for Christie’s play and for the Golden Age conventions of the crime genre. But what exactly are the direct correlations between mystery and theatre as art forms? W.H. Auden’s famous essay “The Guilty Vicarage” draws a clear comparison between the murder mystery and the classical Greek tragedy, as defined in Aristotle’s Poetics. Both, says Auden, are narratives of concealment (i.e. the concealment of a murderer’s identity) and manifestation (i.e. the eventual identification of the culprit). Peripeteia connotes a reversal of fortune, a drastic or ironic change in circumstances; effectively a shift in narrative direction, or a “plot twist,” which is such a vital element of crime fiction. Auden defines it in a crime fiction context thus: “a double reversal from apparent guilt to innocence and from apparent innocence to guilt.” Another key Aristotelian dramatic principle is anagnorisis, a term referring to a moment of realisation; of a character comprehending the “true nature” of something. Consider Othello’s final, dreadful understanding of Iago’s betrayal, and the realisation that he has murdered the blameless Desdemona for nothing. The dramatic impetus in such a scene has much in common with, for example, the denouement of a conventional Golden Age country house mystery, wherein the suspects are gathered and the solution to the puzzle at long last revealed. Broadly speaking, the two disparate forms of literature actually follow similar emotional and thematic trajectories. But the comparisons don’t end there. It’s also worth looking at the archetypal Golden Age mystery narrative through the lens of Brechtian dramatic theory. Bertolt Brecht, unquestionably one of the most influential dramatists of the 20th century, used so-called “distancing effects” to defamiliarize the stock characters of classical drama. The intention was to encourage a more active intellectual engagement from audiences, not allowing them to fall back on old conventions and stereotypes. Golden Age mystery fiction also plays with the notion of stock characters, with certain recurring “types” who are readily recognisable to the eagle-eyed reader. The eccentric aunt, for instance, or the absent-minded clergyman. However, the knowledge of a killer hiding among them places the reader in a similar defamiliarized position to Brecht’s audiences: we are encouraged to question our preconceptions, to scrutinize the mannerisms and behaviours we might otherwise have taken for granted. In short, to question everything. This notion of active engagement on the part of the audience is particularly prevalent in the works of Ellery Queen. Queen novels frequently present a “Challenge to the Reader,” designed to encourage reader participation in the unravelling of the puzzle. Such direct appeals from author signify a breaking down of traditional narrative boundaries, as well as an acute sense of self-awareness that borders on metafiction. Taking this notion further, classic mysteries often feature discourses on the nature of the mystery as a literary form, further demonstrating that self-awareness which is inherent in the Brechtian model. Take for instance the immortal moment in John Dickson Carr’s magnificent The Hollow Man (1935; titled The Three Coffins in America) where the sleuth, Dr. Gideon Fell, declares: “we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not.” Perhaps all of this goes some way toward explaining the appeal of the theatrical milieu as a setting in classic crime fiction. Other notable examples from the height of the Golden Age include Michael Innes’s Hamlet, Revenge! (1937), a brilliant early entry in his John Appleby series. Interestingly, one of the book’s most unlikely legacies was the name “Edmund Crispin,” which was appropriated by Innes aficionado Robert Bruce Montgomery for his own mystery writing career. Under the Crispin name, Montgomery wrote several excellent mysteries, many of which are themselves highly theatrical – almost farcical – in their construction. The first is The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), the title of which is an allusion to King Lear, which sees a theatrical company in wartime Oxford dogged by murder. Another overtly stagy Crispin novel is Love Lies Bleeding (1948), which is set close to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, and features a previously lost Shakespeare manuscript as the catalyst for a murder plot. Other excellent examples include Christianna Brand’s Death of Jezebel (1949), which uses the stage as a setting for an impossible crime, with the murder committed in full view of an audience. The book is a remarkable achievement which has (thankfully) been reissued here in the UK as part of the remarkably successful British Library Crime Classics series. Then there is Derek Smith, a considerably more obscure name, whose Come to Paddington Fair (written circa 1950s, unpublished in English until 2015) also features a murder committed in front of an audience. Smith is a woefully underappreciated plotsmith, and Come to Paddington Fair deserves a much wider audience – not least for its artful evocation of the backstage melodrama which presages the murder. Moving forward in time, P.D. James is another towering figure of British crime to engage with the theatrical in her work. Featuring her private detective character Cordelia Gray, The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) takes its name from a line by T.S. Eliot, who was describing the bloodthirsty preoccupations of Jacobean dramatist John Webster. The novel sees Gray drawn into the lives of Sir George Ralston and his enigmatic wife Clarissa Lisle, an ageing actress who is about to take on the lead role in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Although published in 1982, this novel is James at her most Christie-like. Here, the theatrical milieu provides a sense of both timelessness and nostalgia that belie the psychological preoccupations that take precedence elsewhere in her work. More comic in tone are Simon Brett’s novels featuring the actor-turned-detective Charles Paris. The first, Cast In Order of Disappearance (1975), is glorious fun, and finds Charles adopting an unlikely disguise in pursuit of the murderer of a hated theatrical tycoon. This highly entertaining series has been successfully adapted into a number of BBC radio dramas featuring the brilliant (and Oscar-nominated) Bill Nighy, who utterly embodies the dry wit and world-weariness of Charles. Of course, the theatrical mystery is certainly not unique to the British Isles. Indeed, I couldn’t discuss them without at least mentioning Ngaio Marsh. Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, Marsh would go on to achieve global fame for her long-running series of murder mysteries featuring the suave, erudite sleuth Roderick Alleyn – his surname borrowed from Elizabethan actor Edward “Ned” Alleyn. Of the 33 Alleyn mysteries, a disproportionate number feature theatrical settings, actors, playwrights and allusions to the Bard. Indeed, it could be argued that every one of them carries a sense of theatricality in its style and execution. That’s because Marsh was herself an actor, director and impresario who rejuvenated the theatre industry in New Zealand virtually single-handed. The second of the Alleyn mysteries, Enter a Murderer (1935), sets out her stall nicely: it features the now-hoary gambit of the prop gun replaced by a real one, leading to the death of an actor mid-performance. Other notable examples include Death at the Dolphin (1966), the “Dolphin” being a renovated London theatre which houses a rather unusual McGuffin: a glove which supposedly belonged to Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet. Unlike her contemporary Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh’s powers never waned. Her later novels remain as strong as the early ones – in some cases, stronger. And her very last, Light Thickens (published in 1982, long after the end of the “Golden Age”), is as brilliant a book as any she wrote. It takes us back to the Dolphin Theatre, and to an ill-fated production of Macbeth. Here, Marsh’s passion for the theatre positively springs from the page, as does her canniness as a plotter. It is a perfect swansong. And there are plenty of theatrical escapades to be found in the United States, too. The very first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), is set in a Broadway theatre, and sees a murder committed not onstage this time but in the audience. Though the novel leaves something to be desired in its prose style (which is far too reminiscent of the worst excesses of S.S. Van Dine), its plot is top-notch, and shows considerable promise of the greatness that the series would attain during its lengthy duration. The “Ellery Queen” duo, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, also wrote a quartet of stagy mysteries under the pseudonym “Barnaby Ross.” Like the Queen novels, these are all based in and around NYC, and feature the retired actor Drury Lane in the role of amateur sleuth and master of disguise. The four books are all of a very high standard, with The Tragedy of Y (1932) a particular standout, but I believe the final work – Drury Lane’s Last Case (1933) – to be of particular interest because, like the aforementioned Crispin novel, it also deals with an investigation into a supposedly lost Shakespeare play. In the mould of Ellery Queen, “Patrick Quentin” was another pseudonym employed by multiple writers. The most long-standing of these was Hugh Wheeler, whose hand in co-writing the Peter Duluth mysteries under the P.Q. moniker saw frequent fictional forays into the world of Broadway theatre, with Puzzle for Players (1938) a particular highlight. In it, Duluth’s theatrical comeback is dogged by bad luck and a string of deaths. As an author, Hugh Wheeler was able to draw considerably from his personal experience in the world of the theatre, and would eventually abandon crime fiction to write the books for not one but three Stephen Sondheim musicals during the 1970s: A Little Night Music, Candide and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The collaboration between Wheeler and Sondheim is significant because Stephen Sondheim too nurtured a deep fascination for puzzle mysteries. Indeed, one of his rare non-musical endeavours was the remarkable collaboration with the actor Anthony Perkins that yielded the utterly brilliant 1973 mystery classic The Last of Sheila. The film is a stone-cold classic, and an absolute must-watch for any self-respecting mystery aficionado. In spite of that, neither of the duo’s other mystery projects ever took off, but Sondheim and Perkins nonetheless remain vital “fringe” figures in the world of 20th century mystery. Indeed, even as recently as 2022 Rian Johnson paid homage to Sheila in his own highly entertaining Glass Onion. So what does all this tell us about the theatre, and about the mystery genre? Simply that they are a perfect fit for one another: in both cases the fundamental aim is to show the audience something exciting, something challenging, something to get the blood flowing and the synapses fizzing. To enthuse. To engage. That is the raison d’etre of both the mystery genre and of live theatre – and it is also the reason they make such excellent bedfellows. * SOURCES: Aristotle, Poetics W.H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage” Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre Is The Epic Theatre” RECOMMENDED READING FOR THEATRE LOVERS: Christianna Brand, Death of Jezebel Simon Brett, Cast In Order of Disappearance Christopher Bush, Death of a Tudor Queen Agatha Christie, Three Act Tragedy Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly Elizabeth Daly, Unexpected Night Antonia Fraser, Cool Repentance Carolyn Hart, Something Wicked Reginald Hill, Bones and Silence Anthony Horowitz, The Twist of a Knife Michael Innes, Hamlet, Revenge! P.D. James, The Skull Beneath the Skin Peter Lovesey, Stagestruck Ngaio Marsh, Enter a Murderer Helen McCloy, Cue For Murder Barnaby Ross, Drury Lane’s Last Case Featured image: William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III View the full article

There’s this family I used to babysit for who lived in the hills overlooking the lowly riff raff of greater Los Angeles. Their pride and joy was a pint-sized poodle ironically named Yeti. The kids were terrified Yeti would be devoured by a mountain lion after seeing a video of P-22 (RIP), so the parents bought him this (literal) suit of spiky armor that he had to wear whenever we let him outside after dark. He looked like a Muppet who’d been smuggled onto the set of a Mad Max movie, and he was the bravest little idiot I’d ever seen. It was like he knew he was wearing this deathproof vest and could do whatever he damn well pleased. One night, he scared away a raccoon three times his size, yapping in its snarling face till it skulked off, totally bewildered. I’ve been thinking about Yeti a lot lately. Specifically, his suit of spiky armor. I am not considered high risk for mountain lion attacks. But I am a writer by trade, which means I’m open to a different sort of attack. When I write, I pull from my own emotional well. I am tethered to the hearts of my characters, even if they’re not reenacting my life story. I’m processing what they’re processing. Confronting the same hard truths. Sometimes, those truths are just too sharp, even when I’m dealing with fiction. When I set out to write my most recent book, I realized I needed a suit of spiky armor. I needed vampires. Horror is a remarkable genre because it creates this beautiful buffer between us and life’s more monstrous moments. When we write in this style, we can assure ourselves that none of this is real despite whatever emotional intimacy we feel because. . . well, vampires aren’t real. When I was writing my book Night’s Edge, I felt safe to process all sorts of difficult themes related to childhood trauma because my main character, Mia, was living in a world inhabited by one of our culture’s most ubiquitous mythological tropes. I knew everything there was to know about vampires. What I didn’t know was how to unpack my own complicated, morally gray feelings surrounding family, duty, and trauma. By writing a work of horror, by exploring Mia’s complex relationship with her mother who subsists on human blood, I was finally able to do that. Wearing my spiky suit of vampire armor, I could walk into these scenes, hear these echoes from my past, and weave them into a story I could make sense of. Of course, my mom is not a vampire. She is a resilient and complex human being who has faced some profoundly sobering challenges in her life. And yet, that makes her very much like the people in this book. Paradoxically, by using the imaginary forces of vampirism, these characters become even more real. They become mine. And now, they are yours. I’m fairly certain I’ll never write a memoir, but I’ll write genre fiction every day till my last. That’s where I feel safe to find myself, again and again. I’m willing to bet I can speak for hundreds of my horror-writing compatriots, who use fictional monsters to make sense of the ones we know all too well. We’re like Yeti with our suits of spiky armor, howling right back at the coyotes till they retreat to the wilderness, trembling in the face of our audacity. Wondering how the hell we pulled it off. * NIGHT’S EDGE is available 6/20/2023 from Tor Nightfire. The sequel, FIRST LIGHT, hits shelves 4/23/24. Featured image: Love and Pain (1895), Edvard Munch View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Lee Burke, Flags on the Bayou (Atlantic Monthly Press) “[An] outstanding thriller . . . Burke stitches plot threads and historical details with ease, weaving it all into an urgent, propulsive story steeped in his deep personal connections to Louisiana. This is masterful.” –Publishers Weekly Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (Viking) “This atmospheric heist thriller…proves that genre readers really can have it all: terrific characterization, an intricate plot, and stylish writing to boot . . . Murphy’s spare, polished prose carries a touch of Elmore Leonard and a whisper of Ernest Hemingway, but in balancing those influences he locates a style all his own.” —Publishers Weekly Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books) “Siddiqi’s cleverly written debut is atmospheric and unsettling . . . the suspense builds quietly toward the final startling reveal and many interconnected social issues—immigration, language, class, privilege, gender roles—are carefully exposed. The questions raised by this heady story and its abrupt ending are perfect for book club discussions.” –Sarah Sullivan, Library Journal Scott Adlerberg, The Screaming Child (Ghoulish Books) “A great suggestion for readers who enjoy the atmospheric, horror-adjacent novels of Simone St. James or psychological horror such as Petra’s Ghost by C.S. O’Cinneide.” –Library Journal Megan Collins, Thicker Than Water (Atria) “A page-turner told from alternating points of view, this thriller from Collins (The Family Plot) will especially appeal to those who enjoy exploring complicated female friendships.” –Library Journal Wendy Corsi Staub, Windfall (William Morrow) “A winning lottery ticket, a haunted California mansion, and raging wildfires provide the tense and atmospheric backdrop for Wendy Corsi Staub’s riveting and engrossing new thriller… A summer must-read!” –Lisa Unger Tom Mead, The Murder Wheel (Mysterious Press) “Even readers who live to match wits with canny authors and detectives are likely to be outwitted by this one.” –Kirkus Sujata Massey, The Mistress of Bhatia House (Soho Crime) “A complex whodunit that also provides a fascinating immersion in a bygone era.” –Kirkus Reviews Nolan Cubero, Shadow Drive (Blackstone) “Promises to echo Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog in its portrayal of a man being destroyed by the home he loves—and a fraudulent tenant.” –Library Journal Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power (Viking) “[A] poignant argument on how belief in secret societies, from the KKK to QAnon, influences American democracy.” –Chicago Tribune View the full article

It’s 1965. Truman Capote was a known figure on the literary scene and a member of the global social jet set. His bestselling books Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s had made him a literary favorite. And after five years of painstaking research, and gut-wrenching personal investment, part I of In Cold Blood debuted in The New Yorker. As people across the country opened their magazines and read the first lines of the story, they were riveted. Overnight, Capote catapulted from a mere darling of the literary world to a full-fledged global celebrity on a par with the likes of rockstars and film legends. The success was all encompassing, but the cost would prove greater than even Capote had realized. Having read an article in the New York Times about the brutal slaying of a family at their farmhouse in Kansas, Capote embarked on a journey to the small rural farming town. Holcomb, located in Southwest Kansas, was a town of just under three hundred people and quintessential 1950s America. A small tight knit community that felt and acted more like one large family than a municipality. Needless to say, the murders of prominent farmer Herbert Clutter, his wife Bonnie, their youngest daughter Nancy and their son Kenyon, sent shockwaves through the town. Not only was this kind of crime unheard of in Holcomb, it also cast a cloud of suspicion over the entire town. Who would have had reason to kill the Clutters? And even if there had been cause to kill Mr. Clutter, how could anyone justify killing young Nancy and sweet Kenyon? Neighbors locked their doors and kept their children home from school, firearms were placed next to bedside tables, and all were on high alert for fear that they were next on an unknown killers hit list. It is amidst this air of fear and dread that Truman Capote arrived in Holcomb in 1959. The town had never seen anything like Capote. A man of diminutive stature, great flamboyance of style and a uniquely high-pitched vocal quality, he was a character that the townspeople could never have dreamed up. But there he was, with his notebook in hand, getting the story. It took time for the community to warm to Truman. Their inherent unease with outsiders was immediately on display, not to mention their added skepticism around a New York City reporter’s arrival in town. But Capote did what he was consistently able to do throughout his life—he charmed them into being on his side. Capote’s charm offensive was especially targeted toward Alvin “Al” Dewey and his wife Marie. Dewey was the special agent from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, assigned as the Chief Investigator of the Clutter murders. Known as an honest, dedicated and earnest public servant, Dewey was a member of the Holcomb community and knew the Clutters socially from church. Capote, being both a journalist and sharp social observer, knew that Dewey was the key that could unlock all the access that he needed. His charm offensive on the couple ranged from dinner at their home, where he regaled them with stories of his celebrity friends in New York and Los Angeles, to invitations for them to come and visit him around the world. Before long a bond had been forged (one which would last the rest of Capote’s life) and Truman had the access he needed to begin investigating and writing his story. Truman now had entrée not only to the details of the investigation, but also to the townspeople who felt he was safe to speak with, given that he had the confidence of Chief Investigator Dewey. Soon Truman was interviewing everyone, from the late Nancy Clutters boyfriend to members of the investigative team. He was given access to files and tips that had pointed the investigators in divergent directions. He had the inside track on how the investigation was progressing. By December 1959, the search for the killers had run hot, cold and hot again. The investigators had a tip from a prison inmate that seemed credible. Chief Dewey and the investigators followed the lead and headed to Las Vegas where it was believed the perpetrators were. On December 30th, 1959, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock were arrested in Las Vegas and charged with the murders of Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter. They were promptly transferred from Las Vegas to Kansas where the trial would soon begin. Chief Investigator Alvin Dewey’s arrival back in Holcomb with Smith and Hickock was a triumphant return, as he had successfully tracked down the two men, but it was the end of innocence for the small town. Would the townspeople come together in solemn remembrance of their slain brethren, or would they jeer at and riot around those who had killed them? The sentiments of the town and the people were all on display and Capote was there to witness and transcribe each and every breath of contradiction. Capote’s sketches of River Valley Farm, the Clutter family home in which the crime was committed. ©Truman Capote Estate. The New York Public Library; Manuscripts and Archives Division (Truman Capote Papers, MssCol 469. Box 7-8). Perry Smith and John Hickock were now the objects of Capote’s investigative desire. His story was their story, and he had to once again turn on his charm offensive. While he spoke and communicated extensively with both men, it was Perry Smith who Capote developed a particularly close relationship with. Capote’s obsession seemingly straddled from the physical to the psychological. In Perry he saw the person he might have become had his life taken a different path. Both men were from homes torn apart and both were eventually orphaned. Truman, ever the intellectual and the aesthete, found in Perry a gentle soul with an artistic nature and intellectual curiosity. They traded books and stories and letters. Their connection became one in which Capote could not fully separate himself from his subject, so as the months turned into years, the relationship became increasingly interdependent. The years between 1959 and 1965 were filled with Capote communicating with the community at large, the investigators and of course the inmates. Trials came and went, and despite confessions from both men, the wheels of justice turned slowly. By 1965, Truman had finished his manuscript except for the ending. And the ending he needed, the ending he felt his story deserved was a complete resolution for the crimes committed, and that meant death to Smith and Hickock. As they went through additional motions and hearings, Capote became agitated. His book was ready and after five years, he needed his ending to arrive. Court antics and filings could only continue to delay what he needed, and his fear was always rising that they might receive a stay of execution, in essence leaving him with no ending at all. Yet throughout this entire process, Capote had not fully realized the relationship that had developed between him and the killers, particularly Perry Smith. So, as he waited anxiously for their death, he had not fully assessed what the loss would be for him personally. Eventually there were no more legal motions filed, no stays of execution from the governor. The future for Hickock and Smith was the gallows. And Capote had his ending. He knew he had to see the story through to its most final conclusion, which meant being there as the executioner placed the sacks over the heads of the two young men, as they were dropped from the gallows, and as the last moments of life twitched out of their bodies. Capote watched in tears and was inconsolable on the plane ride back to Manhattan. His friends rallied around him, but each acknowledged that something in Truman had died with Perry. A small, unidentifiable element of himself had been ripped away. The success of In Cold Blood was instant and it bestowed upon Truman all the riches he had dreamed. His five years of work had created a new genre of literature, the nonfiction novel, as he declared it. Soon after publication he gave his storied Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York. He was the toast of jet set society, and the guests who came to fête him were world leaders, royalty, film stars and of course Alvin and Marie Dewey and a few friends from Holcomb Kansas. 1965 was to be the best year for Capote as he ascended to the global stage as the “It” author and personality of his generation; but something eerie lurked just below the surface. When I began work on my documentary The Capote Tapes, I was initially drawn to Truman’s years following the publication of In Cold Blood; but I quickly realized that I could never tell Truman’s story without telling the story of In Cold Blood. His story is intrinsically wrapped in Perry’s story. And the sorrow he felt at the loss of Perry’s life and yet the realization that his success was dependent on that life coming to an end, always lingered for Truman. As glamorous as his life was, the years following 1965 and Perry’s death became a slow and long decline into alcohol and drug addiction. As a young boy in the American South, I grew up reading Capote, from the short stories to the novels. He was an aspirational figure. Someone who lived a grand far away life, he was both indulgent and intellectual. He stood out as an openly gay man when the laws of the land deemed it criminal, but he chafed at the idea of being defined by his sexuality. He was a media personality who emitted wit and charm, but he could also be cruel and inhumane. He was a ball of contradictions. But perhaps most important of all, was his writing. It remains for me so close to home, so near the smells and sounds of the South, so rich in tone and elegant in prose. As Norman Mailer said, “He wrote the best sentences.” My exploration into Capote’s life was through the lens of never heard interviews that Capote’s friends had given the author George Plimpton. Plimpton had turned those interviews into his oral history on Capote. The tapes are a rich history not simply of Truman, but of the era in which he lived and the range of people he charmed and alienated along the way. Additionally, I spent hours poring over Capote’s notebooks and correspondence. Immersing myself in his detailed penmanship, concise and often witty observations, and the pure genius that is his writing. Having access to these incredible notes and drafts, was essential in allowing me to further dive into Capote the man, as well as the author. Capote’s literature remains ever more relevant today. From Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the stories of young people running from their past to make a new life in New York, to the True Crime genre which he is undoubtedly the godfather of following his writing of In Cold Blood. Capote’s talent—his unyielding talent—is what continues to make him a captivating personality and author. He wrote it best himself in Music for Chameleons, “But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.” _____________________ From the introduction by Ebs Burnough to In Cold Blood, the manuscript by Truman Capote, copyright ©2023 by Ebs Burnough and SP Books. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, SP Books. All rights reserved. View the full article

When I was a child, I opened a detective agency with my best friend. We had an office (the space under my father’s desk), a filing cabinet (repurposed from the trash), a role model (Harriet the Spy), and a manual (The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook, which covered such useful topics as scene-of-crime forensics, pursuit of suspects, and forty-years-out-of-date drug slang). Though I didn’t grow up to be a private investigator, I did become a writer—and my own novel owes its origins to the fictional female detectives who came before mine. Kinsey Millhone: The leading edge of a new wave of crime fiction when A is for Alibi was published in 1982, Sue Grafton’s pragmatic and determined private eye Kinsey Millhone almost singlehandedly revitalized the genre. A wisecracking lone wolf, Kinsey is meticulous, disinclined to the domestic, and delights in her solitude. (“I love being single,” she quips early on in the series. “It’s almost like being rich.”) Kinsey’s adventures span nearly the entire alphabet—Y is for Yesterday was published in 2017, the same year Grafton passed away—and her consistency is one of the delights of the novels: Kinsey remains committed to turtlenecks, three-mile daily jogs, men with good teeth, and her lone wrinkle-resistant “little black dress” throughout as she dodges shady hitmen and exposes a legion of bad deeds and nefarious crooks. Harriet M. Welsch: You likely remember the precocious star of Harriet the Spy from your childhood, and she was certainly a significant influence on mine: Sturdy, resolute Harriet, with her tool belt and her spy routine and her notebook, essential staples of any detecting—or writing, for that matter—career. But returning to Harriet’s world as an adult reveals a witty, mordant New York satire that’s no less biting for starring an eleven-year-old. Smilla Jaspersen: The cool, tough, and fearless protagonist of Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow is the daughter of a Greenlandic Inuit mother and a Danish father, a world-renowned ice expert who prefers the company of snow to other people. But she launches herself into an investigation after the mysterious death of her neglected six-year-old neighbor, and the journey that follows is part Frankenstein, part The Snow Queen, and all its own. Mickey Fitzpatrick: The heroine of Liz Moore’s stunning 2020 novel Long Bright River is a patrol officer in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood who came to policing after surviving a shattering childhood. But as she investigates the disappearance of her sister, a heroin addict from whom Mickey is estranged, she begins to wonder if she might have chosen the wrong side. A police procedural in which police and their procedures are often the problem, a thoughtful examination of the opioid crisis, and a loving homage to classic noir, Moore’s novel and her reluctant-detective protagonist are genre standouts. Hornclaw: The leading lady of Gu Byeong-mo’s The Old Woman with the Knife is a hit woman, not a detective; in her line of work, she doesn’t ask questions, and it’s not her job to find answers. Jaded and approaching retirement, she summons the resolve for one last job—but the consequences of her past are catching up to her. I’m a sucker for the hypercompetent solo artist with a secret soft heart, and Hornclaw is a delightful exemplar. Claire DeWitt: Claire DeWitt is the best detective in the world, and she’s not going to let you forget it. For her, mystery is the Great Mystery, the infinite and tenuous web of coincidence, fate, love, and despair that tie human beings together across disparate lives and histories. Sara Gran’s heroine offers the occasional nod to her predecessors, Kinsey Millhone and Philip Marlowe among them, but she is a singular creation—equal parts compassion and ruin, haunted and hopeful, a woman who lives for the truths most people spend their own lives trying to avoid. Electric, wise, and funny, Claire is a heroine close to my heart. *** View the full article

This month’s psychological thrillers are fast-paced, intricate, and deliciously shocking. With new books from May Cobb, Rachel Howzell Hall, Samantha Downing, Chandler Baker, and more, it’s a star-studded line-up of new releases that are sure to please whether you’re reading them poolside or (more reasonably) inside in the AC. May Cobb, A Likeable Woman (Berkley) Austin-based writer May Cobb is back with another sizzling thriller set in the sultry Texas heat. In her latest, a woman who has always wondered about the death of her unpredictable mother finds new answers in a memoir. She returns to her hometown to seek out the truth (and perhaps reconnect with an old flame, or at least have some flirtation in a swimming pool). You’ll tear through this one poolside! Maybe on the beach, while wearing sunglasses…who knows what thoughts of delicious vengeance may be hidden behind sunglasses. –MO Colin Walsh, Kala In 2003, a tight-knit group of friends in small-town Ireland is torn apart when one goes missing. Nearly two decades later, a body is found, just in time for a hen party bringing everyone back together. Alternating between past and present, Colin Walsh skillfully reveals the dark secrets behind the murder and missed opportunities to bring the killer to justice. Of particular note is Walsh’s talent for dialogue and dynamic descriptions. –MO Rachel Howzell Hall, What Never Happened (Thomas and Mercer) The obituary is an art unto itself, and I am so excited it is being explored by none other than the fantastic Rachel Howzell Hall! Skilled obituary writer Coco Weber is back on Catalina Island, a tiny island paradise off the coast of California. Twenty years before, she was the sole survivor of a terrifying home invasion. But now she’s back–ready to grapple with the bad memories and take care of her Aunt Gwen. Exxxxxxxxcept maybe there’s a serial killer on the island targeting elderly people? Coco begins to wonder… and then one day, she gets a copy of her own obituary in the mail. What! (Note: I wanted to end this blurb with the phrase “special die-livery” but I didn’t want to be fired.) –OR Jessica Ward, The St. Ambrose School for Girls (Gallery) In Jessica Ward’s 90s-set novel, a girl arrives at boarding school ready to stand out in her all-black wardrobe, but hoping to keep her mental health history private. When the queen bee of the school begins to mercilessly pick on her, things escalate quickly, and when a body is found, Ward’s narrator finds herself unable to trust anyone, including herself. Ward treats the subject of bipolar disorder with respect while still crafting a complex psychological thriller. –MO Laura Lippman, Prom Mom (William Morrow) I promise you—I swear to you—that Prom Mom means something very different than what you’re thinking! I’m not going to spoil it. I’m just going to say that Laura Lippman’s incredibly layered and tense COVID-era thriller tells multiple stories about its main characters, a man and a woman whose pasts are linked by tragedy and tawdry gossip, and whose current lives are connected by something more powerful: the desire for a second chance. –OR Liz Nugent, Strange Sally Diamond (Gallery/Scout) Sally Diamond has led a quiet life for decades, with her own peculiar habits, without bother. Then her father dies, she burns the corpse in the incinerator, and she becomes an object of much curiosity indeed. Liz Nugent finds much empathy for her strange heroine, whose heartbreaking backstory slowly comes to the fore, interspersed with Sally’s journey from isolation to beloved community member. There’s the usual trademark Liz Nugent disturbing content, but with a heart-felt dose of humanity to balance things out. –MO Jamie Day, The Block Party (St. Martin’s Press) In this delightful suburban thriller, a block party is the catalyst for a neighborhood’s public unraveling, bringing long-festering secrets and dangerous liaisons to the surface. The Block Party is split between two timelines: a murder in the present day, and the events from last year’s block party that set the murderer in motion. A wickedly fun send-off of suburbia that does presume a bit more talking to the neighbors than actually happens in the burbs…My father has, like, never met his neighbors. –MO Chandler Baker, Cutting Teeth (Flatiron) Children can be such little monsters. But monstrous enough to kill their beloved teacher, weeks into a class-wide biting outbreak in which the children appear to have developed a taste for human blood? Baker already impressed me with her #metoo thriller The Whisper Network and her reverse-Stepford Wives take, The Husbands, and with Cutting Teeth, she once again proves herself one of the sharpest and wittiest observers of women’s roles and mothers’ sacrifices. –MO Samantha Downing, Twisted Love Story (Berkley) Samantha Downing is one of those rare writers equally focused on character and plotting, and it shows in the twists and turns of her novels, as well as the genuine emotions they evoke in readers. In her latest, an on-again-off-again couple is bound together by a dark secret—and it’s unclear whether it will destroy them or allow them a chance to prove their love fully, once and for all. –MO Laura Sims, How Can I Help You (Putnam) Laura Sims’ latest is a Highsmithian cat-and-mouse thriller featuring two librarians: Margo is hiding something, and Patricia is obsessed with discovering her secrets. A suspicious death of a patron becomes the catalyst for curiosity and a looming, explosive confrontation in this uneasy thriller. Sims’ work harkens back to the complex personality studies of mid-century psychological fiction, and pays homage to middle-aged womanhood—serial killers age too, after all.–MO View the full article

“The Hot Spot” is a movie of dark joy – dark because it immediately pulls the viewer into a sweltering world of illicit lust, desperation, and deception, but joyful because director Dennis Hopper and leading stars Don Johnson and Virginia Madsen make it all so seductive and fun. They also happen to play out their schemes, manipulations, and dashed dreams over one of the greatest, and most underrated, soundtracks in the history of film. The 1990 major theatrical release is based on Charles Williams’ scintillating pulp novel, Hell Hath No Fury. Williams cowrote the script with Nona Tyson in the 1960s, with Robert Mitchum in mind for the lead role of Harry Madox, an amoral drifter who lands in a small Texas town. Looking for a place to quietly settle, he gets a job as a used car salesman, but soon finds himself embroiled in an affair with his boss’ sultry and mischievous wife. To pass the time in the one stoplight dot on an atlas, he also commits arson, robs a bank, foils a blackmail plot, and falls in love with his naïve, but beautiful coworker. Madox is never at a loss for hobbies. When director Dennis Hopper sunk his claws into the script, Mitchum was far too old for the part. So, he cast Don Johnson. Improbably handsome and yet able to effortlessly communicate sleaze, the “Miami Vice” alum was ideal as a character who, as he puts it, “has a perfect zero-point-zero batting average for staying out of trouble.” “The Hot Spot” opens with a scorching blues-jazz number hanging in the desert air as Madox smokes a cigarette by the side of the road. No one knows anything about his personality, background, or ambition, but Johnson telegraphs concern, anxiety, and disappointment with a few well-timed glances. The inescapable conclusion is that he is on the run from someone or something that he would prefer to permanently forget. Life seems easy in his new little town. He sells cars by day, and sullenly stares at strippers at the Texas village’s sole entertainment venue at night. He also smokes a sufficient amount of Kools to char his lungs within a week. There is hardly a scene when Madox is not puffing, lighting, or crushing. Even if the use of tobacco is tantamount to respiratory and cardiovascular destruction, it must be said that Don Johnson is one of the all time great cinematic smokers. One of the elements of Johnson’s deft performance, in addition to the Kools, is the silent indication of tension. Even as he begins to develop a stable life, his body language and facial expressions make his restlessness undeniable. As far as diversions are concerned, he finds one that is simultaneously the best and the worst when he meets Dolly Harshaw, wife of the owner of Harshaw Motors, played by the scene stealing Virginia Madsen. As a succubus Marilyn Monroe, Madsen has Sharon Stone, whose own turn at the femme fatale archetype in “Basic Instinct” hit screens in 1992, easily beat. She manages to imbue every line of dialogue she utters with three qualities: tantalizing sensuality, hilarity, and danger. Her chemistry with Johnson is as hot as the Texas climate, and they manage to make lines that might seem corny with inferior thespians register in the annals of noir. An illustrative example is from a scene when Dolly summons Harry to her home on an errand, before their affair begins: Dolly: Oh, Harry, I meant to ask you…about finding me. Did I give you the right directions? Harry: I could find it in the dark. When they do commence their inevitable adulterous entanglement, one of their trysts takes place in the backseat of a car on a riser in the Harshaw lot. Before departing for the evening, Dolly tells Harry, “That was more fun than eating cotton candy barefoot.” The most memorable line of the movie is in the middle of another sex scene. Dolly’s husband needs imminent heart surgery, after already suffering two cardiac events. She sees his medical crisis as an opportunity, ties him to the bed, and starts dry-humping him while smacking his chest. When he begins to struggle for air and grimace, Dolly says, “I’m fucking you to death, George.” “The Hot Spot’s” plot offers intrigue, but is a secondary consideration. It involves blackmail, bank robbery, and plenty of double cross. Despite its twists and turns, the movie moves at a pleasurably slow pace, allowing “The Hot Spot” to function as a character-driven neo-noir. No matter what happens, the reason for watching the film is Don Johnson and Virginia Madsen’s respective portrayals of Harry and Dolly. As much as it is a delight to watch, “The Hot Spot” is also a unique feast for the ears. “Something Special” – The Soundtrack “Dennis Hopper knew Miles Davis,” blues slide guitarist Roy Rogers, who played on “The Hot Spot” soundtrack, told me when I interviewed him about the experience. “It was his dream to have his favorite jazz artist – Miles – and his favorite blues artist, John Lee Hooker, play together.” First, Miles Davis agreed to play, and from there, John Lee Hooker brought his musical mastery and blues spirit to the studio. For support, Dennis Hopper and producer, Jack Nitzsche, managed to assemble one of the greatest gatherings of musicians to ever lay down the blues: the legendary Taj Mahal on National steel guitar and electric banjo, drummer Earl Palmer, who is one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, Tim Drummond, who had previously played bass for BB King, Eric Clapton, and Miles Davis, Hollywood keyboard veteran, Bradford Ellis, and the aforementioned, Grammy-award winning slide guitarist, Roy Rogers, who was also John Lee Hooker’s producer. For three days, all the players, with the exception of Miles Davis, sweated it out in the studio, with Dennis Hopper observing in ecstasy. “It was a groove,” Rogers told me, “And once we got into the groove, we kept going, and never stopped.” Rogers explained that none of the musicians had read the neo-noir script, but that Nitzche would provide direction by way of scene summary, discussion of musical key, and the general feeling that a song should transmit (tension, seduction, excitement). “It was all live in the studio. The band improvised,” Rogers said, “And it was all in support of John Lee Hooker. He was the leader, and we played around him. So, it became atmospheric, moody, and natural within the parameters of John Lee Hooker doing John Lee Hooker.” In his role of producer, Nitzsche occasionally offered a suggestion, such as having Taj Mahal start a song instead of Hooker, but most of the tracks emanate out of a few crucial verbal cues – “escalation,” “disappointment.” What follows is the magical alchemy of consummate professionals playing according to the direction of a restless, exploratory spirit. “Playing,” in fact, is an inaccurate term. They weren’t playing music. They were making it. “Creatively, we were all given free reign. Jack might have told me, play a slide riff here, but I knew John’s music and style well-enough, that I could just let it fly. That’s what we all did. One of the best things about it is that there is so much texture,” Rogers said. Miles Davis, absent from the jam sessions that created the foundation of the music, arrived like a living, breathing myth on the fourth day. “Miles was a separate session,” Rogers remembered, “Thankfully, we all got to watch him play and meet him. He overdubbed.” Taking almost no time to prepare, Miles Davis blew into his trumpet over the track tapes, playing some of the best solos of the last ten years of his career. Poet and jazz music critic, Steve Day, went so far to write that Davis “reached inner places” on “The Hot Spot” that he never had previously found in his entire career. His trumpet amplifies an entanglement of lust and doom; mapping a fiery collision within every man’s spiritual geography. “He was really happy. He really dug it,” Roger said of Miles Davis, who because of his joy in the music, belied his surly reputation. “Let me paint you the scene,” Rogers continued, “John Lee Hooker, after watching Miles play, said, ‘let’s go in there.’ He wanted to meet Miles. So, we all followed John. Miles is smiling, and he said, ‘Man, this is great shit.’ He shook John’s hand, and said, ‘John, you play like you got one foot in the mud.’ John always loved that.” The mud in which John Lee Hooker buried his foot was a product of the human capacity for triumph and destruction. His singular guitar and vocal style managed to capture the most primal impulses, while telegraphing an intellect. It is once visceral and philosophical. Rogers added the word, “existential.” The jam session tracks of “The Hot Spot,” far from an exception, are an exemplary exhibition of his unique gifts. Without any lyrics, John Lee Hooker “oohs” and “aaahs” his way through the music, periodically adding, “Have mercy” or “That ain’t right.” It is not only the voice of the beleaguered Harry Madox’s heart, but in the words of Ralph Ellison, “a biographical chronicle of pain expressed lyrically.” In lieu of actual words, the lyricism derives from the expert music backing his voice – his own guitar, but also the contributions of every other player in the room, and the man who would later float into the room, Miles Davis. “The Hot Spot” is a magnificent document of the power of blues and jazz. One example, among many, is the song, “Bank Robbery.” Over a grinding blues riff, Davis blows one of his most emotional, fevered, and fractured solos. Just as the danger heightens, making the song feel as if it is going to detonate into thin air, the band deconstructs, breaking down for John Lee Hooker’s voice to cut through. He moans and groans acapella, hitting a spine-tingling high note. At that instant, the blues riff begins again, eventually playing the song out to a crashing conclusion. “Bank Robbery” is one of several reasons why “The Hot Spot” soundtrack is a masterpiece of American music. “I don’t talk to Taj Mahal very often,” Roy Rogers told me, “But whenever I do, we talk about ‘The Hot Spot.’ We both know it was something special.” View the full article

A new Brubaker/Phillips original graphic novel is always reason for crime fiction fans to celebrate, but there’s something particularly special about the bestselling, much-lauded team’s latest – Night Fever – a twisty, mind-bending neo-noir that pulls you through a winding, hypnotic tunnel of darkness in a way only Brubaker, Phillips and colorist Jacob Phillips can. Cinematic and gripping, Night Fever is an outlier in the greater Brubaker/Phillips canon, but in the best way possible – a memorable detour that sticks with you. It’s always a pleasure to chat with Ed, who took some time out of his busy schedule to discuss the book, his other projects, collaborating with Sean and Jacob, and much more. ALEX SEGURA: Okay, Ed, thanks for taking the time to do this. It’s really a pleasure to chat with you again. I’ll get right to it – there’s something about Night Fever, in the way it seems to embrace or spring from classic noir, but then takes a very weird turn. Can you expand on that? ED BRUBAKER: Yes, the initial germ of the idea came to me 10 or 15 years ago. I used to have terrible insomnia, and so I’d be awake half the night while my wife and a lot of the world were asleep, and I started thinking of a story about a guy who can’t sleep, of course, because what else do you do? It felt very noir to me, some guy goes out because he can’t sleep, and encounters a totally different world in the middle of the night, and he lies about himself and he gets in too deep… and you know, there’s just so many ways a story like that can go. But for some reason, I could never totally crack it, so it sat in the back of my mind, brewing away. A while back Sean had asked me to write something that was set in Europe or the UK, somewhere he’d spent time, and when I was thinking about that, this idea came back to me, the guy that can’t sleep, and I thought, what if it’s a guy on a business trip to France? And then all the pieces just started falling into place finally. Then the story became like this strange blend that feeling of old Black Lizard noir books, mixed with the weird Euro-comics I read when I was growing up… something that felt both scary and sexy and dark and cold war and maybe sci-fi at the edges even? I think that’s when I understood how to make it all work. So it kind of starts out like an almost Hitchcockian kind of set-up, that guy on a business trip who starts flirting with danger… but then as it goes on, the story turns in some really bizarre directions, as you said. Almost surreal at times. AS: Right, totally. I got major Lynch and Fellini vibes, which is of course, good. And speaking of vibes – the mood of the book – the intensity of Sean and Jacob’s art…it kind of borders on the unreal. Would you agree? EB: That’s really what I was going for, as the story went on. I wanted us to make a noir story that felt sort of existential and insane and scary. To try to reflect how insane it feels to be alive right now a lot of the time. So as Jonathan goes further into the night world with his new friend, Rainer, the images and mood of the story get more out there and feel like – what’s real here and what isn’t? Like as Jonathan starts crossing the line and committing crimes and violence, everything just gets more vibrant and intense and seductive, too. Click to view slideshow. AS: There was recently a piece in The Hollywood Reporter where you said Rainer was somehow inspired by Nicolas Refn, who you worked with for several years on a TV project. For my money, Rainer is the most fun character in the book, very chaotic and violent, and funny. What’s the story behind this Refn connection? EB: Rainer isn’t exactly based on Refn but is sort of “inspired by” him in different ways. He’s kind of like a cross between Nic and a character Nic would put in one of his movies. He gives big speeches about life and the world, and human nature, and he does wild stuff you wouldn’t expect. But part of why I said it was inspired by my time working with Refn was about the dynamic between Jonathan and Rainer in the story. Rainer is from this inner circle of life that Jonathan’s always been outside of, and so being with him lets him briefly inside that circle. I wanted to explore how that feels, and the times I’ve most felt that way was those early days with Refn, before it became normal to have him say stuff like “Hey, did I tell you that Jodorowsky did a tarot reading about our show?” So Rainer is sort of a tribute to Refn, but by no means is he Refn. I’d need 1000 more pages to even get close. AS: Without spoiling anything for readers, I think I can safely say the book can be read in two ways – it’s got a few major revelations and then it kind of leaves you there wondering, and questioning our narrator a bit. EB: God, I hope so. I really was trying for that kind of ending that makes you go back and read it again closer, to try to understand, is that a promise or is he lying? That kind of haunted ending that sticks with you and makes you look at your own life, hopefully differently. The book was written during a time I was dealing with some family stuff and spending a lot of time in hospitals, and I channeled a lot of my fears and frustrations into it as I went, I think. Like if writing is usually therapy, then this one was sort of primal scream therapy, I guess – wrapped up inside a weird crime story. But I’ve found that most people can identify with that these days. AS: I love asking this question because, selfishly, I can collect new books or films to absorb. Can you talk a bit about the books or movies that felt more present while working on this – influence or inspirations? EB: When I started out, I was trying to capture that feeling of a Willeford or Goodis novel a bit, the “normal guy stumbles into something dark” alley of noir, but the further I got into the story, the more it kept shifting into something more akin to David Lynch or even Fellini, mood-wise, I think. It definitely goes from “neo-noir” to “what the fuck noir” at some point in the story. AS: Night Fever feels very different from your earlier work while still residing in the crime genre – can you talk about your headspace while first coming up with the book and then working on it with Sean and Jacob? EB: I started writing it just at the beginning of a really dark time in my life, dealing with a family health crisis, and spending a lot of time around waiting rooms and hospitals, so I think that all definitely informs the story. I think a lot of the main characters fears reflect things that were going through my head a lot as I wrote. These things that haunt you as you get older, like “did my life work out how I planned or did I just end up here somehow?” As far as the working process, Sean told me he wanted to draw something much larger, on bigger paper, so I thought about that while writing, the expansiveness of the way he’d approach the drawing. And we told Jake to just go nuts on the colors, to make every scene vibrant and alive. I think it’s the best work either have ever done. AS: How do you think Night Fever fits into your bigger body of work, particularly with Sean? EB: It’s different than most of what we do, while still feeling like our work, which is, I think, one of the goals as we continue making books together. But I think as artists and writers we all approach a few themes or obsessions over and over again, from different angles, and Night Fever I feel like is our best attempt so far, at a really vivid noir story, that feels sexy and seductive. We’ve done a few books in this same wheelhouse – Bad Night and Last of the Innocent, in the CRIMINAL series are not too far tonally from Night Fever… but Night Fever feels more evocative to me, in some ways. It’s about a lot of things at the same time. AS: Zooming out a bit and talking about the business side – you guys have made a big move into original graphic novels, first as a reaction to the pandemic, but now as your new business model – can you talk about that a bit? EB: Yeah, I think because of me and Sean’s unique career in comics, working together as a team for over 20 years now, we were able to slowly build a loyal readership, and we discovered over time that those readers really wanted us to put out hardback books. A lot of people buy our paperbacks or single issues, but our biggest loudest audience was the hardback buyers, so back in 2018 we finally tried an original graphic novel, My Hereos Have Always Been Junkies, and that was a huge hit. We sold out in like 6 weeks, of a printing I thought would last two years. That changed our lives. So we decided to follow that path and see what we could do with focusing on graphic novels instead of serializing stories first, and it’s been the best decision ever, both creatively and on the business side. Our audience seems to just grow with every book, and we are constantly going back to press with one of our previous books now. It’s been a dream for us. AS: Before I let you go – what are you reading/watching/enjoying these days? Any crime authors you’d like to shout out? EB: I’m currently reading I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai and loving it. My stack I’m taking on a reading trip soon is the new Lehane, the new S.A. Cosby, and the new Megan Abbott, all of which I’m sure will be amazing, as always. I really enjoyed Beef on that streaming platform that is forcing me to go on strike – but all props to everyone who made that show anyway. I’m pretty hooked on the Graham Yost adaptation of Silo. Star Trek Strange New Worlds is just back, which was great last season. The final season of Barry was amazing, of course. Bill Hader is a genius. I’m behind on comics reading the last few years, so I just got to Ducks by Kate Beaton and it’s just as good as everyone in the world says it is. I watched The Thin Man again recently and that movie is still a lot of fun. And Sullivan’s Travels, too. Been doing some 30s research for a project. AS: You mentioned a lot of my recent reads, too. Great minds, etc. Okay, what else are you working on? What’s next after this? EB: Our next book is a strange little book that comes out in December, called Where The Body Was. That one is a crime story is about a bunch of characters who live on the same street, told through a bunch of overlapping perspectives and the endpapers are like a tribute to old mapback covers. ___________________________________ Night Fever is out now from Image Comics wherever books or comics are sold. View the full article

On July 15th, 1976, in a small farming town in California’s central valley, three men wearing pantyhose masks and brandishing guns boarded a school bus on its afternoon route home and kidnapped the driver and twenty-six student passengers, some as young as five years old. For twelve hours, they drove the captives around in vans without ventilation, food, water, or bathroom breaks. Their destination was a stone quarry owned by the family of one of the gunmen, located over a hundred miles from where the police found the school bus. They instructed the victims to climb down a ladder into a hole in the ground that opened up into a buried moving truck. The truck was poorly stocked with mattresses, cut-outs in the floor for toilets, water, some food, and a couple of flashlights. The gunmen trapped the victims inside, essentially burying them alive. As with many crimes, the motive behind this one was money. The kidnappers planned to extort $5 million from the state of California. Their plan was botched when jammed phone lines at the police station prevented them from making a ransom demand. Meanwhile, the victims succeeded in escaping. The Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping, as the incident became known, is still the largest kidnapping-for-ransom plot in American history. It is also the inspiration for my new novel, Time Will Break the World. I first learned about the crime several years ago, in an article about Frederick Woods, one of the assailants, who at the time had been denied parole yet again (though he was released in 2021). Until then, I was completely unaware of him or what he had done. It seemed I wasn’t alone. I started asking people I knew if they had heard of Chowchilla, and no one had. I found it unbelievable that so shocking an incident, one that attracted worldwide media attention and drove President Gerald Ford to unleash the authority of the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, had been forgotten. I knew the story was a novel and I wanted to write it. My original project was to write a fictionalized retelling of the Chowchilla kidnapping, “based on a true story.” All the necessary materials for a good book were right there: interesting characters, a compelling and tense plot, a unique setting, and life and death stakes. The finished version of Time Will Break the World tells the story of gunmen who hijack a school bus and kidnap the passengers. The quarry is there and so is the daring escape. But something happened during the writing of the novel. Three kidnappers became two. The crime no longer took place in 1976, and the setting ended up thousands of miles away from California. An important subplot about the 1984 Summer Olympics emerged. Half the book took place thirty years after the abduction. None of the student characters were modeled on the real kids. It was clear I couldn’t say the novel was “based on a true story.” At best, it was “inspired by a true story.” It might not seem as if there is much daylight between “based on” and “inspired by,” but the distinction is crucial. The main difference, I think, has to do with intent It might not seem as if there is much daylight between “based on” and “inspired by,” but the distinction is crucial. The main difference, I think, has to do with intent. Novels based on true stories have an interest in what really happened, even when certain elements are changed or elided. The actual event is central to the telling of the story. Novels inspired by true stories take aspects or the premise of an event to tell a story that while familiar in a broad sense, is upon closer inspection merely a backdrop to investigate topics and ideas that are important to the author and possibly unrelated to the episode that inspired it. Little Deaths, the crime novel by Emma Flint, falls into the category of “based on a true story,” in this instance the arrest and trial of Alice Crimmins, a woman accused of murdering her two young children. The life of Ruth Malone, Little Deaths’ main character, shares many details with Crimmins. Both women were living lower-class lives in Queens in the mid-1960s, drinking and smoking and dating several men who weren’t their husbands. Like Alice, Ruth wakes up one morning to find her son and daughter missing from their bedroom. Their bodies are discovered soon after. The novel gives Ruth a resolution to her ordeal that Alice never received, while also inventing a reporter character through whom the reader sees the plot unfold. Besides that, however, the book nearly mirrors the Crimmins case. Specifically, it emphasizes the larger social perspective that the media focused on at the time. Both Alice and Ruth were accused not because of evidence—in fact no physical evidence tied them to the murders—but because they were judged to be bad mothers and bad women: promiscuous, boozy, and unapologetic. The way Flint renders the sexist beliefs of the period is the biggest strength of the novel and a compelling reason to stick with the actual incident as the novel’s guiding light. A good example of a novel “inspired by a true story” is Room by Emma Donaghue. Donaghue claims the novel was “triggered” by the case of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter Elizabeth in the basement of his house for 24 years, and impregnated her seven times. Ma, the young woman in Room, isn’t a captive of her father, but a stranger known in the book as Old Nick. She has one child by him, Jack. In the novel, Ma and Jack escape; in real life, a situation involving a serious illness of Elizabeth’s eldest daughter led police to the Fritzl’s home. But the important thing isn’t how similar the details are between reality and the novel. At its center, Room isn’t about the worst type of human evil, nor is it a tale of survival against the odds. Rather, Donoghue takes the premise of the Fritzl case to tell a story of motherhood and family under the most overwhelming of conditions. She even let’s five-year-old Jack narrate, a choice that lends a more experimental tone to the novel, and a decision no writer trying to adhere to the truth of a real moment would make. In both “based on” and “inspired by” there are reasons why a writer veers from the truth. Some are practical: Often, not all of the facts are known, and the writer must speculate and fill in the blanks. No one knows what the Chowchilla kidnappers did between the time they forced the victims into the buried moving truck and when the kids escaped. In my novel, they went home and watched Mary-Lou Retton win the gold medal in gymnastics. Another reason could be fear of lawsuits. Thinly veiled portrayals might bear too much of a resemblance to the real people in our overly litigious country. Finally, a novel is not life. The freshness and originality that a writer strives for on the page, the effortlessness, is in fact the result of a willful structure and style, trial and error, years of work. The most spontaneous seeming novel has nothing of the randomness of a boring Thursday. Life is complicated and prone to coincidences in ways that challenge strong writing, and storylines sometimes need to be trimmed or combined or cut altogether to make a coherent narrative. As for why the writing of my novel started “based on” and ended “inspired by,” it came the moment I realized I had stopped being captivated by the kidnapping and was instead wondering what would happen long term to someone who went through it. If you’re abducted when you are 10, what does the rest of your life look like? Once the focus shifted for me, the project became something different, a chance to investigate how people’s lives turn out the way they do, and the stories we all tell to explain our lives. *** View the full article

In July 1902, a fully rigged English merchant ship, the Leicester Castle, arrived from Hong Kong at San Francisco, its iron hull heavy with wheat. After docking, its Scottish Captain Robert D. Peattie expected to lose much of his crew of 26 men as a matter of course; sailors typically scattered for the excitements of San Francisco once they were paid off, picking up a new ship when they again felt light in the pocket. Capt. Peattie needed to replace more than half his men before heading out again for the long route to Queensland, northeastern Australia. He paid a shipping master named John Savory, who rounded up fourteen candidates living at sailor boarding houses around the city. The ship’s registry recorded their range of origins: Ireland, Sweden, Finland, “Leghorn,” Germany, “Chili,” Isle of Man, “Liverpool,” as well as from the ‘U.S.A.’ When several Americans and a German named Christian Wolz (who signed on as ‘Wolf’) were brought on board, one of them, W.A. Hobbs, was told to surrender his Colt revolver to the Captain. Hobbs made no promises against sneaking ammunition aboard. Capt. Robert Peattie (SF Chronicle) 1905 The Leicester Castle returned to sea on July 27, 1902. In the opinion of its Captain, three new Americans appeared to have no experience with actual sailing, and they spent the first days vomiting and complaining about what was asked of them: The owner of the confiscated revolver, the “stoutly built and smooth shaven” W.A. Hobbs, 27, claimed to hail from Litchfield, Illinois and had been coached to falsely list experience on a previous vessel (the Crocodile) in order to rate the pay of an able seaman; Ernest Sears, 21, a runaway farm boy from McKey, Oregon, claimed to have worked the Grant; while James Turner, also 21, said he was from Ida Falls, Indiana and had sailed the Shenandoah. These men, though novices at sea, would end up united by their unhappiness aboard a makeshift raft. The Leicester Castle was 273 feet long and it was noticeable when a crewman avoided his assigned work. After two weeks, Captain Peattie had seen enough to privately disrate each of these three Americans to ordinary seaman, at lower pay. After the Chief Mate discovered Hobbs uselessly “pulling on some ropes,” he asked him “what kind of sailor” he was, according to able seaman Wolz, to which Hobbs answered that he would find out “God damned soon” what kind. Hobbs stayed in his cabin refusing to work from August 2nd to 21st, citing headaches and fever, even after the Captain brought him quinine lotion and determined there was nothing wrong with him. After the Australian first mate, Oyston, called him a “loafer” and a “blood sucker,” and ordered him to turn out, Hobbs answered, “If you knew who I was you wouldn’t come and pull me out of this bunk.” When Sears and another sailor on duty neglected to ring the watch bell, Oyston threw a bucket of water at them from the poop deck along with the bucket itself. Things would come to a head on the night of September 2nd 1902. ___________________________________ Nathan Ward’s new book, Son of the Old West, will be released by Atlantic Monthly Press in September, 2023. ___________________________________ The Leicester Castle had reached South Pacific waters on its route to Queensland, and some crew slept on deck to find breezes. “It was beautiful tropical weather,” remembered the Captain, “every sail was set and drawing.” Capt. Peattie was quietly reading in his room before bed when one of the Americans, the farm boy Ernest Sears, appeared in the doorway to report an accident around 10:30 that evening. As recorded in the ship’s log, “Sears asked the Master [Capt. Peattie] to turn out as a man had fallen from the foreyard and broken his leg.” Capt. Peattie was puzzled at the nighttime climbing that could have led to such a fall. But he moved into the cabin and lit a lamp to prepare his table for treating the injured man. When he asked Sears where was the sailor, he replied “Just outside.” Then, wrote the Captain: Suddenly W.A. Hobbs…stepped into the cabin by the starboard door with a revolver in his right hand and a club in his left and with only the words ‘Now then Captain’ fired striking the Master [Peattie] in the left breast, the Master attempted to close with him and struck him once, but was fired at again and struck on the head with the club which brought him to the deck, where other two shots were fired at him and his head was severely beaten by the club.” Peattie was shot four times before his second officer, J. B. Nixon, appeared at the port door in a singlet and white pants, drawn by the sounds of gunfire. Hobbs fired a shot to his heart, killing Nixon in the doorway with his own gun, which Hobbs had stolen from Nixon’s cabin, hoping to use it to retrieve his own Colt from the Captain. While the crew became gradually aware what had noisily happened, Capt. Peattie was treated by a crewman who had medical experience from the Boer War. Pitcairn Island, home of the Bounty mutineers, 1814. (J. Shillibeer/ State Lib. New South Wales) Able seaman Vincent Collins had shared the evening watch with Hobbs and Sears a few hours before the killing, and heard Hobbs ask second mate Nixon, “Are we going to call at Pitcairn Island?” Pitcairn was a remote rocky island in the South Pacific famously settled in 1790 by the original mutineers from the HMS Bounty, whose descendants were said to live there still over a century later. Even landlubbers like the three Americans would have learned from Boys’ Stories about the rebellion aboard the Bounty, its crew settling on Pitcairn after overthrowing Captain William Bligh. Hobbs may have pictured the island as a sanctuary where pirates might be forgiven and was disappointed in the mate’s answer that the winds would not quite allow them to “fetch it.” But not for the wind, Capt. Peattie had meant to come within five or six miles, where the islanders were known to row out and trade local fruits and vegetables with passing crews at anchor. Following the sounds of shooting, Collins encountered Hobbs as he ran downstairs, excited and out of breath (and having emptied Nixon’s gun). After he disappeared again, there was the sound of hammering from the foredeck. The other crew kept away, waiting to confront the Americans at sunrise, as the three men hurriedly built themselves a raft, stealing some provisions (as well as another sailor’s boots and an overcoat) and at least one bucket of water. The Leicester Castle was more than 300 miles off Pitcairn Island when they escaped. It was unclear whether hearing about the proximity of the island had suggested the violent plan, since Hobbs had been overheard asking if the ship would be “calling” there. According to Vincent Collins, Hobbs had once told him he had been a cowboy in Mexico, Turner said he had invalided out of the American army in the Philippines, and Sears had run away from home “to go to sea.” No one knew if any of it was true beyond the part about running away from home. Around 1:00 am they dropped their makeshift float over the port side, and the figures of three men were soon seen passing the stern; Wolz, who held the ship’s wheel, heard Hobbs saying, “Hurrah for the American flag.” Did he say anything else, Wolz would be asked, “Yes, sir. ‘All I am sorry for, I couldn’t kill every English cock-sucker aboard.’” Before vanishing, Hobbs shouted, “Take a drink at Juli’s,” referring to a Silver City mining camp saloon he and Wolz had discussed. As the Americans floated off into the dark, a dozen men went up to the poop deck with what guns they could gather on board, including Hobbs’ confiscated Colt from the Captain’s quarters. “The ship was still in the darkness,” recalled Vincent Collins. “…on hearing the voices we fired in the direction of the raft.” Lying wounded in his bunk, Capt. Peattie heard the guns on the deck. Over the coming days, the men were thought dead, given the flimsiness of their mastless raft among the large sharks and ocean swells. “It was generally supposed that the three men had been drowned,” recalled Capt. Peattie, “and I never thought they would live till morning when I heard what the raft was made of.” From a quick inventory of what was missing, their float was assumed to be about twelve feet long and four feet wide, its planks buoyed by three cork cylinders torn from the forward life boat. Peattie would note in the ship’s ‘Slop Chest Book,’ beneath an earlier record of plugs of tobacco purchased by Turner and Hobbs: ‘deserted at Sea 3 Sep.’ The men and their raft were not seen again after their escape, but a passing ship, the Howth, later spotted bonfires on Pitcairn, signaling the presence of castaways the islanders wanted removed, its captain believed. But the winds prevented the Howth from investigating more closely, as the winds also did not favor the Leicester Castle’s visiting Pitcairn to learn if the three had somehow reached it without a sail. At noon following the violent night, the body of 2nd officer Nixon was sewn inside his hammock along with an iron weight and “committed to the sea.” The wounded Capt. Peattie could not preside at the ceremony, but a week later was “healing quite nicely” without signs of blood poisoning and managed to hold on all the way to Queensland, by which time he could give a full account of the small uprising in which he nearly died. He would characterize the violence not as an act of classic mutiny (since the great majority had not rebelled), but more like piracy. The three Americans, who were barely sailors, had acted like “desperadoes of the worst class.” Newspapers would carry the story of the ‘cowboy mutineers.’ Capt. Peattie was recovered enough to command a new voyage aboard the Leicester Castle months after his near-death, accompanied by his two daughters. They left England for Vancouver in March 1903, and when the vessel put in there, the story of the “mutiny” by the Americans was revived in local newspapers. This drew the father of Ernest Sears to travel from his Oregon farm to meet the captain, and compare stories about his runaway son. After leaving Ontario, the Leicester Castle finally made a visit to Pitcairn Island, in the fall of 1903, a little over a year after the Americans’ disappearance. One of Capt. Peattie’s daughters traveling with him, Jean Oliphant Barlow, wrote a remembrance of their day-trip to Pitcairn, where the locals “sighted us from the heights of the island, and about a dozen of the men had rowed out to us laden with all manner of luscious fruits, to barter with us for any old clothes or anything in the eatable line which we could spare.” The men were dressed in cast-off naval uniforms, white trousers, and caps from their previous trades. The daughters talked their father into going ashore with him, a difficult landing because of high rocks and rolling surf. Pitcairn’s original “Bounty Bell,” was rung to herald the guests’ arrival. Jean Barlow admired the lonely island’s outbuildings (wood, thatched with leaves) and enjoyed the sweet scents of its flowers. The local women were barefoot, but wore “long, pinafore dresses falling from the neck right down to the ankle” and wanted to know how English ladies wore their hair. Capt. Peattie dined with Pitcairn’s schoolmaster, a London man who had married an islander, while the Captain’s daughters ate with a “Matron” descendant of one of the 1790 mutineers, “Miss Young,” who showed them the original Bible from the Bounty crew and signed a copy of her own history of the island. The visitors were served a variety of fruits, including tomatoes, which Miss Young had grown from cuttings given her by a passing ship’s crew. “She told us if they had only our British singing birds their island would be a Paradise,” Jean Barlow wrote. But Capt. Peattie would note something else lacking about the place: “I could learn nothing of Hobbs, Turner, or Sears.” As far as he was concerned, the story of his American highwaymen ended with their disappearance aboard their doomed, implausible raft, which had failed to reach the mutineers’ island. II. But two years after the shooting, in March 1904, one of the ship’s former crew, the German-born Christian Wolz, was traveling across Texas, looking a bit ragged but hoping to find new prospects in the West, when he claimed to have an astonishing encounter. Wolz had originally boarded with two of the Americans in San Francisco before shipping out on the Leicester Castle, and now saw a man he recognized as Turner at the depot in El Paso: “I went towards the depot,” he explained, “and I have met Turner and I said, ‘Hello,’ and he says ‘Hello.’ I says ‘How did you get here?’ ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘A schooner picked us up and brought us to San Francisco.’” Turner said he was headed for Idaho Falls, Wolz remembered, “That is all the talk I had with him.” But he also seemed to have told him that a man named Hobbs was living in Clifton, Arizona as a sheriff. When asked under oath why he ended the conversation with the mutineer, Wolz answered, “I didn’t feel like staying with him because he might have harmed me.” Months later, on Christmas day, Wolz boarded a train at Douglas, Arizona and met a middle-aged stranger named William Sparks. The two had begun discussing some shipping incident then in the news when Wolz offered his own dramatic sea tale, “I told him I was on the Leicester Castle, then he began to ask me questions about it.” He became animated when Wolz told about his running into Turner near El Paso. Sparks, it turned out, was an Arizona Ranger, and also knew about Sheriff Hobbs, but not his past. Indeed, Lee Hobbs was deputy sheriff of Graham County. The terrified Wolz had no desire ever to see the murderous Hobbs again, but word soon got out that a survivor of the Leicester Castle had turned up in Arizona. The Arizona Rangers held a grudge against Sheriff Hobbs, who had refused to hold some of their Mexican prisoners, releasing them during a recent flood; Sparks sent a cablegram to Scotland Yard, then he and his superior came to see Wolz, before arresting Hobbs in Clifton without explanation. “I first arrested him for turning those prisoners loose,” Sparks recalled on the stand. But once Hobbs was bundled into a stagecoach, he had seen a little more of his warrant. As his friends gathered near the stage window to ask the reason for his arrest, Hobbs deadpanned, “For murder on the high seas.” Hobbs was brought to a dining room in a boarding house, where it was arranged that Wolz might discreetly look him over beneath an electric light; he identified Sheriff Lee Hobbs as the mutineer by his features, chiefly “a little mole on his left cheek.” This was the W.A. Hobbs with whom he had sailed from San Francisco, the murderer from the Leicester Castle. When his accuser was pointed out to him, Hobbs thought he had a scruffy look like “a Hobo,” and noted the thin soles of his shoes. Lee Hobbs was held by the rangers for thirty days. An extradition trial followed the complaint brought by ‘His Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General’ Courtenay Walter Bennett, on behalf of the United Kingdom against “W.A. Hobbs, otherwise called and known as Lee Hobbs,” who “has been found and now is within the said Territory of Arizona.” Hobbs’s crimes included attempting to murder Capt. Peattie, “a human being in the peace of God and of His said Britannic Majesty.” The Consul-General endured a stagecoach adventure from San Francisco through the Arizona Territory to attend the trial in Phoenix, in April 1905. It was said to be the most dramatic event yet in that city, and attended by dozens of Hobbs’ cowboy friends who wore their guns to show support. Despite Wolz’s testimony that this was the same Hobbs he’d seen during the violent voyage of the Leicester Castle, several witnesses suggested alibis for the sheriff; local newspaper stories cited arrests made by Sheriff Lee Hobbs at the time of the mutiny, and the man who ran the San Francisco boarding house where W.A. Hobbs had stayed before joining the Leicester Castle said the deputy sheriff was not the man he had known. (He then accepted drinks from Hobbs’s cowboy friends the rest of the afternoon.) While the killer was recalled as “smooth shaven,” Sheriff Hobbs testified about the history of his mustache, which he claimed to have worn all through the dates in question. Likewise, when asked if he had a mole on his face, the clinching mark for Wolz’s identification, he denied it, as did the judge inspecting him from the bench. Capt. Peattie and Vincent Collins were summoned to a Bow Street police station in London, where they again gave their accounts of the deadly voyage. The Captain identified Hobbs’s revolver presented to him as the Colt he had held in his cabin and went over the ship’s log books to fact-check his memory, which seemed to need little refreshing about the violence. Collins also recalled the shootings and recited what little background he had gleaned about the Americans. Capt. Peattie still bore the bullets from his ordeal when he set out from England, headed for the trial in Arizona, where he was eager to make the long journey to identify the killer of his second mate. The Captain was expected to be the last, most important witness. “The Captain and two members of the [Leicester Castle] crew are now on their way to America,” announced the London Weekly Dispatch in late April 1905, “where they will be confronted by the Sheriff of Graham’s County.” But the Captain was still en route to New York, where he would begin the overland part of the trek to Phoenix, when the judge pronounced Hobbs innocent. Had Sheriff Hobbs not had the sort of job where he made arrests that were reported in the newspapers, he might have been extradited for trial in England. Lee Hobbs got on with his life following the ruling, but he also hired a lawyer from Tucson, who gathered together the trial transcripts and documentary evidence (some 700 pages) to prepare for a future damages suit against the British government. The materials were sent to the Territorial government at Phoenix to forward to the US State Department for Hobbs’s lawsuit. But this case was never brought before Hobbs died of consumption in 1914. It is not hard to see why this story sank into obscurity, once the Arizona Hobbs and murderer Hobbs were ruled not to be the same man. As mutiny tales go, it was minor, since only three of the crew went over the side, and the Judge’s later ruling in Phoenix deprived the high seas drama of its denoument. I spent several months trying to prove poor Sheriff Hobbs guilty, receiving research help from archivists in Arizona, Washington, and Liverpool to gather all the materials from the trial and the account by Capt. Peattie’s daughter of their visit to Pitcairn Island, where the escaped Americans were not found. Any movie of the episode would make Sheriff Hobbs guilty, for the sake of the story, but he wasn’t. The Judge was right, which makes it less likely that fellow mutineer James Turner survived in order for Wolz to blunder into him on an El Paso street. If Wolz was bribed or bullied by the Rangers into cooperation, Turner may have been added as a segue connecting one Hobbs to the other, against whom the Rangers already held a considerable grudge. In fact, rather than plucked from the ocean, the three Americans may have ended life just as Capt. Peattie imagined, even hoped, in his less charitable moments: not lasting long enough on their feeble raft to exhaust their inadequate supplies, they were quickly drowned by the waves and taken by the sharks. As he noted, none of them had been much of a sailor. View the full article

Many noir tales feature infidelity as the motive behind mayhem and murder. More than a few of my favorite novels, films and songs have been motivated by cheating partners whose adulterous lust leads to broken hearts, cracked heads, stolen money or dead bodies. A few of the cheating narratives I’ve admired over the years include the Billy Paul song “Me & Mrs. Jones,” the steamy flick Body Heat and James M. Cain’s masterful debut novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Cain’s hardboiled story was about a miserable woman named Cora Papadakis who has an affair with java gulping hobo Frank Chambers, who’d recent been thrown off a “hay truck.” Click to view slideshow. Minutes after meeting him, Cora’s husband Nick Papadakis hired Frank to work at the gas station outside their diner Twin Oaks Tavern. Nick was a cool guy from Greece who had relocated to rural California to make his fortune in the world. He loved wine, money and perhaps his wife, but Cora viewed him as the barrier that kept her from freedom. She soon recruits Frank, who was in lust with her at first sight, to help murder Nick. Cain’s text was as naughty as it was intriguing, and The Postman Always Rings Twice has been adapted several times on screen and stage. The 1946 noir starring Lana Turner and John Garfield has long been a respected landmark while the 1981 remake starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, directed by Bob Rafelson with a screenplay by David Mamet, was my least liked film of the decade. While in the first film Cora was an alluring earth angel (Lana Turner literally had a sanctified glow) who became a femme fatale, Jessica Lange’s portrayal was grittier, sweatier and hornier. In fact, the entire film was grimy. “They took a classic and turned it into pornographic trash,” Lana Turner told Phil Donahue in 1982. James M. Cain was an Annapolis, Maryland native who had worked several jobs before becoming a middle-aged novelist; he was forty-two when The Postman Always Rings Twice was published. Cain soon became the king of infidelity noir: two-timing spouses and the murders that followed. A former journalist and screenwriter, his writing style was raw, but poetic with a side of erotic fetishism thrown in. Cain would go on to write a few other infidelity masterworks including Double Indemnity (1936) and Mildred Pierce (1941), but it was Postman… that I read first. I bought the book after peeping in the window of the original Mysterious Bookshop on 56th Street in 1984. There was a special display window to commemorate the book’s 50th anniversary. Having seen the original film at the Thalia months before, I was ready to dive deep into Cain’s bleak world filled with various levels of betrayal. I devoured the paperback in a couple of subway rides between work in midtown and my Harlem home. While earlier that year I’d gone through a Hemingway/Fitzgerald phase, two writers who we’re taught from a young age represented the genuine American voice, I was more drawn to Cain’s brutal world. Though Cain wasn’t the first to write world-weary, cynical and lustful crime fiction, his refined style of viciousness inspired countless others. Years before he too became a novelist, journalist/ cultural critic Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1969 introduction to the collection Cain X 3, “Cain was one of those writers who first amazed me and delighted me when I was old enough to start looking around and seeing what was being done in American literature…I can see how complex Cain’s famous ‘fast-paced,’ ‘hard-boiled’ technique really is.” Back when I was a teenager, knowing the cheating ways of my father, having witnessed mom curse his name and my stepmother curse him out, I vowed to never inflict that kind of emotional pain on any woman I loved. In 1984, when I still had morals and was guided by what I was taught at Catholic school St. Catherine of Genoa, I thought I would never put myself in the same sort of compromising situation Frank Chambers found himself in with a married woman. Certainly, what kind of man can be so blinded by lust that he’d go against the seventh commandment and sleep with another man’s woman or cheat on his own? That self-righteousness lasted until the following year. Like many nice boys who grow-up to be messed-up men, I slipped and became a cheater. It’s funny how real life can turn into a noir novel (or film) real quick. Ironically, my first cheat happened across the street from the Mysterious Bookshop at a coffee shop called Miss Brooks, where I worked and had an affair with a married manager. The last occurred in the fall of 2000, sixty-six years after the first printing of Cain’s novel, when I had a summer fling with a woman named Elizabeth that began in August and ended badly one night in a SoHo restaurant after she was two hours late for dinner. Elizabeth owned and operated a movie website and I was a pop culture critic who wrote for cultural rags. Two months after we split, I ran into her at a screening for a biopic about Vincent Van Gogh, one of my favorite painters. Minutes before the film began Elizabeth was escorted down the aisle by a red jacket wearing usher. Stopping at the row where I was sitting, she glanced over and smiled. Taking a seat next to me, she blurted, “I didn’t plan this.” “It would’ve taken a lot to do that,” I replied. “Plus, I don’t mind seeing you.” “Well, that’s a relief. Have you missed me?” Just as she asked the question the house lights dimmed, the curtains opened and some of the other critics were shushing people before the projector started flickering. Starting at exactly 7 pm, the next two hours was a brilliant mediation on madness, art, brotherhood and sacrifice. The tragic brilliance of Van Gogh’s life and work made me weep. There were still tears in my eyes when the lights were turned on. Elizabeth glanced over, but remained quiet. Like the rest of the audience she was stunned silent by the masterwork we’d just experienced. We stood at the same time. Liz was about 5’5″, but in heels she could almost look me in the eye. “Are you going to the after-party?” she asked. “I hadn’t planned on it, but if you want to hangout for a while, I’m down.” “Plus the food and liquor is free,” she said laughing. “That’s my favorite price.” Outside yellow cabs lined the block. The Supper Club, the midtown venue where the party was being held, wasn’t far. We settled in the cab and I glanced over at Liz and felt a shiver. She looked beautiful, elegant and smart as the girls with glasses that I usually dated. “You look marvelous,” I said, quoting Billy Crystal mimicking Fernando Lamas on Saturday Night Live. Liz smiled. “Thank you. That’s kind of you.” I smiled. “You don’t have to be so formal Liz, loosen up.” We arrived at the club in 15-minutes. Three vodkas and Red Bulls later we were dancing wildly to “Come On Eileen.” At that point Red Bull was a relatively new drink in America, and neither Liz nor I realized the cocktail would make us both intoxicated and hyper. However, when the DJ played that MTV staple from twenty years before, we lost our minds. Hours later I was awoken by the morning sun beaming through a window and the soothing vocals of Bill Withers singing “Lovely Day.” Slowly opening my eyes, I discovered myself in an unfamiliar bedroom wearing only my underwear and a black t-shirt. Glancing around, I saw a picture of Liz on the dresser and slapped my forehead like the people in those old V8 juice commercials. Since we’d broken up Liz had moved to Jersey City, but how I’d gotten from the after-party to the 20th floor of a newly built residential skyscraper was a mystery that was soon replaced by the smell of eggs and bacon frying down the hall. Seconds later Liz walked into the room and smiled. She looked ravishing in the morning light. “Oh good,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you were awake. The food is almost ready and I brought you a cup of coffee.” She sat the flowered mug on the night table and kissed me on the forehead. A part of me wondered if I’d been drugged. “What happened last night?” “What do you mean? “I mean, how did I get here?” “You don’t remember? I called a car for us. We came here, and made love on the living room floor.” “Like animals?” I laughed. “Yes, like animals.” Liz laughed too. “Then we came into the bedroom, made love again and went to sleep.” Though I’d been drinking since I was a sneaky teenager bar hopping in Baltimore, I had never blacked out nor woke-up in another state. Oh well, things could’ve been worse I reasoned. After breakfast Liz insisted that I walk with her to the mall a few blocks away. On the way there we passed a few abandoned factories that would soon be converted into condos. A decade before, it was obviously someone’s dream to turn working-class Jersey City into a luxury branded outer borough to Manhattan, and by the early 2000s it was progressing at a steady pace. Afterwards we went to the promenade, sat on a new bench and talked. By the time we stood-up an hour later, Liz and I were a couple again. All was lovey dovey for a few weeks as we walked around looking like unmarried honeymooners. Everything was fine until Liz suddenly announced in November that she was going to Chicago to attend a business conference. “I’ll only be gone for a few days,” she promised. I had no reason not to believe her. She left the following day. A week passed and while we spoke on the phone every day, Liz was still in Chicago. Considering that it was her hometown I figured she was spending time with friends and family. However, one afternoon I received a call from our mutual friend Shawn, another Chicago transplant living in New York. After we caught up, he said, “I wanted to ask you…are you still dating Liz?” “Yeah, man. Why?” “Well, I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I saw Liz at a business conference and she was with her ex-boyfriend. Some New York City dude she dated a few years back. They were all hugged up, telling me they got back together. In my mind I’m thinking, ‘Does Mike know?’” “Mike didn’t know shit, but thanks for telling me.” After hanging-up, I flopped back on the couch and began humming TLC’s infidelity anthem “Creep.” I had heard from yet another friend about Liz’s cheating ways in the past, but I was still surprised that it happened to me. Though shocked, I wasn’t mad. A part of me thought it was kind of funny that, after making such a big deal about our break-up, she’d cheat on me so soon after we reconciled. Hours after learning of Liz’s betrayal I went out with my friend Anna Silverman, a publicist at a prominent rap/R&B record company. She brought her co-worker Terry, a pretty light-skinned woman who had the nerd appeal that I loved. We drank dirty martinis and after the third I asked, “Is it okay if I kiss you?” Terry smiled. “You’re fresh, but it’s all right.” I leaned forward and started with a peck on the lips before diving deeper. Although I didn’t count the minutes our tongues were entangled, I believe we set some kind of record. By the end of the night I had a new girlfriend. Three days later Liz finally returned to her apartment. We spoke a few times on the phone, but I never revealed that I knew of her reconnection with the old boyfriend. That night I met her in the city at a restaurant in Tribeca. We sat in a booth and ordered our meal. We chit chatted about this and that until Liz finally said, “Michael, I’ve started dating my old boyfriend again. I’m afraid we’re going to have to break-up.” “Really? Can’t you just cheat on him with me?” She looked as though she was considering it, but changed her mind. “No, I don’t think that’ll work.” “It’s alright. I’ve started dating someone else myself.” “Wait a minute,” Liz screamed in an indignantly stern voice. “You’ve been cheating on me?” “You cheated first.” “Yes, but you didn’t know that.” “Actually, I found out before you returned and started messing around with my new woman that night.” “You have a new girl? That was fast.” I assumed Liz felt cheated because I wasn’t mad or wounded. Perhaps she’d wanted me to scream or cry or stomp my feet like a crazy person. “Are you sure you weren’t dating her before I left for Chicago?” “You have a lot of nerve. You tell me you’re going away for a few days and that turned into weeks. Then I hear you’re back with what’s-his-name, but now you’re trying to turn this around on me. Give me a break.” Neither of us ordered dinner and after one more cocktail for the road we departed. There was a full moon hovering overhead as I watched her high heel walked towards the World Trade Centers to the trains to New Jersey that ran beneath the gleaming towers. Months later my telephone rang. I answered without looking at the caller ID and was surprised to hear Liz’s jovial voice. “I just wanted to tell you that my boyfriend proposed to me a few days ago. I’m getting married.” “That’s wonderful, but what makes you think that I care?” “Well, we’re going to see each other at that screening tonight at the Tribeca Grand and I didn’t want you acting weird when you saw my ring finger.” “Men don’t check out ring fingers. Really, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. You know, I’m a bit oblivious.” That night, before the screening, there was a cocktail reception. Liz and her husband to be strolled in looking sharp. She introduced me to the guy and I wondered if he knew our history. Seconds later she was waving her fingers in front of my face as though she was a hand model or a magician’s assistant. “Congratulations to both of you,” I said. He thanked me and then excused himself to go to the bar. Liz waved the diamond in front of my face a few more times until I growled, “Do it again and I’m going to cut off your hand.” “Damn you’re mean?” Liz chuckled. “But that was a good line. You can use that in your novel.” “You think so?” A few months passed before I spoke or saw Liz again. But, as luck would have it, I overheard her talking on her cell one evening at the Strand Bookstore and I was instantly excited. She tried to shatter my heart, but I still liked her. “Hey Liz.” Startled, she turned around quickly and dropped her book in the process. It was then that I noticed that her sparkling diamond was gone. “Where’s your ring?” Liz looked at her hand as though for the first time. “Oh, I broke up with him. He was cheating on me.” Without meaning to, I burst out laughing. “I’m glad you think it’s so damn funny.” “I’m sorry. It’s just ironic. I assume you returned the ring.” “No I didn’t return it, I lost it.” “Lost it?” “It slipped off my finger one morning in the sink and went down the drain.” “Sounds like someone put voodoo on you. Or maybe it was karma.” Liz grinned weakly. “Are you still with your new girl?” “Yeah, we’re still together, but that doesn’t mean that you and I can’t go out for a drink one of these days.” She smiled, I winked and we both knew what I meant. Still, while flirtations came easily, taking that gamble a third time was the last thing either of us wanted to chance. View the full article

There’s nothing quite like a cozy mystery novel for me. From the charming small-town settings to the quirky cast of characters, there’s just something about this sub-genre that always leaves me feeling warm and fuzzy inside. But you know what my absolute favorite thing about cozies is? The amateur sleuths. That’s right, forget about your typical hard-boiled detectives and seasoned police officers. In a cozy mystery, everyday people are the ones who take action to solve crimes in their hometowns. Whether it’s a talented baker, a curious librarian, or a spunky grandmother with a knack for trouble, these characters bring so much heart and personality to the stories they inhabit. They’re relatable, flawed, and always get to the bottom of a mystery. And as a writer, there’s nothing more satisfying than crafting a sleuth who’s just as determined as they are endearing. So if you’re looking for a mystery sub-genre that’s full of heart and personality, look no further than the cozy mystery. Remember, the most effective heroes in solving crimes can sometimes be the unlikeliest ones. A few years ago, social media was awash with phrases like Boss Lady, Girl Boss, and Lady Boss. These terms encouraged individuals, regardless of their profession, to strive for greatness. It made me reflect on the amateur sleuths in cozy mysteries. As someone who has been an avid reader of these mysteries for over twenty years, I realized that the protagonists in my favorite cozy mysteries were nothing short of Boss Sleuths. Of course, some may dismiss these amateur detectives as mere busybodies, but I see them in a different light. They are brave, intelligent, and resourceful individuals who take on the formidable task of solving a murder without the help of formal training or access to resources available to law enforcement. It’s these qualities that make them true Boss Sleuths in my eyes. Amateur sleuths are not just nosy parkers, they are fierce and determined women who will stop at nothing to uncover the truth and serve justice. They’re willing to put everything on the line, from their friendships and family relationships to their careers and social status, and even their own safety, in pursuit of finding justice. These women are not content to sit back and let an innocent person be falsely accused, nor will they let a victim go without justice simply because others don’t see their worth. They are passionate and relentless, with a deep sense of purpose that drives them forward. For these women, the search for truth and justice is not just a hobby, it’s a calling. When you’re writing a cozy mystery series, the first character you create, which is usually the amateur sleuth, is the backbone of your entire story. That’s why I’ve spent countless hours developing my amateur sleuths. I’m going to be living and breathing these characters for a long time to come. In fact, I’ve created three different sleuths over the years, each with their own unique quirks and traits. But here’s the thing: crafting a memorable and engaging amateur sleuth is easier said than done. That’s why I’m excited to share with you my top three tips for creating a sleuth that readers will love. These are the same tips I’ve used to create my beloved characters, and I know they’ll help you too. So buckle up, grab a notebook, and get ready to create your own cozy mystery sleuth. Tip # 1 – Suspect everyone To solve a murder case, it’s important to let go of any assumptions and consider all possible suspects, including those who appear innocent. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. After all, somebody is lying, and it’s your job to find out who. Tip # 2 – Learn when to say “yes” To really get close to your suspects, you need to learn when to say “yes” to any and all opportunities to hang out with them. Whether it’s a community event or just grabbing a coffee, getting to know your suspects can be key to getting them to let their guard down and reveal some juicy information. Tip # 3 – Question everyone’s motive Of course, not everyone is going to spill the beans willingly. That’s when you need to start questioning everyone’s motives. Everyone has secrets, and some of those secrets might just be motive enough for murder. It’s not always going to be easy, and some of those conversations might be downright uncomfortable, but if you want to solve the case, you need to be willing to go there. I hope these tips are helpful. Creating my own Boss Sleuth has been an incredible journey, one that’s allowed me to explore the depths of my imagination and create a character who’s truly a force to be reckoned with. Whether it’s my newest protagonist, Mallory Monroe, or any of the other amazing amateur sleuths out there, one quote always comes to mind: “Women are like tea bags – you never know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.” These words, often attributed to the legendary Eleanor Roosevelt, perfectly capture the spirit and tenacity of these amazing women. So go forth and let your imagination run wild. Create a character who’s truly unforgettable, and who will keep readers on the edge of their seats with every turn of the page. After all, with a little bit of determination and a whole lot of creativity, anything is possible. *** View the full article

Heather Levy is the author of Walking on Needles and a nonfiction series on human sexuality and BDSM, as well as the forthcoming Hurt for Me. She lives in Oklahoma, where her novels are set. In Hurt for Me, a survivor of abuse finds empowerment and financial independence in her career as a dungeon master, but her new life is threatened when one of her clients goes missing, just after telling her about a private party with no rules—and no safe words. In Hurt for Me, Heather Levy draws a stark difference between the consensual, safe practices of BDSM and the dangerous behaviors of those who would take advantage. When we were given the opportunity to interview Levy as part of revealing the cover of her new book, I decided to ask her craft advice for writing about kink responsibly. Molly Odintz: What is your advice for writing sex? Heather Levy: My biggest piece of advice for writing about sex is to go for it without fear of getting it wrong. When a sex scene is highly orchestrated on the page, it can read as inauthentic and robotic. Sex isn’t perfect, and that can be reflected in scenes while still maintaining the steam factor. I love seeing slight stumbles when two characters are having sex because it creates a sense of intimacy. I want to be in that space with the characters, in their heads as they’re experiencing each other and all the emotions—lust, trepidation, embarrassment, etc.—they may feel. MO: What were your considerations when it came to portraying the kink community? HL: Anytime I’m writing about kink, my one goal is to present it as authentically as possible. As a member of the kink community, I want to show BDSM and other aspects of kink as a normal part of people’s sexuality. In the case of Hurt for Me, my protagonist is a single mom and business owner. She worries about trying to be a good parent and keeping afloat in a struggling economy just like anyone else. Her love of kink is only one layer of her life, as it is with many within the kink community. Interview continues below cover image. MO: How has kink been treated by mainstream culture in the past? And how do you think that’s changed over the past decade or so? HL: I cringe every time I read a book or watch a show or film displaying kink as a character flaw. How many times do we see a sadist in a film or show as the “good guy”? Or a submissive person who’s also strong and kicks ass? Mainstream culture is still stuck on the Madonna-whore complex where the chaste characters get the gold, and the sexualized characters are kicked to the curb or murdered off. Think most crime TV shows. But I do believe we’re seeing improvement in how kink’s presented in mainstream culture. One show I loved is Netflix’s “How to Build a Sex Room.” It’s not only kink positive but informative for people who are new to those experiences. I sometimes long for the days of films like Belle de Jour, Bound, or Blue Velvet to help offset the Fifty Shades franchise, but there have been more recent kinky films like The Duke of Burgundy and even the fun Korean rom-com Love and Leashes that give me hope. MO: Who are the authors who’ve written about sex work best, do you think? HL: I absolutely adore Tiffany Reisz’s writing. Her Original Sinners series is sexy, funny, and portrays kink and sex workers in an authentic manner. You really get to know and root for her characters throughout the series, and—whew—is it steamy! I also love A.R. Torre’s work in The Girl in Nowhere she gives readers one of the most unconventional sex workers I’ve ever read who also happens to kick ass. There are some newer writers I’m also excited about, including Briana Una McGuckin, whose debut On Good Authority combines two of my favorite things: kink and the Victorian era. The build-up was so hot I thought the pages would burst into flames! MO: What’s your advice for balancing between character building and moving the plot along? “Kink is about voicing your desires without shame, and that alone can be empowering.” HL: To me, it’s important to give readers some breathing room during a major plot point. This is also a natural moment to allow characters to react and process what’s happening in the book before bouncing on to the next scene. Part of character building is throwing hurdles at the protagonist and seeing what they’ll decide do and how they’ll overcome them. It’s in that decision-making where the plot can progress while still building layers with the character. MO: Your novel talks a lot about women and agency—losing it, wrestling it back. What were you thinking about with control, and power, and women’s experiences, when you were writing the novel? HL: I thought a lot about what’s been going on in society within the last few years and how women’s bodily autonomy is being stripped away. More and more, women are having to find creative and effective ways to take back agency, whether it’s within their own intimate relationships, in the workplace, or getting involved in politics. Kink, when consensual, is such a powerful way for women to take control of their sexuality. It doesn’t matter if they lean submissive or dominant or somewhere in between. Kink is about voicing your desires without shame, and that alone can be empowering. MO: What’s a question you wish you got asked more? HL: Do you think AI will eventually kill publishing if it continues to go unchecked? My answer: yes. I do have a fear of being a new author and having my lifelong dreams crushed by AI-generated stories becoming bestsellers, which is a real thing happening today. Society needs writers, not computers, to reflect our experiences as humans. *** View the full article