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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

The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his journey through the history of modern New York City, this time taking on the 1970s, as the cast of characters from Harlem Shuffle get swept up in political action, civil unrest, corrupt policing, the rise of Blaxploitation culture, and more. It’s a rich backdrop for Whitehead’s powerful human dramas, and he paints a vivid portrait of people moving between the straight and the crooked world, just trying to get by. –DM Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books) What would you do to be part of the most elite language academy ever established? And what would you be willing to keep secret? The Centre follows a struggling translator who learns of a place where people can go to become completely fluent in a new language in mere days of effort. She is determined to reap the rewards, but shocked when she begins to find out the dark secrets underpinning the secretive institution. A vicious and entertaining speculative satire of late-stage capitalism. –MO John Milas, The Militia House (Henry Holt) In this military horror novel, a rare but hopefully growing subgenre, American soldiers stationed near the ruins of an old Soviet outpost in Afghanistan find themselves in the midst of strange happenings, unexplained disappearances, and disturbing visitors. Milas is a wordsmith, and this novel is as haunting as it is impressive. –MO 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 Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (Viking) If the lovers at the heart of Casablanca had met about 30 years later, and had a kid, and then that kid and his dad started a business, then the story might have gone something like Dwyer Murphy’s upcoming New England beach thriller, The Stolen Coast. Murphy’s lawyer hero and his retired spy dad have an unusual business helping people on the run, using the legions of homes left abandoned outside of the summer season. When an ex-girlfriend shows up with a plan for a diamond heist, the risks of an already-dangerous job go through the roof, but the rewards may just be big enough to be worth it. –MO 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 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 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 Kelly J. Ford, The Hunt (Thomas & Mercer) An Easter egg hunt in Presley, Arkansas is the unlikely springboard for a serial killer’s diabolical plot in Kelly J. Ford’s newest standout thriller. Ford takes all that small-town rumor and agitation and burns it down to its purest form, where every incident is loaded with significance and the race to untangle truth from supposition becomes almost impossible. Ford pulls off the high-wire act with coolness and style to spare. –DM James Lee Burke, Flags on the Bayou (Atlantic Monthly Press) James Lee Burke trains his formidable talents on a sweeping epic of post Civil War bayou country, and the result is every bit as complex and searching as you would expect. The story involves women on the run, men fleeing their demons, and a country in tatters. The rest is well worth the read to find out. Burke is contemporary crime fiction’s reigning poet, and his work remains absolutely electric. –DM View the full article

The most powerful piece of true crime–related art I’d seen in years was tucked away in a difficult-to-access corner of a downtown New York City museum. This was not what I expected at the spring 2022 New Museum retrospective for the artist Faith Ringgold, a formidable educator and activist best known for showstopper quilts that present visceral juxtapositions of major facets of Black American history. The quilts were, justifiably, worth the museum visit. But my attention, at the time and since, kept returning to that corner, near a stairwell connecting the museum’s third and fourth floors, where the Atlanta Children and the paired Save Our Children in Atlanta and The Screaming Woman sculptures had been secreted away. Atlanta Children, on the right, was structured as a chess board, but these were no typical pieces. Each depicted a Black child in distress or pain, or dead. On the left was a female sculpture (the aforementioned Screaming Woman) clad in a green dress, a button adorning her right lapel, holding a poster Ringgold had created listing the names of twenty-eight boys, girls, and young men. “This is a commemoration to all those wantonly slain in the dawning of life,” Ringgold wrote. “Make it impossible for the sins of hate and indifference to persist in America. Stop child murders!” These words and images resonated as viscerally with me in 2022 as they must have with every person who has viewed them since their creation in 1981. Ringgold was making art out of the Atlanta child murders, one of the most confounding serial crimes in American memory, a story that resists the usual constraints of true crime storytelling—and yet inspired one of the foundational texts of this ongoing true crime moment, whose title and trajectory are in turn the inspiration for this anthology. — Black boys and girls were disappearing and turning up murdered in and around Atlanta. Between 1979 and 1981, as answers proved frustratingly elusive in tandem with the rising body count, parents of the murdered children demanded justice, because it was becoming all too clear there would be none. The subsequent killings of two men, Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne, both in their twenties, led to the arrest of twenty-three-year-old Wayne Williams, tied to their deaths by considerable circumstantial physical evidence. But even though police immediately named Williams as the prime suspect in the child murders—murders which appeared to stop with his conviction for the killings of Cater and Payne in 1982—he was never officially charged with those crimes. Larger issues grew more prominent in the intervening decades: Why hadn’t Atlanta police taken the child murders more seriously, and earlier? How had systemic inequalities, from asymmetrical economic status to homelessness and, above all, racism, influenced the trajectory, and the mistakes, of the investigation? More than forty years later, after countless treatments in books, podcasts, documentaries, and scripted television series, the Atlanta child murders remain a cipher among criminal cases. The lingering lack of total resolution highlights how deeply the system failed the murder victims and their families. This is not, however, because of what remains unknown: it is because of what is known, is evident in plain sight, and still denied wholesale. No wonder the celebrated writer James Baldwin felt called to explore the Atlanta child murders, first in a long essay for Playboy, and then in The Evidence of Things Not Seen, published in 1985, two years before his death. Baldwin was two decades removed from the height of his celebrity, when The Fire Next Time (1963) had made him the philosopher-king of the civil rights movement, whose work was supposed to bring order out of mounting chaos, and who was unfairly expected to alleviate white guilt and offer them hope as a salve. But by the early 1980s, America had soured on Baldwin. Readers viewed his later novels and nonfiction as downers, as speaking truths that were no longer fashionable, no longer palatable, no longer a conduit for idealism. As Hilton Als wrote in 1998, “Baldwin’s fastidious thought process and his baroque sentences suddenly seemed hopelessly outdated, at once self-aggrandizing and ingratiating.” Backlashes against progress, and the rise of Reaganite Republican politics, prevailed. Baldwin still spoke in his own tongue, still called out the essential disparities. But younger generations found greater literary kinship with the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara. Searching for different truths blinded people to what was right in front of them: that Baldwin still had the fire, still was nowhere close to the end of the line. This change in attitude about Baldwin may explain why the initial critical response to The Evidence of Things Not Seen was one of widespread bafflement. Baldwin had no interest in adhering to a typical true crime narrative, or even traditional narratives at all. His lambasting of the Atlanta Police Department and of the city’s governmental bodies was a song on repeated refrain, but most people just wanted to turn the music off. His reporting was introspective: while he did visit crime scenes and bore witness to the loved ones left behind, Baldwin ultimately concluded that he could not impose himself upon the parents of the murdered children after they had already suffered such grievous and continuing losses. What baffled people then makes far more sense now in a society loosed from anything resembling order and of a consensus reality. The Evidence of Things Not Seen has rightly grown in stature over time, reconsidered as a forerunner for other important works that showed how crime is woven into the fabric of society, how the legal system is built to fail millions of the marginalized, and how prioritizing collective voices can supersede traditional narratives about perpetrators. As Baldwin wrote in the book’s preface, the Atlanta child murders ultimately created a campaign of sustained terror, and because the totality of that emotion is so great, “terror cannot be remembered. One blots it out.” It is not the terror of death, but rather “the terror of being destroyed.” That palpable sense of fear permeates every interaction Baldwin has as he grapples, once more, with “having once been a Black child in a white country.” It is not the evidence of what is unseen, but rather what society still refuses to see. When Lady Justice is willfully blind, how damaging are the costs and how irreparable is the harm? As both Faith Ringgold and James Baldwin knew too well, crime has always been a catalyst for greater pain, and no part of the pursuit of justice could alleviate it. — The past few years have borne perpetual witness to seismic changes that continue to rock the globe: the COVID-19 pandemic; protests against racial injustice, and then a vicious backlash; right-wing extremism and the cancer that is white supremacy; increasingly oscillating temperatures thanks to climate change; the obliteration of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights; and the distortion of reality put in sharp focus by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Most of these major events were shocking, but surprises they were not. They were evidence of what was visible to anyone bothering to pay attention. Denial, however, is a more potent aphrodisiac than looking reality squarely in the eye. It is far easier to cast the perpetrator of a mass shooting, for example, as a lone wolf in the throes of mental derangement rather than a cog in the spinning wheel of more cohesive and reprehensible ideologies firmly rooted in bigotry and conspiracy theory. True crime cannot be divorced from society because crime is a permanent reflection and culmination of what ails society. And while collective interest in true crime has only grown since the first season of Serial in 2014, so too has it morphed into something larger and more troubling, reflecting the acceleration of what we cannot look away from. Evidence of Things Seen—of course the title is an homage to Baldwin, the Jeremiah of the latter half of the twentieth century—is divided into three parts. “What We Reckon With” examines events of the past few years, as well as the precipitating factors that catalyzed those events. Racial injustices past and present are examined by Pulitzer Prize winner Wesley Lowery in his searching portrait of a 1980s-era lynching, and by Samantha Schuyler, chronicling the brief life and murder of Black Lives Matter activist Toyin Salau. Canadian writer Brandi Morin delves into the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, specifically in California but universally applicable to North America, while Justine van der Leun investigates the continuing failure to treat as victims rather than perpetrators those who endure intimate partner violence and kill their abusers. White-collar crime, and the federal government’s steadfast refusal to punish those who engage in it, gets the full treatment by Michael Hobbes, and Atlanta merits the cruel spotlight once more through May Jeong’s powerful account of the city’s 2021 spa shootings, its effect on Asian communities, and the larger history of exclusion and xenophobia. “The True Crime Stories We Tell” gives space to critical examinations of the genre and those who helped shape it. Amanda Knox takes back her own narrative and voice in unforgettable fashion, while Diana Moskovitz and Lara Bazelon convey the importance, complications, and damage done by the work of Miami police reporter and author Edna Buchanan, and Baltimore journalist and television showrunner David Simon. The ever-growing interdependence between true crime and those who consume it, and what happens when amateur participation becomes something more sinister, gets a full airing by RF Jurjevics. The final section, “Shards of Justice,” offers some paths forward, both for our deeply fissured legal system and for the true crime genre itself. Amelia Schonbek examines a case of restorative justice with unbounded empathy, while Keri Blakinger, one of the finest criminal justice reporters working today, gives an inside look at death row prisoners finding solace and comfort in a radio station that’s specifically targeted to them. Sophie Haigney’s moving letter to the child of a victim of gun violence, whose death she witnessed, refracts and upends expectations, while Mallika Rao finds greater meaning, even hope, in an unfathomable murder story. All fourteen of these pieces, as well as Rabia Chaudry’s incisive introduction, reflect true crime’s shift from providing answers to asking more questions. As a whole, this anthology is a testament to the discomfort we live in, and must continue to reckon with, in order to hold the true crime genre to higher ethical standards and goals. It is our duty to take the evidence of what we see, tell the truth, and strive for better. ___________________________________ From Evidence of Things Seen by Sarah Weinman. Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Weinman. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers View the full article

I’ve often likened the writing of a crime novel to a stand-up comedy performance and I still believe that they have much in common, for me, at any rate. As a writer of commercial fiction I need to engage my reader quickly. I feel compelled to strive for this, largely because I require that same early engagement when I am reading a novel. It doesn’t need to be a crash-bang-wallop bit of action, a killer hook or an irresistible cliffhanger. Sometimes it’s just a voice or a character; something that teases and draws me in. But there needs to be something in those first few pages demanding that I read on. The same is certainly true when it comes to performing stand-up. Back when I was doing just that, I couldn’t just amble on to the stage at the Comedy Store and say to the audience, “Stick with me folks, I get funny in about ten minutes.” To be fair, it did usually take me about that long… There is also a striking parallel in terms of structure, because I’ve always felt that many crime novels – thrillers, certainly – are structured in exactly the same way as jokes. There are set-ups and punchlines and the success of these are dependent on precision timing, on the moments when key information is revealed. The performer/writer misdirects the audience, leading them to think they know exactly what is about to happen before they get hit with a sucker punch from a completely unthought of direction. Think of that stunning moment at the end of The Silence Of The Lambs. The SWAT team descend on the house of the man they believe to be the serial killer, while Clarice Starling is hundreds of miles away tying up a few loose ends. The SWAT team ring the doorbell and we cut to the killer’s lair where he hears the doorbell. That is the moment when the reader is sold the dummy. We follow the killer up the stairs, butterflies flitting around as he approaches the front door. In a moment of unbearable tension, he opens it and…it’s Clarice Starling! The SWAT team are at the wrong house and she – God help her – is at the right one. It’s a stone-cold classic punchline, albeit a rather dark one. There has always been a degree of humour in the crime novels I’ve written, because there has to be. I simply cannot bear to read or watch anything that doesn’t contain some lighter moments because not only would that be unbearable and bleak, it would be unrealistic in the extreme. Life contains darkness and light. I would actually go further and suggest that it is the very co-existence of these seeming opposites that define human existence. Blimey, this is getting a little heavy…we’ll need a joke in a minute. Don’t worry, there’s a cracker coming very soon… So yes, there is some (usually dark) humour in my Tom Thorne novels, but my new book, The Last Dance is the start of a series featuring Detective Declan Miller in which those lighter moments are very much to the fore. Of course, they are used to counterpoint or comment upon grief, pain and loss (all the old favourites) but there are rather more of them than might be found in earlier books. So, apologies in advance but I’ve finally given in to the comedic instincts I’ve been stifling all these years and pushed the boat out, having first filled it with whoopee cushions, stink bombs and Christmas cracker jokes. To be serious (for a moment, anyway) where there are jokes, I hope that many of them are somewhat more profound than that. I firmly believe that some jokes can be very serious indeed or at the very least, thought-provoking. I’m currently on tour in the UK promoting The Last Dance and as part of my presentation I’ve taken to telling the following joke, which I’ve traced back from Jerry Seinfeld, via Ricky Gervais and David Baddiel, to a prominent Jewish academic. I did promise you a joke, didn’t I? A Holocaust survivor finally dies of old age and goes to heaven, where he meets God. The Holocaust survivor says to God, “Can I tell you a Holocaust joke?” “OK,” God says. So, the Holocaust survivor tells God the joke. “Sorry,” God says. “I don’t think that’s very funny.” The Holocaust survivor looks at God and shrugs, and says, “Oh well, I guess you had to be there.” Now that’s a joke with a lot going on. I’m certainly not claiming that The Last Dance is crammed full of jokes quite as profound as that, but I think it neatly illustrates a premise on which the Miller series is based; that humour and seriousness are not mutually exclusive. I like a silly joke as much as anyone else, but some laughs mean more than others and laughter can serve many purposes. My favourite definition of comedy is one that’s been attributed to everyone from Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce, but has never felt more apposite than it does today. Comedy = tragedy + time. It’s certainly true for Detective Declan Miller, laughing through tears as he strives to crack a case that has his colleagues baffled. I hope that the reader will go through a similarly complex range of emotions as they read The Last Dance. Giggling hysterically, their keyboard splattered with teardrops as they email me messages of gratitude and type out their five-star reviews. Yeah, I know, it’s a big ask. But… You don’t ask, you don’t get, right? *** Featured image: Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, 1760-61 View the full article

The most generous thing you could say about the Metropol Hotel in 1941 was that it had seen better days. When it opened in 1905, it stood as a shining example of the Art Nouveau style, combining the designs of avantgarde British and Russian architects with highly coloured elements of décor drawn from Russian folklore. At that time the capital of the Russian empire had for two centuries been St Petersburg on the Baltic coast, reducing Moscow to ‘a village with four hundred churches’. Despite this cruel label, Moscow at the start of the twentieth century was the home of Russia’s wealthy merchants, who at the time were leading art collectors, patrons of the country’s cultural elite and nurturers of progressive ideas. The Metropol was their showcase and their playground. The year of its opening was a time of mass protests throughout Russia demanding reform from the autocratic Romanov dynasty. One of the first grand occasions held at the hotel was a dinner to celebrate the unpopular Tsar Nicholas II granting the Russian people the right to elect a parliament. Feodor Chaliapin, the great operatic bass who was the son of a peasant, marked the occasion by climbing up onto a table under the vaulted glass ceiling of the dining room – the space was originally designed as a theatre, hence its huge dimensions – and singing unaccompanied the revolutionary anthem, the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’. He then passed a hat around the diners to collect donations to support the strikers. As Russia recovered from the upheaval of 1905, the hotel proved an instant hit for those with money to spend. Sugar barons flaunted their wealth with rivers of French champagne, and cavalry officers invited ballerinas from the nearby Bolshoi Theatre to join them for a post-performance supper. Tsarist gallants invited their guests up to one of the private rooms on the first-floor balcony where they could look down on the diners below or close the curtains for an intimate soirée. The British diplomat and spy Robert Bruce Lockhart captured the dissolute atmosphere of the hotel when he first visited in January 1912 and, having put off the call girls who pestered him by phone, went down to the restaurant. ‘My first impressions were of steaming furs, fat women and big sleek men; of attractive servility in the underlings and of good-natured ostentation on the part of the clients; of great wealth and rude coarseness, and yet a coarseness sufficiently exotic to dispel revulsion. I had entered a kingdom where money was the only God.’ Unsurprisingly, the hotel acquired a reputation as a place where bourgeois mothers did not want their daughters to be seen – the phrase ‘girls of the Metropol’ would be used with a knowing wink for decades to come. Bruce Lockhart describes gaily lit windows on the first floor with doors opening into the cabinets privés where, hidden from prying eyes, ‘dissolute youth and debauched old are trafficked for roubles and champagne for songs and love’. The restaurant was a maze of small tables, crowded with officers in badly cut uniforms, Russian merchants with scented beards, and German commercial travellers with sallow complexions. At the end of the dining room was a dais where a red-coated orchestra played, led by a Czech violinist who performed from a little pulpit. Sometimes the orchestra crashed out a waltz loud enough to drown the popping of corks and clatter of plates. At other times, the violinist turned round to face the diners and brought tears to their eyes with his doleful gypsy tunes. When the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the provisional government that had replaced the Romanov dynasty in November 1917, Tsarist officer cadets chose the Metropol to make their last stand in Moscow against the victorious Reds. They were forced to surrender when the revolutionaries brought up field guns to bombard the hotel; the damage was still visible on the walls in the 1940s. Bruce Lockhart was uniquely well placed to chart the hotel’s abrupt transition from playground of the rich to a bastion of the Bolsheviks. When he returned, after the Bolsheviks had seized power, he was the guest of Leon Trotsky, firebrand of the Revolution. Trotsky was haranguing members of the new Bolshevik government from the same dais where the Czech violinist had until recently entertained the cream of Moscow society. In that year the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin had moved the capital back to Moscow from St Petersburg – an imperial city too closely associated with the Tsars to suit the workers’ state – and he requisitioned the hotel as a dormitory and offices for the new rulers. The hotel was renamed the Second House of Soviets and became the home and workplace of senior Bolsheviks. It was from here that the fateful telegram was sent ordering the Reds to massacre Tsar Nicholas, the Tsarina Alexandra and their five children in Ekaterinburg in 1918. Lenin and Stalin both addressed grand occasions in the hotel’s dining room. The new communist rulers paid no heed to the upkeep of such a bourgeois icon, and standards fell rapidly. The depths to which the hotel had sunk after the Revolution are described in a 1920 account by a Russian official. While blood was being shed in the civil war, the Metropol was filled with people getting drunk on vodka, champagne, and wines from the Caucasus. ‘Dirt and cigarette butts were everywhere . . . residents chopped firewood and used primus stoves in their rooms, clogged the sinks and toilets with garbage, lay on the beds with their boots on, carried food and hot water up and down the stairs, hung up their wet clothes in the halls, brought in unauthorized guests, claimed to be someone they were not and often behaved in a rude and downright outrageous manner.’ Clare Sheridan, a British sculptor who visited Moscow in the early 1920s, wrote in her diary of life in the Metropol: ‘The drain smells are such that one climbs the stairs two at a time holding one’s breath! There are bits of the Kremlin that are enough to kill the healthiest person, but the Metropole [sic] baffles all description. Inside the offices it is all right, but the double windows everywhere are hermetically sealed for the winter, and I wonder that people do not die like flies.’ Arthur Ransome, who reported from Moscow in the 1920s and later became the author of the children’s book Swallows and Amazons, described how people lived in the absence of room service. ‘And all the time people from all parts of the hotel were coming [to the kitchens] with their pitchers and pans, from fine copper kettles to disreputable empty meat tins, to fetch hot water for tea.’ By the 1920s the sleek and fur-clad clientele the hotel was built for had either fled abroad and were working as taxi drivers in Paris or Shanghai, or were lying low as ‘former people’ whose wealth, property and even clothes were requestioned by the Revolution. In their place came commissars in leather jerkins demanding accommodation, peasants from far-flung provinces bringing written notes of the progress of the civil war or the spread of famine, and all manner of desperate people begging for a square meal from the Metropol’s dining room, now a cafeteria. The Revolution had set out to destroy ‘bourgeois morality’, leading to an outburst of sexual liberation, prompted by the reputed comment of the revolutionary theorist Alexandra Kollontai that ‘the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water’. The revolutionary ‘glass of water theory’ of sexual relations after women were liberated from the bourgeois norms of marriage was hotly debated in Russia in the 1920s – and denounced by Lenin. Alexandra Kollontai did indeed describe sex in terms of a human need like water, but the origin of the sentence which is often attributed to her remains unclear. The hotel manager appointed by the Bolsheviks tried to stop the Metropol becoming a brothel. When he stopped ‘non-party women’ coming to visit a senior member of the Cheka, the new secret police, the latter told him: ‘You are not my father, priest or protector.’ In the manager’s eyes, Moscow had become a ‘bubbling, rumbling, rotting and gurgling swamp’. Some semblance of order was restored in the mid-1920s when the government found a new use for the hotel. Having recovered its pre-revolutionary name, it was designated as the place to accommodate influential visitors from the West. The face of Soviet hospitality looked very much like the Tsarist version, minus the fine crockery that had been pilfered in the years of chaos. With the Bolsheviks believing that worker-led revolution was fated to take over the world – and that Soviet power was not safe in Russia until that happened – a new industry arose to market the Soviet Union abroad. In 1925 the All-Union Society for Relations with Foreign Countries, known as VOKS, was set up to ensure that visitors received a positive impression of the emerging Soviet state. Guides and interpreters were put through a 160-hour training course to ensure that influential visitors – ‘useful idiots’ in Lenin’s term – went home with an impression of peace, progress and bountiful supplies of everything, even when famine was stalking the land. A VOKS guide, according to Ekaterina Egorova, historian of the Metropol, was not a hired servant, as in the West, but a companion who was ‘a comrade with a rigorous political foundation’. Guides should present Soviet achievements ‘in the appropriate context and scale’. They were required to inform on the visitors they were showing around: who they met, what interested them and what questions they asked. Stock answers to tricky questions were supplied as part of the training course, such as ‘Are infectious diseases widespread in the USSR?’ Answer: ‘Since the application of our social legislation, infectious diseases have ceased.’ Or this one: ‘Do convicted bribe-takers enjoy the right of early release from their sentences?’ Answer: ‘No, like all members of the intelligentsia who have not emerged from the ranks of the proletariat, they do not enjoy this right.’ These bone-headed responses might suggest that the charm offensive was cack-handed and ineffectual. While the guides reported that some visitors were inveterate anti-communists and Russophobes, this propaganda barrage worked on a stream of progressive academics, liberal clergymen and others who clung to the Soviet experiment as a way out of the poverty and unemployment that gripped the capitalist world following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Most famously, George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright, avowed communist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, visited Moscow in 1931 to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. The Russians honoured him with banquets at a time when food was in short supply. In the absence of his wife, who was ill, Shaw was accompanied by Nancy Astor, a Conservative MP and the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons. Despite their clashing political views, they admired each other and had a lifelong friendship. While in Moscow, Lady Astor provided a muted counterpoint – she liked to denounce communists as thieves – to Shaw’s fulsome praise of the Soviet system. No flattery was spared for Shaw: on a visit to the theatre, the whole cast unrolled a huge banner in praise of the writer. Stalin accorded the Shaw/Astor double act a two-hour meeting, unprecedented for a visiting literary figure. The smooth progress of the charm offensive stuttered briefly when the Metropol lift broke down between floors with Shaw and Lady Astor in it and they had to be pulled out. On return to Britain, Shaw’s impressions dominated the headlines. Ever the provocateur, he said he had never eaten better than in Russia. Within a year, the quickening pace of Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture had unleashed famine on Ukraine. Shaw did not speak of the prison camps that Stalin was filling with real or imagined enemies, though Lady Astor had had the courage to confront Stalin and ask him why he was killing so many Russians. There is some doubt that Stalin’s interpreter dared to translate the question correctly. In 1935, the British Fabian socialists, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, stayed in the Metropol and then published their two-volume panegyric to Stalin’s Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? For later editions, published in wartime after the USSR joined the Allies, they removed the question mark. As the 1930s drew to a close, Stalin unleashed a two-year reign of terror known as the Great Purge, which saw residents of the Metropol regularly dragged from their beds. One of the many thousands of Stalin’s victims was Evgeny Veger, a rising star of the Communist Party, who lived in two rooms on the second floor of the hotel with his pianist wife Solange and their children. On the night of 25 June 1937, the tramp of boots was heard in the corridor, then a woman wailing and a male voice trying to comfort her. After that, silence. The next morning, one of the rooms occupied by the Vegers was closed with a leaden seal. The sound of weeping drifted down the corridor from the Boyarsky Zal, a function room where Solange had sought refuge to hide her distress from the children. Veger was executed five months after his arrest. Solange did not suffer the usual fate of wives of victims of the Terror– a spell of forced labour in a camp for ‘families of traitors to the motherland’ – and was placed in a psychiatric hospital instead. After Stalin’s death in 1953 the political elite were no longer at risk of arrest in the middle of the night, and the Metropol settled into a more comfortable role, as the best of a bad bunch of Moscow hotels with a restaurant serving poor food where no one could get a table. In the 1960s the visiting Labour politician Tom Driberg, openly homosexual at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, discovered behind the Metropol a 24-hour urinal which appeared to be the only gay pick-up place in Moscow. On Driberg’s recommendation, Guy Burgess, the Soviet spy who had fled Britain to live in Moscow, went there and found a companion in a young electrician called Tolya. After the long era of stagnation under Brezhnev, the death of Communist Party rule was marked by a celebratory dinner at the Metropol in 1991. The exiled cellist Mstislav Rostropovich had returned to Moscow to support demonstrators resisting the hard-line Communist putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev; his concert outside the White House, the bastion of the anti-putschists, was one of the defining moments of the resistance. Afterwards, he and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, celebrated the defeat of the putschists at a dinner in the Metropol – the place where more than thirty years earlier they had first met and fallen in love, before leaving Russia in the 1970s. In 1993, when Michael Jackson stayed at the hotel, there was a faint echo of Chaliapin’s performance almost ninety years before, albeit against a less heroic backdrop. The pop star had climbed onto the stage at one end of the dining room to examine the harp that is played each morning during breakfast. He plucked a string and – such was the hotel’s hold on the collective imagination – launched a rumour that he had given an impromptu performance under the glass dome. The Metropol has been owned since 2012 by Alexander Klyachin, a Russian businessman and owner of an international hotel chain, who has modernised it, while preserving the unique features of a significant cultural monument. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War by Alan Philps. Published by Pegasus Books, July 2023. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Bonnie Kistler, Her, Too (Harper) “[A] page-turner . . . . sharp prose and a ripped-from-the headlines premise. . . . Kistler, a former trial lawyer, brings authenticity to the proceedings . . . This burns hot.” –Publishers Weekly Mark Billingham, The Last Dance (Atlantic Monthly Press) “A gritty, engaging novel that balances light with dark, offering wit and wisdom in equal measure. Billingham’s new lead detective, DS Miller, may not be able to dance, but he never misses a step when it comes to solving crime.” –Nita Prose Arianna Reiche, At the End of Every Day (Atria) “A dreamlike, unsettling narrative that frequently slides into the uncanny valley. Readers are in for an eerie, psychological roller-coaster ride.” –Publishers Weekly Alex Hay, The Housekeepers (Graydon) “This wonderfully inventive story paints an authentic portrait of London society in the early 1900s and is full of shocking secrets, suspense, hidden identities, flamboyant characters, and subtle humor.” –Booklist Kate Collins, A Good House for Children (Mariner) “Atmospheric and beautifully written, A Good House for Children builds slowly but surely into a terrifying ghost story.” –Guardian Ben Crane, A Man of Lies (Pegasus) “Crane’s ambitious, fast-moving debut follows a gay mobster desperate to leave the underworld behind. There’s a lot of bloodshed and a lot of plot twists here. Bold and exciting.” –Publishers Weekly Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre (Penguin Books) “[Hurley] ably captured the vibe of the era’s demon-spawn novels like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. . . Top-shelf gothic-folk horror.” –Kirkus Sarah Weinman (ed), Evidence of Things Seen (Ecco) “This is a book about finding justice in a system that can frequently be unjust. These are stories about inequality, victims who must fight to be heard, and the tendency of the legal system to marginalize, or ignore, entire groups of people. . . . A valuable addition to the ever-growing genre of crime nonfiction.” –Booklist Alan Philps, The Red Hotel (Pegasus) “An unsettling account of how a cadre of foreign correspondents in Moscow during World War II were pressed to acquiesce to the Kremlin’s censorship. Philps’s thoughtful narrative puts their work into the appropriate historical context. An authoritative history of the terrible ramifications of the silence about Stalin’s lies.” –Kirkus Reviews Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure (Random House) “Spirited [and] frequently wry . . . an account of thought at Oxford from 1900 to 1960 that weaves biography with philosophy and somehow attains . . . a pellucid clarity. This is one of those books that leaves readers feeling a lot cleverer than they actually are.” –The Sunday Telegraph View the full article

Don’t get mad, and for God’s sake, don’t get weepy. Get even. These words become the motto of Kelly McCann in my latest novel, Her, Too. She’s a lawyer who’s built her career defending men accused of sexual assault. When she’s raped by her own client, she convinces herself that she can’t report him to the police without destroying her reputation. But her trauma manifests as rage, and soon it becomes corrosive. So instead of seeking justice, she charts a course for revenge. Hell hath no fury like a woman—assaulted? In four of the following novels, the victims chart the same course as Kelly, and their revenge proves sweet if morally debatable. In only one does the victim find revenge through the justice system, an outcome that might be the sweetest of all. SPOILERS AHEAD. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, Lisbeth Salander is placed into the guardianship of Nils Bjurman, a corrupt sadist who repeatedly rapes her. She secretly videotapes one of his attacks, then returns to his apartment to taser him, tie him up, and sodomize him with one of his sex toys—a literal rape for a rape. She threatens him with release of the videotape if he doesn’t end the guardianship. Finally, she tattoos the words “I AM A RAPIST” on his chest. Lisbeth not only achieves her own personal revenge, she also gains a measure of justice by assuring that no other woman will suffer at his hands. In Big Driver by Stephen King, mystery author Tessa Thorne is lured into an ambush where a man brutally rapes her and leaves her for dead, stuffing her into a culvert where she awakes in horror to discover the corpses of his previous victims. She doesn’t report her attack, fearing the public embarrassment that would follow. She has a passing thought for his other victims, but finds herself too tired to worry about moral responsibility. She asks herself What’s in it for me? Eventually, though, those bodies in the culvert call to her, and she kills her rapist, accomplishing revenge for herself while also protecting those women who would have been his future victims. But she goes on to kill his mother and brother, too, for facilitating his crimes. These murders read as pure revenge. Nonetheless she apparently goes on to live happily ever after, untroubled by what she’s done. The moral issues get even murkier in Pretty Evil by Zoe Rossi. Camilla Black, a glamorous magazine editor by day, has a secret vigilante life by night. Brutally abused as a child, she now seeks a form of revenge by entrapping other sexual predators and killing them. She’s much like Dexter in Jeff Lindsey’s novels: she kills only bad guys, but she does it with the bloodthirsty relish of a serial killer. She pulls off a final, satisfying coup de grace, then retires to live happily ever after with her lover. Assuming she can control her obvious psychopathy. If you’re one of the three people on the planet who hasn’t yet read Where the Crawdads Sing, STOP READING RIGHT NOW. In this much loved novel by Delia Owen, a little girl named Kya is abandoned by her family and learns to survive on her own in the marshes of coastal North Carolina. The novel is rich in its descriptions of the natural world and gives us much to admire in the character of Kya. But it has a jarringly discordant ending. Chase, the town’s golden boy and Kya’s onetime suitor, attempts to rape her, though she successfully fights him off. She then painstakingly plans his murder, lures him to his death, and constructs a diabolically clever alibi. She commits the cold-blooded murder of a man who is not a murderer himself; technically he’s not even a rapist. Yet Kya suffers no remorse. She goes on to have a successful career as a nature writer and a blissful life with the man she loves. Contrast the revenge arcs in these novels with Dark Chapter, Winnie M. Li’s excellent first novel. Vivian is hiking alone near Belfast when she’s beaten and raped by a thuggish teenager. She immediately reports the crime to the local police and submits to all the appalling forensic exams and interviews. She suffers horribly from PTSD, but she grits her teeth and sees the process through the arrest and trial of her rapist. After she endures a brutal cross-examination, her rapist is convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term. She’s achieved justice for herself and for every other woman or girl her rapist would have attacked. At the end, Vivian is climbing toward recovery from her trauma. (Hopefully the author has done the same in real life. This novel was based on her own harrowing experience as a rape victim.) Of course, Vivian’s course may not work for all women. Kya in Crawdads is the town pariah, while Chase is its golden boy. There’s little hope that her accusation against him would lead to prosecution, let alone conviction. It’s equally unlikely that the state would intervene on behalf of Lisbeth Salander against her state-appointed guardian in Dragon Tattoo. In Big Driver, Tessa doesn’t go to the police because she fears public embarrassment and damage to her reputation. These are the same fears that haunt Kelly in Her, Too, and convince her instead to seek revenge by ruining her rapist’s fortune and reputation. But eventually she realizes how ill-conceived her plan is. She isn’t his first victim, and unless she goes public, she won’t be his last. Her silence, along with the silence of all his other victims, has allowed him to continue his crimes. At the end she knows she has to come forward with the truth. For Vivian in Dark Chapter and, ultimately, Kelly in Her, Too, revenge isn’t the answer. Justice is the sweeter reward. *** View the full article

About a year ago, I was sitting at a coffee shop when I had a great idea: instead of doing work, I should make a puzzle for a friend. This particular friend is very sharp, and he loves puzzles. (To steal a joke from Dial ‘M’ for Murder—I call him my friend, because if I call him my lawyer, he charges me.) So I sent my friend-lawyer a simple word puzzle, and he solved it almost immediately. It wasn’t the least bit frustrating for him, which made it twice as frustrating for me. So I abandoned the idea of working completely and focused my attention on sending him a harder puzzle: a cross between a logic grid and a murder mystery. Much to my delight, my lawyer-friend couldn’t solve it. But my delight disappeared when I realized that the reason he couldn’t solve it was because it was broken. I stormed out of the coffee shop, drove home, and began to work on a computer program that would generate these murder-mystery logic puzzles automatically. Soon, I would be able to generate thousands of puzzles—millions of puzzles!—much too many for my lawyer-friend would ever be able to solve. And that’s exactly what I did. The next morning, I sent my lawyer-friend the first computer-generated murder-mystery logic puzzle, and not only did he solve it, he loved it. With his feedback, I made it into a daily online murder-mystery game called Murdle. Once I shared it, other people loved it, too. A literary agent reached out to me and said she thought she could sell it as a book, and she was right! Now, three volumes of murdles are coming to bookstores all around the world, starting this June. I got extraordinarily lucky. But I was helped by my background making immersive murder mystery theater. Eight years ago, I launched a show called the Hollywood Mystery Show. Each episode was a one-time-only performance of a mystery where not even the actors knew whodunit, because they were reading the script for the first time as they performed it on stage. You might think this would hurt their performance. You’d be right. So, we added a rule: whenever an actor made a mistake, the audience shouted “Drink!” and they took a drink on stage. This hurt their performance, too, but it also made them funnier. Not always to the audience, but to the other performers, at least. And the audience members who did come back came to every show, and they asked to be in it. Slowly, we grew into a theater collective called the Hollywood Mystery Society. Since then, we have staged a variety of mysteries in a variety of places. We’ve done haunted houses in Brentwood mansions, dinner theater in Himalayan restaurants, and interactive whodunits in downtown movie theaters. By writing, staging, and hosting dozens of mysteries, I’ve learned five lessons absolutely essential for making a murder mystery work. The first lesson is this: Make the clues obvious. It was pretty easy to slip a crucial clue past the audience of the Hollywood Mystery Show: they were usually drunker than the performers. But ever sober readers can struggle. John Dickson Carr, the master of the locked-room mystery, wrote, “The best way to conceal a clue is to place it in full view and let the reader turn it over in his hands, as it were, without ever seeing its significance.” In the Mystery Show, we started making songs about the clues. In Murdle, I had to be very specific with the language, because the solver needs all of the clues in order to solve the puzzles. If they misinterpret one clue, they’ll get the wrong answer. But for Murdle, as in all mysteries, it’s not the clues themselves that should be hidden, but what can be deduced from those clues. But clues alone are not enough to make a great mystery and that brings me to the second lesson: Good characters are better than good clues. At a monthly murder-mystery dinner show we do called Murder at Tara’s, the audience is asked to choose between two women who might have murdered a man. More importantly, the audience is asked to spend an entire dinner hanging out with both of them. If they didn’t like the characters, their meal would be ruined! It’s hard to remember many distinctive Agatha Christie clues, but many of her murderers spring to mind, and I will never forget Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. People still watch episodes of Columbo, fifty years after they aired, not because of the great clue about the gunshot on the phone call, but because of Peter Falk playing the greatest American detective, and the Oscar-winning actors he went up against. There are one-hundred puzzles in each of the Murdle books, so suspects and murderers come and go. But there are two people you are with the whole book: the rationally-minded Deductive Logico who solves the murders, and the esoteric Inspector Irratino who provides the hints (if you need them). Their relationship creates an emotional underpinning that’s hopefully a lot deeper than people are used to from their crosswords and sudokus. Third lesson: Know who did it from the start! G. K. Chesterton wrote that a good mystery is written “for the moment when the reader does understand, not merely for the many preliminary moments when he does not understand.” That moment of understanding must be planned from the beginning. In the Hollywood Mystery Show, none of the actors knew who did it, but I always did, and the sooner I knew who did it in the writing process, the better the final script was. Once, while writing an episode, I wrote a few scenes before I knew the central mystery, and pretty soon, I’d written almost a whole show without knowing whodunit. Suddenly, it was the day of the show, and I was feverishly rewriting the first act to add references to an evil twin. When the final twist was revealed, you should have heard the drunken jeers, which continued even during the after party. That brings me to the fourth lesson: Write for your friends. You don’t know what the faceless masses will like. You’ll never know. But you do know what your friends like. Or your family. Or your partner. And if you write something that you like, and they like, too, then other people might like it, as well. I started the Hollywood Mystery Show for my friends who performed it in. And I made Murdle for my lawyer-friend to procrastinate. Both turned out to be the best decisions I could have possible made. One gave me an LA family, and the other gave me a book series, but they both helped me have fun with my friends. So that’s my most important piece of advice, but my final piece is important itself. I learned it just after selling this book series, and I pass it along to you to hopefully avoid my fate: Before you ask your lawyer-friend for advice, ask what he charges. *** View the full article

There are things you want from an Indiana Jones movie. You want Indy to to yell directions at a stunned, fuddy-duddy academic while trying to dodge bullet spray. You want Indy to shove the lid off a big stone tomb, and maybe even yank an antique out from the stiff grip of the skeleton inside that tomb. You want to watch him shimmy though a cavern full of vermin and translate an ancient language very quickly by sight. You want him to growl at Nazis. You want the hat and the whip and the grin and the eye rolls and the French horns. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a good student of the canon that came before it. It is the fifth in a series which was originally intended to have five installments but for a very long time (from 1989 to 2008) time only had three. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny faces many of the same challenges that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the long-awaited fourth volume, did—namely, how to capture the pleasures of the original franchise while delivering a new, compelling story. And, of course, how to rely on Indy as an action hero now that he’s considerably older; his character is 58 in the fourth film, and 70 in the new one. (In each film, Harrison Ford, the series’ star, is 65, and 80, respectively.) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny works very hard to do right by the series, while also remaining realistic given newer constraints, and for the most part, it pulls it off. It is a rousing, genuinely entertaining return to adventure with cinema’s greatest action hero. I’d probably rank it higher than #4. The movie begins with a flashback to 1944, when a 45-year-old Indy is, once again, embroiled in yet another attempt to rescue a priceless historical artifact from the Nazis, aided by a bumbling British scholar named Basil Shaw (Toby Jones). But he winds up picking up another relic, the Antikythera—part of a dial designed by the Greek mathematician Archimedes that is believed, by some, to have the ability to plot cracks in the fabric of time that can allow for travel through it. The Antikythera is the hobbyhorse of Nazi physicist Dr. Voller (Mads Mickelson), who believes that, instead of Biblical artifacts, it is the instrument the Nazis should use to win the war. The opening sequence—in which Indy and “Baz,” as Indy calls him, attempt to flee the Germans and bring along the Antikythera—is a nailbiting romp made possible through de-aging CGI that transforms present-day Harrison Ford into his 45-year-old self. Mostly, it’s an extremely impressive computerized reconstruction, although it’s not the only CGI thing going on; there are a few nighttime scenes on an over-stylized careening train that made me feel like I was watching a much darker sequel to The Polar Express. It’s worth reiterating that, taking in this opening sequence, which is 25 minutes long, I was genuinely unbothered by Indy’s younger-looking, ever-so-slightly rubbery visage, but I did worry that this portended a heavy reliance on CGI, overall, at the expense of practical effects. A lot of the fun of the original Indiana Jones trilogy is the handmade component, that scenes do in fact feel like they take place on soundstages decorated to look like caves via spray-painted foam, and that their incredible action sequences are combinations of editing tricks and impeccable choreography. But the good news is that, the rest of the film, which features our regular, naturally-aged Harrison Ford, does indeed return to this more tactile approach to action filmmaking. This is the first Indiana Jones film not directed by Steven Spielberg, and while you can sense his absence somehow, the efforts from director-surrogate James Mangold are more than sufficient. Mostly, I think this is because of the insane magnetism Ford emanates whenever he plays this character; he has been, many times before, the salvation of this franchise, which has been known to occasionally lean into weird narrative experiments and traffic in some casual racism. Ford’s just as great here, mixing his character’s cocky, scrappy, wiseass personality with some of the age-appropriate crankiness that he, as an actor, has made his shtick on talk-shows and in interviews. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ends on a happy note, depositing Indy into a satisfying domestic situation. After its opening sequence, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny begins in earnest in 1969 in New York City, at a bit of a low point. Marion (Karen Allen) is divorcing him, and he lives in a messy apartment down the hall from some annoying hippies. For ten years now, he’s taught archaeology at Hunter College, boring the very demographic of undergraduates he once enthralled. A bright spot in this surprisingly bland grind is a visit from Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the now-deceased Baz’s daughter/Indy’s goddaughter. She wants Indy’s help in tracking down the Antikythera, the thing her father was obsessed with until the day he died (man, I love when an Indiana Jones movie features a professor dad with a handwritten notebook full of well-researched details pertaining to one historical object), after his fateful encounter with it while fleeing Nazi territory. But Indy’s not planning on embarking on another breakneck adventure… at least for a whole minute or so, until a group of people start chasing and shooting at them. The CIA, mostly in the form of a field agent named Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson), is on Helena’s tail. And so is Dr. Voller, who, in the many years since World War II, has, in Wernher von Braun-fashion, been working for the U.S. Government on their rocket program, and has helped America get to the moon. Voller, now known as Schmidt, has two lackeys, a trigger-happy, Southern-drawling psycho named Klaber (Boyd Holbrook) and a giant named Hauke (Olivier Richters), and let’s just say that they don’t play by the CIA’s more restrained rules. Voller is using his American connections to track down the Antikythera, and will stop at nothing to get it. So, Indy and Helena wind up on a cross-Mediterranean journey, hunting artifacts, outrunning Nazis, dealing with various personal ambitions and or crises. They are aided by a Short-Round-esque Moroccan pickpocket named Teddy (Ethann Isidore) and a suave Spanish sailor named Renaldo (Antonio Banderas, who does not get enough screen time) and, in a wonderful cameo, Indy’s longtime Egyptian friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies). I don’t want to spoil too much about the plot, but I will say that the film has several incredible setpieces, ones that we haven’t seen in Indiana Jones movies before, and therefore feel extremely distinctive. There are also, don’t worry, motorcycle chases and horseback chases and car chases through outdoor markets. There are some incredible whipcracks and punches and kicks. The stuntwork and effects are masterful, a treat even if you somehow don’t care about the rest of it. I’ll also add that it’s charming how the film’s MacGuffin is a time-traveling device, while it’s also a flashback-laden farewell to a beloved character who rocked cinema for forty-two years. Ticking noises abound, characters are really into their watches, the mise-en-scene is full of clocks. Even though time has marched onward, Indy’s still our guy. He shouts “it belongs in a museum!” while gripping an antique. He still gets dewey-eyed when he comes face-to-face with history. Whatever else is entertaining about it, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a joy for how it takes us down memory lane with this character and his friends, one last time. Let’s do it all again, for old time’s sake. View the full article