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Bologna, capital of northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. With only about 400,000 citizens the city is still one of Italy’s most multicultural, largely due to being a university town. Widen out the region and it’s a million people. Alternatively known as the Fat City for its rich cuisine, or the Red City for its red tiled rooftops, and sometimes the Learned City as Bologna is home to the world’s oldest university (in continuous operation). It’s also a beautiful city – a massive UNESCO World Heritage site and also, of course, a city with some fine crime writing. Or should we say Gialli – Italian crime fiction books? The name comes from the covers of a popular Italian series of crime fiction stories launched by Milanese publisher Mondadori in 1929, which were yellow (in Italian: giallo). Without doubt the two major Bolognese giallisti are Loriano Machiavelli and Carlo Lucarelli. However, sadly we have no books of Machiavelli’s, featuring his long running character policeman Sarti Antonio. Italian readers are more fortunate in having access to Machiavelli’s novels (approximately 40 in total!) that recount the changes in the city. Alongside Andrea Camilleri (of the Inspector Montalbano books) Machiavelli is the most prolific post-war Italian giallisti. Time for someone to head to Emilia-Romagna and buy up those rights! We do fortunately have some Carlo Lucarelli – known as the “master of Italian noir”. Lucarelli is best known for his Inspector De Luca trilogy, and the successful TV show (for which he wrote the scripts too) following Commissario Achille De Luca navigating the world of crime and politics in Mussolini-era fascist Bologna between 1938 to 1948 – “he’s not a fascist/he’s not a partisan/he’s a cop”. The first instalment in the enormously successful De Luca Trilogy (which are all short and essentially novellas) is Carte Blanche (1990), followed by The Damned Season (1991) set in the immediate post-war years and (perhaps the best) Via Della Oche (1996) where a murder in a brothel on a notorious street in the centre of Bologna in the run-up to elections that will decide a nation’s fate. Lucarelli also has several stand-alone novels translated into English including Almost Blue (1997) where a serial killer is loose in Bologna and rookie Detective Inspector Grazia Negro is assigned the case. She only has one witness who can identify the killer – and he is blind. Lucarelli was was shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2003 for Almost Blue. Grazia Negro returns in Day After Day (2000) hunting a professional killer whose picture of a pit bull terrier left behind at each murder can link the crimes and stalks the internet too. I think it’s fair to say that Italian giallisti prefer their heroes to be cops – flawed often, but still policemen and women. A fairly rare example of a professional private eye in Italian crime fiction is Bologna-born Grazia Verasani’s PI Giorgia Cantini, who lives in Bologna, is single, in her forties, independent, hard-drinking, ironic, and haunted by two family suicides. She features in a popular trilogy in Italian that inspired a movie though only the first in the series, Quo Vadis, Baby? (2005), has been translated into English so far. It’s got everything that symbolises Bologna – ancient streets, the old university, and leftist politics. It’s also hard-core noir, nobody is happy, everybody’s miserable – the Cantini Detective Agency mostly investigates the tangled affairs of unhappily married couples and domestic violence. Hopefully more from Verasani will be translated as she is a genuinely original voice from Bologna. Leftist agitators and property moguls are at the heart of Tom Benjamin’s novel A Quiet Death in Italy (2020), the first in a trilogy. A radical protestor is found floating in one of Bologna’s underground canals. PI Daniel Leicester, son-in-law to the former chief of the Bologna police, receives a call from the dead man’s lover, he follows a trail that begins in the 1970s and leads all the way to the rotten heart of the present-day political establishment. The novel is a great trawl through Bologna’s underbelly. Leicester returns The Hunting Season (2021) set during truffle season in the hills around Bologna the hunt is on for the legendary Boscuri White, much prized by Italian gastronomy. But it’s soon back to the underbelly of the city’s catering trade and illegal immigration. And finally Requiem in La Rossa (2022) where a professor of music is apparently murdered leaving the Bologna opera. Leicester follows a trail that begins among Bologna’s close-knit classical music community and eventually leads to a serial killer at large. A few more Bologna set novels… Gianluca Morozzi’s Blackout (2008) is set in Bologna in August with its unbearable heat and empty streets. Three people become trapped in a lift in a deserted building on a holiday weekend. There’s nobody to help, one of them is a serial killer. John Grisham takes a trip to Bologna in The Broker (2010) where the CIA obtain a presidential pardon for a man who has secrets. His is given a new identity and a new life in Bologna. But now someone has come to kill him. Our old friend from Venice Aurelio Inspector Zen goes to Bologna in Michael Dibdin’s Back to Bologna (2005). The corpse of the shady industrialist who owns the local soccer team is found both shot and stabbed with a Parmesan knife. Then a world-famous university professor is shot with the same gun after publicly humiliating Italy’s leading celebrity TV chef. And along comes a semiotics student and Tony Speranza, Bologna’s most flamboyant private detective. This is a very Italian crime novel! A true crime from Bologna – Monica Calabritto’s Murder and Madness on Trial (2023) goes back to 1588 Bologna. Paolo Barbieri stabbed his wife, Isabella Caccianemici, to death with his sword. Later, Paolo would claim to have acted in a fit of madness—but was he criminally insane or merely pretending to be? This is a case study in the diagnosis of insanity in the early modern era, Barbieri’s story reveals discrepancies between medical and legal definitions of a person’s mental state at the time of a crime. And finally, as usual, something a little bit different and a little bit special – Giampiero Rigosi’s Night Bus (2006). Truly hard-core Italian noir – Leila drugs the men she picks up and then robs them. However, problems arise when her latest client has mistakenly acquired a document that could compromise certain corrupt politicians willing to kill to get it back. She is hunted through Bologna and while on the run meets Francesco, bus driver and gambling addict. A dark, broody novel that takes you on a nightmare trip through Bologna. View the full article

The following is a conversation between two debut YA novelists: Amanda Linsmeier, author of Starlings, and Amy Goldsmith, author of Those We Drown, both lyrically written horror novels that test the bounds of the YA genre. Both novels are now available from Delacorte Press. Amanda Linsmeier: Hi Amy! I’m so excited to chat with you today about our books! Creating a strong and atmospheric setting is so important in stories. The town in STARLINGS became like its own character to me, and I loved your setting so much—as I was reading I was struck by the fact that it felt really fresh and at the same time, perfectly ominous. At what point did you know THOSE WE DROWN would take place on a cruise ship, and why do you think it’s such a great setting for this story in particular? Amy Goldsmith: Hi Amanda. So good to chat with you, too! I agree that a setting can act almost like a character in itself—like Shirley Jackson’s eponymous Hill House—and I wanted the Eos, the vast cruise liner where THOSE WE DROWN is set, to feel like that too. Very early on, I knew I wanted to tell a story where the main character was being unconsciously led into something deeply sinister, where they didn’t realise just how much trouble they were in until it was too late. For that kind of story, a locked room setting, such as a ship, is ideal since the MC can’t just get a taxi the heck out of there like any rational person. Around the same time I was playing with this idea, there were stories in the press about thousands of people being stuck on cruise ships, quarantined for weeks due to c*vid outbreaks, which sounded pretty nightmarish to me. So those two ideas ended up converging into THOSE WE DROWN. The town of Rosemont and its eerie rose festival reminded me a little of Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Was folk horror a conscious influence on STARLINGS? Amanda Linsmeier: I think it was more under the surface, at least in the first several drafts. Early on, my comps were all over the place, and so was the story—I actually began it thinking more of The Crucible vibes (and it was historical). But once I settled on placing it in a contemporary town, it came alive. I wanted to set my story in a charming and “perfect” town where nothing bad ever could possibly happen, which is of course, not true at all in Rosemont’s case! As far as Midsommar, there’s something unsettling about how it sneaks up on you, particularly when you take into account the bright, light colors and that most of it takes place in the daytime. The funny thing is that I hadn’t actually seen that movie until we sold STARLINGS, and my editor told me Midsommar reminded her of it, so I immediately watched it and was like, wow! It was pretty cool picking out details that resonated and taking that into account as we marketed the book. I think the comp we went with for the pitch—if Midsommar was set in Stars Hollow—fits perfectly. There are many writers that have influenced my own writing. From Robin McKinley to Maya Angelou to R.L. Stine, I grew up reading and loving all kinds of things, and I’m guessing you were the same. Is there any book in particular that made a lasting impact on your work? Amy Goldsmith: Yes! The dark side of Greek mythology strongly influences THOSE WE DROWN, and I couldn’t get enough of myths and legends as a kid. This was pre-Percy Jackson, so there wasn’t a ton out there for children, but I remember being enthralled by Leon Garfield’s THE GOD BENEATH THE SEA and its sequel, THE GOLDEN SHADOW. Another favourite series of mine was Susan Cooper’s THE DARK IS RISING sequence, a contemporary fantasy series that beautifully weaves Arthurian legend, English folklore, and Welsh mythology together. There’s something so timeless about myths in general that hugely inspires my writing and many of them contain messages that are still relevant. Another childhood favourite of mine was an abridged version of Edgar Allan Poe’s TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION, and I think that kickstarted my eternal love of dark and creepy stories. Speaking of inspiration, what inspired you to write STARLINGS? Amanda Linsmeier: I have a visceral memory of reading THE HAZELWOOD, and it sending a little chill up my spine. I had fallen out of habit of reading books that unsettled me—it had been years since I’d read any dark fantasy or horror or anything like that—and I had this flash of a thought as I read: can I write something like this? And so I started dipping my toe into fantasy/horror. With STARLINGS, I let myself lean into the horror aspect. Before I even drafted it, though, I was just coming off of an Adult manuscript that was pretty dark, and I remember thinking this new idea about a girl and creepy things in the woods (no spoilers) sounds SO FUN! Like, it would be a vacation from all the grief-y and heavy things I’d immersed myself in with the prior novel. Writing STARLINGS was so fun, but it turned out to deal with themes that I wasn’t anticipating—I guess I just can’t get away from writing those darker things (I’ve fully embraced it now)! But on a purely indulgent note I was very inspired by Pinterest photos of dead flowers and girls in white dresses. Music is another things that inspired me—there’s a scene where my protagonist Kit is doing something quite frightening and as soon as I heard Unchained Melody by Norah Jones, I knew it was the perfect slow and romantic song to contrast this horrible thing happening. Now—both our books are Young Adult. What do you like best about writing for teens? And speaking of teens, I think Kit is far braver than I ever was at seventeen—or even now! Amy, how do you think your teenage self would have fared aboard The Eos? Amy Goldsmith: Part of the reason I love writing for teens was the absolute delight I felt the first time I discovered teen horror. At twelve, I was just as obsessed with horror as I am now, and I’d read (and enjoyed) all of my dad’s dusty old volumes of ghost stories but wasn’t quite ready for the heavier hitters of horror like Stephen King. So, when I walked into Waterstones and discovered Point Horror and Christopher Pike for the first time, I was blown away. Shelf after shelf of ominously titled books like THE BABYSITTER and FUNHOUSE with equally spine-chilling covers. Here was horror specifically written for me. Horror that wasn’t written by a fusty old clergyman from the 1800s but was instead about the perils of house-sitting while your parents were out of town or flirting with the mysterious new boy at school. I needed the bridge those books provided before entering the more adult-orientated horror spaces. As for how teenage Amy would have fared aboard the Eos, badly. The downside of years of reading horror is that I’m overly suspicious of everything, so I’d probably be chucked overboard the very first night! One of the many reasons I loved Starlings was because it features a very unsettling insidious type of horror. What draws you to dark fiction? Amanda Linsmeier: Goodness, so many things. I think there’s a part of me that simply and absolutely delights in that delicious moment where you are reading or watching a movie, and feel in your gut something is wrong and it’s the anticipation that really terrifies you. Other horror authors have touched on this, as well, but having anxiety over a lot of stuff makes me feel like I’m scared much of the time—and writing scary things gives me courage. I can face things that frighten me and look them in the eye and write my characters (and in some ways, myself) over the other side. It’s a way for me to take control in an otherwise often uncontrollable world. Amy Goldsmith: Thanks so much for your great questions, Amanda. I enjoyed chatting and am looking forward to debuting together! What’s up next for you? Amanda Linsmeier: Thank you! I had a fantastic time chatting with you, too, and I’m glad we get to share this amazing experience of debuting together! Up next for me is another YA with Delacorte Press, coming next summer, called SIX OF SORROW. It’s a horror novel in which six teen girls, all born on the same day, must unravel the secrets of their small town after one of them disappears, only to return very, very different. I just handed in my latest revision and I’m incredibly excited to get to share this book next year! What’s next for you, Amy? Amy Goldsmith: That sounds so eerie; I can’t wait to read it! I also have another YA horror with Delacorte on the horizon, releasing next summer. It’s called OUR WICKED HISTORIES and was initially inspired by THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER by E A Poe. It’s a tale of betrayal and revenge centred upon a group of estranged friends reuniting in an old manor house by a cursed lake. Amanda Linsmeier: That sounds wonderful! I can’t wait. Thanks again for the great talk! Amanda Linsmeier’s debut novel, Starlings, is now available. Amy Goldsmith’s debut novel, Those We Drown, is now available. View the full article

There are few people in the history of organized labor in America who are as infamous as Jimmy Hoffa. He rose from poverty to become the president of the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters (IBT or just the Teamsters) and helped expand it into one of the most powerful unions in the world. Hoffa rubbed shoulders with gangsters, fought bitterly with Robert F. Kennedy, got convicted of jury tampering and other crimes in 1967, and promised to take back control of the Teamsters after his controversial release from prison in 1971 before he mysteriously vanished in 1975. His disappearance, as well as the fact that his body was never found, continues to fascinate people. But Hoffa hasn’t lived on in popular culture just because he is at the center of an unsolved mystery. His life and personality have provided fertile material for writers and filmmakers. He has been a character in the work of James Ellroy (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand), an influence on Treat Williams’s character in Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and even a minor part of a TV film about Jesse Owens (The Jesse Owens Story (1984)). He has also played a pivotal role in several major films as either a prominent supporting or lead character. The directors of those films use the events of Hoffa’s memorable life and interesting persona as a type of canvas onto which they paint their key artistic interests, aided by actors whose fascinating performances as the notorious union leader capture different parts of his life and personality. The most recent depiction of Hoffa in popular culture was in The Irishman (2019). He doesn’t have appear in a proper scene until 46 minutes into the film. But Hoffa (Al Pacino) is mentioned several times before his fateful interview with truck driver/ hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) to be his bodyguard. One of them is when Mob-connected Teamsters lawyer Bill Buffalino (Ray Romano) tells Sheeran that he is unable to be fired for stealing steaks because of the contract the Teamsters have “thanks to Jimmy Hoffa.” Even before they have met, Hoffa is established as a powerful figure whose activities are intertwined with Sheeran’s life and fate. He only becomes more prominent as the film goes to show why he is important to the world and Sheeran. The version of Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman might best be described as “Hoffa the rock star.” When he is trying to describe Hoffa’s great fame, Sheerhan compares him to Elvis Presley and The Beatles. Most of what we see Hoffa do for work as president of the Teamsters isn’t things like sign up new members or organize strikes. Instead, he does things that rock stars do, like perform in front of crowds of adoring supporters (although he recites speeches instead of singing) or conduct interviews with the press. Those scenes of him giving speeches feel like rock concerts, and sometimes his supporters even chant his name like he was their favorite artist, which leads Pacino to dance as many famous musicians do when faced with the love of their followers (albeit with simpler choreography than the average rock star because he was 77 when he played Hoffa). Like many rock stars, a key element of Hoffa’s personality is his charisma. It enables him to charm multiple characters ranging from Sheeran’s daughter Peggy (Lucy Gallina as a child and Anna Paquin as an adult) to mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), and especially Sheeran himself. His magnetism and the way he helps his friends (he encourages Sheeran to become the president of a Teamsters local in addition to temporarily helping him have a better relationship with Peggy) helps give you an idea of why he became such a powerful man, and why so many people got caught up in his web to the extent that they did. This is not to say that the Hoffa of The Irishman is just a likeable man who is devoted to the simple things in life, like his friends and ice cream (although he frequently eats and enjoys it, just like the real Hoffa). He is also given to moments of rage that are familiar to fans of Pacino. In one of my favorite scenes, he rails against his associates for allowing a general organizer to sell insurance to his father’s locals. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, and Pacino’s performance is just as enthralling every time. He insults his lieutenants, hands gesticulating passionately and with purpose as he describes what they did, until he becomes so angry that he stops talking in mid-speech. He practically crumples at what he considers to be his associates’ stupidity, taking a moment to rest as if they’ve exhausted him, before resuming his rant until he becomes so angry that he hits the table in front of him twice. That tendency to give in to rages against people who he feels have crossed him is one of his greatest weaknesses, as is his inability to recognize that he is vulnerable. In a latter scene, Hoffa hears a veiled threat from Sheeran that he might get killed. His face contorts in confusion, and he replies, “they wouldn’t dare” before he confidently tells Sheeran that he’s not in danger. Hoffa’s sense of indestructibility, and the too-much faith he places in his own importance, is the dark side of his portrayal as a rock star. While this film’s depiction of Hoffa tries to stick to the historical record (and Pacino rose to the task by listening to recordings of him giving speeches on set right until he heard the call for “action”), it is also indebted to the artistic interests of its director. The Irishman is the latest in a long line of films Martin Scorsese has made in which a level-headed guy tries and fails to save his hot-headed best friend. Scorsese’s interpretation of Hoffa is reminiscent of his other fiery men who practically run around asking for punishment, like Johnny Boy from Mean Streets (1973) or any character Pesci played for him in the 1990s. You could imagine all of them having a loud and enjoyable dinner before getting into an explosive argument over who’s going to pay the check. That type of conflict – a rational man trying and failing to save a beloved yet volatile rogue – is a personal one for Scorsese. In Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective, author Tom Shone writes that Scorsese had a paternal uncle named Joey, “a colorful loudmouth” who “…was always in trouble of some sort, always in debt to some mobster he had borrowed money from,” with the result that the young Scorsese spent years listening to “…a lot of family sit-downs to make sure Joey wasn’t killed by the Mob.” Scorsese thus recreates this primal conflict in the relationship between Sheeran and Hoffa. In addition, the climactic action of the film is a betrayal, which is something that has fascinated Scorsese for his entire life and been depicted in his work since his days as a graduate student at NYU when he made his underrated and hilarious crime short It’s Not Just You, Murray! All these things make Scorsese’s depiction of Hoffa as much a window into what fascinates him as an artist as it is a portrait of a historical figure. Scorsese’s take on Hoffa is a far cry from how another director depicted him in a prominent film. In contrast to the portrait of him in The Irishman, in which he is the president of the Teamsters and spends more time giving speeches than organizing workers, Danny DeVito’s biopic Hoffa (1992) spends a good portion of its running time following his rise to become president. The focus here is less on the relationships that Hoffa (Jack Nicholson) has with gangsters (to the extent that DeVito refers to the gangsters with whom Hoffa does business on the DVD commentary as being a part of “the organization” instead of the Mafia or even the Mob) and more on him as a fighter for working people. Scorsese’s Hoffa is a man with whom you’d like to have a beer. DeVito’s Hoffa is a man who you’d want to salute. DeVito’s film depicts a version of its titular character that I like to call “Hoffa the hero.” This is fitting since DeVito told an interviewer that he thought that Hoffa was heroic in an interview shortly before the film’s release. “He put bread on the table of the working man. That to me is a hero,” DeVito said. To that end, DeVito and screenwriter David Mamet include many scenes of Hoffa fighting on behalf of working people. Whether it’s changing a tire for a driver as he gives him his pitch for why he should join the Teamsters, leading a march in defiance of his superiors in the union and the wishes of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, or comforting the mother of a slain Teamster, DeVito spares no effort to depict his protagonist as an authentic working-class hero. Nicholson leans into this side of the character in his performance. While his version of Hoffa isn’t perfect (he frequently uses homophobic and anti-Italian slurs much like Pacino’s Hoffa), he captures what DeVito saw as his commanding presence and passion for improving the lives of working people. Nicholson also does a very accurate impression of Hoffa’s voice (albeit one that slips every now and again) and looks a lot like him, even without the help of some old age makeup (“dig those jowls,” as DeVito says on the DVD commentary) that he wears later in the film. He may lack the sheer charisma of Pacino’s performance, but Nicholson delivers exactly what you’d expect from a biopic which seeks to valorize Hoffa as a hero of organized labor. Hoffa might seem like the odd film out in DeVito’s body of work as a director up until that point in time. He had previously directed Throw Momma from the Train (1987) and The War of the Roses (1989), both black comedies that focus more on making you laugh than want to shake a union organizer’s hand. But Hoffa does reflect DeVito’s artistic interests, just as The Irishman did for Scorsese. His positive portrayal of Hoffa reflects his own labor-based politics, which in more recent years have led him to support Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. While DeVito says on the DVD commentary that some of the deals Hoffa made were “very extreme,” he goes on to note that “you can do anything for the furtherment of the cause,” and that sense of being willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve something important feels like a justification for the great lengths that the protagonists of his previous films had gone to achieve their goals, such as getting rid of a reviled mother or an annoying spouse. While Hoffa isn’t a comedy, it does end with a punchline that is as dark as anything DeVito put in his previous two films. Hoffa associate Bobby Ciaro (a fictionalized character played by DeVito) tells a Teamster trucker credited only as Young Kid (Frank Whaley), who is grateful to him for helping him, to go thank Hoffa instead. Composer David Newman’s score swells sentimentally as Young Kid slowly walks towards Hoffa, like he’s going to meet his hero and thank him on behalf of all Teamsters for what he has done for the union. But instead, Young Kid whips out a gun and murders Hoffa, whose body (along with that of a murdered Ciaro) is taken away in a truck. It’s an ignominious ending for Hoffa the hero, but it is also one that is totally in keeping with DeVito’s artistic voice. Since these films bear the artistic stamps of both Scorsese and DeVito, you might wonder how Hoffa would have told his life story in his own way. He did, but not in the form of a film. Instead, Hoffa helped create an autobiography that was ghostwritten by journalist Oscar Fraley, who had done most of the work in writing Elliot Ness’s book The Untouchables. Fraley conducted extensive interview sessions with Hoffa and finished it after he disappeared. Their book bears the promising yet self-serving title of Hoffa: The Real Story. It follows its titular protagonist from his childhood until shortly before his disappearance. A major goal of Hoffa: The Real Story (which is written in the first-person from Hoffa’s perspective) is to provide readers with what its authors seemed to have hoped would be an honest portrait of “Hoffa the man.” This is clear from the punchy quote mid-way through the book that he “wrote this book because I’m going to have my say, and I’m damned well going to say what I think.” That leads to part of the appeal of the book, which is the punchy language created by Hoffa in collaboration with Fraley. He writes that his enemy, former Special Counsel to President Nixon Charles Colson, “proved himself to be a no-good liar. Because he’s no good and no good at lying…” He goes on to remark that when he saw a hated foreman get angry, he thought “hopefully, that he was going to have a heart attack.” He refers to prison as “hell on earth, only hell couldn’t be this bad.” Though Hoffa repeatedly denies that he is linked to organized crime (despite knowing gangsters), his pulpy language helps his autobiography feel like a true crime book. Indeed, it seems that Hoffa intended it that way, but with him as the victim of a crime instead of a perpetrator. Hoffa’s hate-filled relationship with Robert F. Kennedy was depicted in The Irishman (he frequently calls him “Booby” and he’s played by an understated Jack Huston) as well as Hoffa (in which he has more screentime and is played by a sneering Kevin Anderson). But it’s hard to get the full measure of Hoffa’s hatred for the man until you read Hoffa: The Real Story. The chapter where he first meets him is called “The Spoiled Brat.” In it, Hoffa writes that when he first encountered Kennedy (when he was counsel for the McClelland committee) he tried to get documents from him when he was in a meeting. Hoffa, angered that someone would interrupt him, “shoved him back into the hallway so hard that he almost fell down.” Later in this chapter, after Kennedy has repeatedly annoyed Hoffa, he calls him to his hotel room. After interrogating him, he suggests that they arm wrestle. Hoffa goes on to beat Kennedy in two consecutive arm-wrestling matches and writes that “I’m damned certain in my heart that Robert F. Kennedy became my mortal enemy that night.” It is stories like that–unverifiable, petty, and downright bizarre–which ironically helps make Hoffa’s autobiography feel like the most unlikeable and arrogant representation of him out of the three considered here. All his stories make him out to be the hero who has done nothing wrong. He’s simply a victim of bad luck (a running gag consists of people arresting him for no reason during his organizing days) and the ambitions of Robert F. Kennedy, who he insults with a wide variety of terms such as “vicious bastard” and “greedy little rich kid.” But Hoffa’s stories also reveal character failings and prejudices which he doesn’t address. When describing his aborted first date with his future wife Jo, he notes that it turned into a disaster when he honked his car for her to leave the house, like Kyle (Timothée Chalamet) in Lady Bird (2017). He also notes that, when he was in Lewisberg prison and tried to organize the prisoners to reform it, he refused to include complaints about racial and ethnic discrimination when he went to the warden. “We’re not here to talk about discrimination. We’re here to get the prison straightened out for everybody,” Hoffa said. His more problematic side is confirmed by Fraley in his epilogue, in which he noted that his co-writer supported capital punishment, opposed gun control, and busing, and believed that you could make cities safer if you could “crack down on the hoodlums; shoot their asses off.” Despite his attempts to win the reader over to his side, complete with quotations of news articles that are friendly to him and critical of Kennedy, the real Hoffa – violent, boorish, and petty – can’t help but be less likeable than the ones played by Pacino and Nicholson. Hoffa continues to linger on in popular culture, both because of what he achieved while he was alive and the ongoing mystery of his fate. There are plenty of books that try to find out what happened to him and, late as June 2022, the FBI was still pursuing leads related to the case. But it is Hoffa’s pro-union life, and what he built despite the charges of corruption and his own personal failings, that continue to resonate because we live in a period of renewed interest in and approval of unions. A recent poll showed that Americans approval of unions is at its highest point since 1965. Millions of people are joining them or starting ones at companies such as Starbucks. More recently, the Teamsters are about to conduct massive contract talks with UPS on behalf of 330,000 workers it represents. At a time like this, as workers try to assert their rights, it can be useful for them to look at previous representations of Hoffa in popular culture for inspiration. They can learn how to inspire a crowd with sheer charisma like Pacino’s Hoffa, or about the basics of organizing from Nicholson’s Hoffa. But perhaps most importantly, they can learn what not to do from the real Hoffa. View the full article

The late Cormac McCarthy, widely regarded as the literary heir to Herman Melville and William Faulkner, a traditionalist in a sea of deconstructionists, had a flair for violence. Sometimes he boiled everything down to the brutal essentials. From his novel “No Country for Old Men”: “Chigurh stepped into the doorway and shot him in the throat with a load of number ten shot. The size collectors use to take bird specimens. The man fell back through his swivel-chair knocking it over and went to the floor and lay there twitching and gurgling. Chigurh picked up the smoking shotgun shell from the carpet and put it in his pocket and walked into the room with the pale smoke still drifting from the canister fitted to the end of the sawed-off barrel.” And sometimes he went more baroque. From one of the more famous sequences in “Blood Meridian,” in which a tribe of Native Americans butcher a legion of hapless soldiers of fortune: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil…” Whatever the action, he gave it weight and texture. McCarthy’s style, light on punctuation but heavy on the conjunctions, sprinkled with the occasional sentence fragment and anachronistic word, is simultaneously reminiscent of a Biblical text and an old-school noir novel; think Deuteronomy meets Jim Thompson. His early books were steeped in Southern Gothic; as he progressed through the decades, he shifted West for his masterworks (“Blood Meridian” and the Border Trilogy), his prose increasingly lean. His last two books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” coalesced these literary forms; the former is dense and heartfelt, occasionally galactic in scope, while the latter is a pure dialogue of ideas that ends on a nihilistic note. Attempting to analyze McCarthy’s work through the lens of ‘crime fiction’ is an interesting exercise. His books were saturated with ‘crime’ in the most primal sense: murder, theft, baby-eating, massacre and genocide. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told The New York Times in 1992. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.” Crime fiction also revolves on the axis of crime and punishment, law and outlaw—but even in his most grounded novels, McCarthy wasn’t interested in the niceties of societal justice. The marauders of “Blood Meridian” pillage with impunity until more savage forces tear them apart; the police in “Child of God” are little more than a cleanup crew once the full scope of the protagonist’s horror is revealed; the cops who scurry through “No Country for Old Men” are powerless before the ruthlessness of Anton Chigurh, a professional hitman and fixer who pontificates about fate before murdering people; and in “The Road,” set in a post-apocalyptic America coated with ash, the laws and tenets of the old world are a fading dream. Much of crime fiction is obsessed with balance: the forces of law and order win, or at least the guilty get what’s coming to them. The arc of McCarthy’s literary universe bends not toward justice but something far darker. In “Blood Meridian,” man is described as the “ultimate practitioner” of war, the “ultimate trade.” War, in the book’s context, isn’t the orderly movement of troops around a field—it’s slaughter and pillage, much of it conducted on territory where burning down a village and killing its inhabitants for their scalps is considered just another Tuesday. Humanity perfected violence, and violence pushed humanity onto a merciless evolutionary path: Sheriff Bell, the old-fashioned lawman in “No Country for Old Men,” laments that a man he sent the death row “wasn’t nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.” That incomparable force is Anton Chigurh, not so much a psychopath as a human tailored to his environment. Among McCarthy’s rogues, he’s matched by the Judge, the giant killer genius at the heart of “Blood Meridian,” and Malkina, the antagonist (or perhaps the protagonist?) of “The Counselor,” a 2013 film written by McCarthy and directed by Ridley Scott. They’re all apex predators; the only laws that matter to them are the most primal ones. With “The Passenger,” the longer of his final two-book salvo, McCarthy starts out with the trappings of a conspiracy thriller. A plane has crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, and a passenger onboard is missing, along with an instrument panel and the pilot’s flight-bag; one of the divers sent to survey the wreck, Bobby Western, soon finds himself pursued by mysterious government men. It seems like McCarthy’s setting up a tense chase along the lines of “No Country for Old Men,” but then the narrative… trails off. Instead of pursuits and gunfights, we’re treated to long, digressive conversations about everything from nuclear physics to the JFK assassination. In the months since the book’s release, theories about this narrative drift have proliferated across the internet. Perhaps the story is actually Bobby Western’s coma dream (it certainly plays like a dream at moments); perhaps McCarthy performed the ultimate flex of the world-famous writer: using a narrative as a thin pretense to talk about the things that interest him. Whatever the motive, crime fiction aficionados heading into “The Passenger” expecting a thriller were treated to something radically different. “The Passenger” (and to a smaller extent, “Stella Maris”) also offers a counterbalance to the darkness and nihilism that dominated so many of McCarthy’s previous narratives. It’s a cruel and violent world, the books suggest, but love among family, among friends, is what sustains us through it: “He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.” It’s our solace among the bloodshed. View the full article

As a young child, my favorite activity involved going into my make-believe laboratory (a.k.a. the bathroom) and experimenting with powerful potions (empty shampoo bottles and such filled with water and soap). My big sister and I had a game we never spoke of. She would stand outside the door I’d left ajar and spy on me. I would stage-whisper to myself, “This will kill her, and she won’t even know how I did it!” A few years later, I got hooked on comic books. One that blew my mind was a mega-sized anthology of classic horror stories. It was printed like a comic book, but definitely foreshadowed what would later be known as graphic novels. It included comic book versions of the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson’s novella was published the year following the 1885 passage of the Labouchere Amendment in the United Kingdom. The Amendment made “gross indecency”—defined as any homosexual acts—a crime. From my early “experiments,” I was already primed for a mad scientist narrative. It wasn’t until reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde years later that I realized how deeply his theme of the double resonated with me. Stevenson’s novella was published the year following the 1885 passage of the Labouchere Amendment in the United Kingdom. The Amendment made “gross indecency”—defined as any homosexual acts—a crime. No less of a great artist than Oscar Wilde was persecuted and imprisoned because of Labouchere, ten years after its passage, and Alan Turing, esteemed World War II codebreaker and the acclaimed father of theoretical computer science and Artificial Intelligence was chemically castrated in 1952 after being convicted of breaking this cruel law. The U.K. didn’t “pardon” any of those persecuted till 2017, under the “Alan Turing Law.” No wonder “the closet” existed then and persists today. Imagine what it would feel like to have to hide an essential part of yourself, or risk public humiliation, loss of livelihood, prison time, and worse. Wouldn’t you feel as if you were living a double life? In the preface to my novella The Uncanny Case of Gilles/Jeannette, a modern gothic gender transition story inspired by Stevenson’s iconic characters, I note that there has long been speculation about Stevenson’s sexuality. Was he a queer man who explored the State-imposed duality of his life through his allegorical masterpiece? Curious, I dug deeper to discover the actual date of the law’s passage: August 14, 1885. According to Stevenson biographer Frank McLynn, most of the writing was done in September and October of 1885. The novella’s publication date was January 5, 1886. Could this have played into the extreme urgency with which Stevenson felt driven to write this story? You do the math. Although his sexuality cannot be “proven,” one thing is sure. Jekyll and Hyde has become short-hand for split personality, double life. It’s a trope queer people know quite well. The terror of the closet has long kept us leading double lives. This month is Gay Pride and like all Prides past, the celebrations are a mix of joy and sorrow. Yes, it is wonderful how far we’ve come, but given the way queer people, and Trans youth in particular are being viciously targeted by legislative hate campaigns, we are still living with targets on our backs. Consider the bill (SB 458) passed in Montana in May, 2023, which states: “a person’s sex can be only male or female” and “they are defined based on gamete size and chromosomes,” and finally that “one’s sex cannot be changed and the ‘subjective experience of gender’ is not important for the application of the law.” How different is that from the Labouchere language of 1885 which deemed sexual activities between two people of the same gender as “gross indecency?” The goal of all these horrific laws is to chase queers back into the closet, and ultimately erase or exterminate the ones who come out. Section eleven of the Labouchere Act sentences anyone guilty of “gross indecency” to two years of hard labor. Right now, 138 years later, the American Civil Liberties Union is tracking 491 anti-LGBTQ bills across the U.S., many of which mandate jail time and other punitive measures. The indecency of this vicious campaign speaks for itself. The question is: Why? Jekyll and Hyde gives us a classic literary answer. When a person is cut off from their “indecent urges” (as judged by society and/or the courts), they are forced to create an alternate identity, one couched in secrecy. Mr. Hyde is a literal creation of Dr. Jekyll’s alter-ego—a set-up so resonant now, we see it everywhere, especially in fantasy and sci-fi genres, where characters are forced to physically transform themselves due to “social norms” imposed on them. The moral of the story still applies, too. Dr. Jekyll was unable to understand his own urges, just like many anti-queer politicians are unable to recognize their own motives. In recent years, legislative homophobes turned out to be men who have sex with men, including Minneapolis Senator Larry Craig, Michigan State Representative Todd Courser, and many others. The list goes on and on. These tormented men were compelled to torment others because free expression of sexuality and gender held a mirror up to them. If they’d read and learned from Stevenson’s classic story, they’d have looked in that mirror, seen hidden aspects of themselves and even loved those rejected parts. There’d be no hate and no chilling laws like the ones Stevenson saw being enacted in his day. Today, anti-queer legislation is fueled by a similar lack of self-understanding—and a fear of anything “transformed” beyond “social norms.” That’s how Mr. Hyde and the Labouchere Act are lurking behind hundreds of repressive legislative acts proposed today. I wrote The Uncanny Case of Gilles/Jeannette to modernize a Jekyll and Hyde-style tale and reflect the torturous conditions for LGBT people in the 21st century. In the story, Ella and Simone are working through the complexities that have arisen in their long-term relationship, since Simone began transitioning to Simon. But this is just the present-day framing story. When Ella inherits an old family Inn in Hudson, she and Simon move upstate from Brooklyn. In the basement she discovers a diary that tells the mad tale of Jeannette and Gilles. When Jeannette, grieving the recent death of her father cannot win the love of her friend Dahlia, she descends into her father’s laboratory and creates a serum that turns her into a man. This man, Gilles, however turns out to be a charming, murderous monster—one that Jeannette cannot control. The old tale is set in 1933, the height of the Great Depression. My previous crime novel Jazzed took place a decade earlier, during a time that was loose and free—the Jazz Age—but also a time when the hypocritical social forces were fighting hard to keep the country homogenized. Eugenics played a large part in that story. My new novella is set during the oppressive Prohibition era, and one year before the Hollywood Hays code goes into effect. Before Hays, at least queer people could see some reflection of themselves on the screen, even if stereotypical (though often quite sexy)! After Hays, queers were erased from the screen until the code was lifted in 1954. I learned about the Hays code through The Celluloid Closet, a 1981 book by Vito Russo who died of AIDS at age 44. Russo’s book is one of the two nonfiction books that have had the greatest impact on me. The other is futurist Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near which, back in 2005, predicted that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and pass the Turing Test by 2029, and by 2045, humans will merge with the very artificial intelligence we’ve created. Isn’t it truly a horror tale, how important the “Turing Test” has become today—with the very recent rise of ChatGPT and hundreds of other AI applications—when in his own era, Turing was medically tortured for his sexuality? Much the way there is AI hysteria in the air, and people fear that the non-human “other” will make them obsolete, queer-haters in American politics are equally hysterical (and not in a gay old way!) about trans people whom they also view as non-human and “other.” They fear that by allowing trans people to even exist they will be signing away their own powers, and their own relevance. Stevenson had it right when he showed us that Jekyll and Hyde were both the same person. There is no evil “other,” only ourselves we see mirrored in others. We can either accept ourselves completely, and turn shame into self-compassion, or project that hate onto others and fight to take away their rights and very lives. Or perhaps that is a little too righteous and binary. In the name of a classic horror story, how about we all take one small step to just consider this idea, and act accordingly, with decency? *** View the full article

What is it about being alone in the woods that’s so frightening? Is it a fear of predators, disorientation, or a sense of vulnerability? What about the inability to call for help or a fear of the unknown? Or, what if the most pulse-pounding element is simply your imagination, feeding off a lifetime of consuming thrillers set in the deep, dark woods? Growing up, I spent my summers at a lakeside cabin situated a few miles down a narrow dirt road. Once the car bounced off the pavement onto the gravel and houses gave way to a dense forest, it felt as if I entered a different world. I relished the campfire tales and late-night walks to the pitch-black cemetery situated unsettlingly close to our cabin. My imagination ran wild and unfettered out there. A snap of a branch sent my heart pounding. An animal’s claws clicking on a brick path had me cowering under the covers. In a secluded and lonely little cabin, rational thoughts seemed to slip away as darkness fell. Cut off from people and communication – to this day, there’s no internet connection, and good luck getting a cell signal – it was easy to conjure nail-biting scenarios. Those nights filled me with a love of all things scary, but as I got older, the isolation of our cabin in the woods brought out new fears in me. Gone were days of looking for ghost lights in the cemetery. Now, I peered nervously into other empty cabins and wondered, who could help me if something happened? It was that thought, and that setting, that eventually morphed into an idea for my debut thriller, The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard. When journalist Willa Stannard is found dead from an apparent suicide, her sister Sawyer knows it’s not possible. Sawyer plunges into a desperate search for the truth and learns Willa was writing a true crime book about the decades-old disappearance of a toddler in a small lakeside community. She begins to trace her sister’s steps, deep into a community she can’t begin to understand and to a truth that could destroy her as easily as it did Willa. When writing The Three Deaths of Willa Stanard, I knew I wanted to incorporate an isolated lakeside cottage not unlike the one where I spent my summers as a kid. Sawyer’s investigation takes her to a tiny cabin on a dead-end road with few neighbors. When a child goes missing from a place like this, there’s only one road out, but miles of forest and lake. Juxtaposed with a dual setting in Chicago, the remoteness of the woods is starker. The main character feels as if she’s entered a different world, where she can rely on only herself for help. In that way, the setting can become its own character. It makes an indelible mark on the story. The plot couldn’t march forward the way it does without the eerie isolation of the woods. Here are five thrillers that use a secluded, wooded setting to lead you into dark tales. In the Woods by Tana French In the summer of 1984, three children don’t return home from the dark and silent woods bordering their neighborhood. Police find only one child, gripping a tree trunk in terror, unable to remember any details of the previous hours. Twenty years later, that same boy is a detective who finds himself investigating the murder of a young girl found in the woods – a case eerily similar to the one haunting his past. In this small Dublin town, the woods tie together the past and present, and the setting adds to the moody, shivery darkness of IN THE WOODS. The Troop by Nick Cutter Each year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the wilderness for a camping trip. But when an extremely thin and voraciously hungry intruder stumbles into their camp, Scoutmaster Riggs and the boys are exposed to something more frightening than a campfire tale. Set on a remote island off the coast of Prince Edward Island, horror/thriller The Troop takes wilderness survival to a new level. Deliverance by James Dickey On a remote white-water river, four men embark on a canoe trip. What starts as these middle-aged men’s last chance for an adventure on a river that’s scheduled to be damned into a reservoir quickly becomes a fight for survival when their party is attacked. What follows is an action-packed, at times violent, tale of survival. James Dickey’s incredibly descriptive writing brings the Georgia wilderness to life. Perhaps even more spellbinding than its cinematic adaptation, this 1970 debut novel is a riveting ride into the beauty and deadliness of the woods. Final Girls by Riley Sager Quincy Carpenter is the sole survivor of a mass murder at a remote cabin in the woods. Branded a “final girl” by the press, she buries her trauma. But when another final girl, a survivor of a sorority house massacre, dies by apparent suicide, Quincy is forced to confront her spotty memories of that fateful night. The flashbacks to Pine Cottage are reminiscent of scenes from classic horror movies: a secluded cabin in the Poconos, a gaggle of college-age kids, an attacker, and a bloody run through the woods. Final Girls plays off the slasher-in-the-woods trope, and it delivers a twisty, gripping story of surviving an attack while isolated in the woods. The Woods Are Always Watching by Stephanie Perkins High school graduates Josie and Neena embark on a three-day backpacking trip before their looming separation. The girls are novice campers, underprepared and uneasy with the wooded terrain. When they take an off-trail detour, they realize a predator is lurking deep in the forest. Set in the Pisgah National Forest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, The Woods Are Always Watching offers vivid descriptions that immerse the reader in the terrifying isolation of a backpacking trail where evil watches from the shadows. *** View the full article

Algonkian Writer Conferences reviews two of the most troll-heavy "reviews" ever encountered by its staff, or for that matter, humans still alive in the 21st century. Algonkian Park in Northern Virginia might be described as a lush and calming act of forest rubbing shoulders with the Potomac River, and it was here, twenty-two years ago, that Algonkian Writer Conferences began with a small workshop of five writers. Since then, the grand majority of my own experiences with many hundreds of my fellow writers have been rewarding, and I can truthfully say I've played a productive role in assisting many to secure both agent and publisher contracts. However, during this same time, as Algonkian evolved with new faculty (both agents and publishing house editors) and fresh-rooted into New York and California, the relatively benign flow of interactions could be compromised on rare occasion by something unexpected, and quite frankly, a bit lunatic. Below are a couple of meandering tales that unfortunately fit under the rubric of Algonkian Writer Conference reviews, and as such, are so incredibly bad I never would have believed them possible had I not lived them from first howl to final tantrum. ________________ A Mad Hatter Out for Blood Twelve years ago, in Marin County, I received a phone call at 3 AM on a weekday. Bleary and puzzled, I picked up the landline phone to hear the enraged voice of a popular author I knew in Faifax, Virginia. And what he said jolted me into a shocked awakening. "Who the f**k are they?" he began, yelling into the phone. "They're lying about me, about you... the bastards! Who the f**k are they?" Since I had zero idea who or what had launched him screaming from the silo, I finally calmed him enough to extract an unexpected and jaw-dropping explanation. He'd set up a Google alert to inform him any time his name was indexed and published by the search engine, and that morning at 6 AM EST, an alert led him to a particular thread on a certain writer chat board (remaining nameless due to my reluctance to provide said board with thousands more visitors). And what did this disguised floating blip say that could have turned a mature and regarded literary author and full-time MFA professor into a mad hatter out for blood? Within only a few minutes of reading what an anonymous poster had said about him on this thread, he was persuaded to contact me. And what did this disguised floating blip say that could have turned a mature and regarded literary author and full-time MFA professor into a mad hatter out for blood? But first, a little scene set. Picture your browser window filled with a dull, grey-white background and blocks of typed narrative in a small black font. To the top left of each posted block, residing in its own narrow column, you see the icon and alleged name of the poster, plus info like date joined, etc. Typical chat board layout. Now, for the one in question. You zoom in on the icon and witness a bubbly vibrating fairy. To the right, you read the blocks of text this fidgeting blip as typed. You see "Algonkian Writer Conferences" and something about an upcoming reveal that "will finally tell the truth about this organization stocked with literary frauds and flying sock monkeys!" Flying sock monkeys? It took over a year of investigation, but Algonkian staff discovered the identity of the primary abusers. They operated a competitor writer event in the northeast. No big surprise there. For starters, the primary instigator of this massive fraud, Michael Neff (who else?)--in order to make his workshops seem more credible--willfully assisted a local author and college professor to spread a huge lie about winning a certain national literary award for one of his books. Not only that, but the flying sock monkeys that ran Algonkian really didn't feature actual faculty. They were just "driven around in limousines" for a few hours, but never met with anyone. Also, our staff were "waiting at bus stops for dazed MFA grads" to arrive home so we could trick them into taking these workshops with limousine-lounging faculty. I'm not kidding. Not a bit. To make a long and ugly story short, the author noted above went on the chat board in question and began a roaring argument with the anonymous tribal members, most of whom resembled beasts or cyborgs. After a few days of wrangling and threats mixed with general acts of denigration and mockery on the part of all, the author finally produced evidence that indeed proved without doubt he had won said literary award, and no chicanery was involved in any way whatsoever. Despite his undeniable proof, the chat board owners refused to remove the post alleging his immoral act. Despite his undeniable proof, the chat board owners refused to remove the post alleging his immoral act. Following this, at least ten or so Algonkian writers who had learned of this ongoing farce via Facebook stormed the board and opened a new front to battle with the beasts and cyborgs. It must've lasted weeks, but at the conclusion, the chat board shills admitted no wrong and no mistakes. The accused were guilty, the evidence was irrelevant, and the lies multiplied even further. In truth, it was a precursor to the later cancel-culture mobs of Twitter. Regardless, the whole affair was exhausting, stupid, and pointless, only further serving to taint the integrity of the human race. It took over a year of investigation, but Algonkian staff discovered the identity of the primary abusers. They operated a competitor writer event in the northeast. No big surprise there. The surprise lay in the fact that the vibrating fantasy blip was actually a well-known editor at a major publishing house who loved playing a roving assassin on various chat boards, not just the one noted here. Also, one of the meanest of the board trolls who ran a close second to the aforementioned blip turned out to be a popular literary agent in New York who also ran a blog that worked 24/7 to insult and cancel everyone she didn't like. No surprise there either. And still, not kidding. To this day, none of them have ever apologized for intentionally lying about that author or for my alleged involvement. Both of these accusations, and more, were acts of per se defamation and therefore legally actionable in civil court, but given the locations of the parties, the cost involved, and additional fallout issues involving the blip's publisher, we let it go. I've often regretted that decision. ______________ The "Terrified One" Smears Far and Wide Unlike the case above, this one manifested like ash fall on Pompey prior to inundation. It began with incessant phone calls and messages to staff over the course of several weeks from just one person who we finally determined would never be satisfied with reality as it presented itself. Did people at conference workshops sit in circles? Did they sit in half-circles? Did they stand? Sit? Why sitting? Why not a theater-seating kind of arrangement? Why not this? That? And on and on. Then things got weird. Rejected and free of restraints, The Terrified One transmogrified into the hysterically raging one, and the world was her playground. One of our staff people was trying to help this individual and reaching wit's end. Towards the conclusion of these interactions, the staff person was accused of "terrifying her" with her communications. I looked over the mails and saw absolutely nothing to indicate a hostile or "terrifying" attitude, only a weary human being attempting to help someone desperately striving to acquire a new victim culture medal. A final email was sent by staff to The Terrified One: I offered to help you but you chose to become "terrified" though I did nothing to terrify you. Best to reconsider and perhaps some other time. It's not good to approach an event like this with fear and major doubts, and wondering whether or not people sit in circles, or whether you have to be a public speaker, etc. etc. It's just not worth it. Effectively disallowed from attending the actual event (because we all knew that an appearance by this person would certainly result in even more complaints and self-martyrdom) The Terrified One transmogrified into a Nemesis with a holy mission. The fact of this wasn't a shock, however, the sheer relentlessness of the retribution could not have been predicted. Rejected and free of restraints, The Terrified One transmogrified into the hysterically raging one, and the world was her playground. Nowadays, it's easier to quickly get a court order to force the social media source to divulge information about the user, thus enabling legal action, but back at the time, such action was far more laborious. The rest is a footnote of a footnote in history. TTO posted screeds of rage, alleging all manner of nefarious intent (nearly identical to the absurdities noted above, thus hinting at direct inspiration) and preposterously conceived fraud on several chat boards, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Various childish identities were employed over the course of weeks, but the source was obvious. Nowadays, it's easier to quickly get a court order to force the social media source to divulge information about the user, thus enabling legal action, but back at the time, such action was far more laborious. Most of the offending revenge posts evaporated over time and one or two are left, rising and sinking in the SERPs depending on the nature of the algorithm. Damned if we did, and damned if we didn't. _____

The New York Write to Pitch reviews, bullet by bullet, what makes the conference especially valuable to writers in terms of development, craft, and market guidance. See the NYWP e-Book below for an example. "New York Write to Pitch 2023: Development Guideposts and Crucial Craft Prior to Novel Pitching" Amazon Page Free Kindle Reader As noted on Amazon, this is a compilation of important articles, notes, and studies drawn from the conference pre-event schedule. The e-book addresses the vital core points that will be discussed in the context of each writer's novel-in-progress. From relatively simple matters of proper title choice to polished interior monologue, it's all here. Examples of Content as Follows - Do not join a local or online writer group, however socially alluring it may be, and regardless of what its apostles tell you. Don't fall for it. We know, it feels like the right thing because so many recommend it, but it's the wrong thing by a lightyear... Review carefully our notes on this crucial and controversial subject... - Aspire to be a great genre author? Why not? But what's your high concept?... If you fail to grasp the vital importance of this second question, you will fail to conceive much less write a publishable genre novel - thriller, mystery, fantasy, horror, crime, SF, you name it. Just not going to happen. - The above diverse examples define classic drama that creates conflict with real stakes. Note too that each of these hook lines contains what we refer to as the CORE WOUND. Important! Especially if you intend to become commercially published. If you cannot make the stakes of your novel clear via a properly written hook line, the odds are you don't have any. We must address this now... Bullet points in this chapter : Issues of The Hook: Protagonist Intro - Antagonist First? - Inciting Incident - Extreme Importance of Setting - Establishment of Characters - The MacGuffin - In Media Res - Crucial Sympathy Factors - Something Bad Happens - Exposition - Theme? What needs to be done from the start? Why is the hook of Act I critical to this novel and to being taken seriously as a writer? - What is Act Zero of the novel? Understand the issues below. This does not directly appear in the story except by use of flashback and via other methods to deliver exposition. Forces must already be in motion in order to create conflict for the characters... __________ From our blog post on the NYWP: The New York Write to Pitch was officially launched on June 1, 2022. It is a hybrid event combining the core elements of the New York Pitch Conference with new development and editorial content that addresses the many nuances of premise, plot, and prose narrative. As it notes on Publisher's Marketplace, "Development of the novel therefore becomes an issue of paramount concern. Why? Because you can't pitch a marketable novel unless and until you've written one." _________

Three months ago, I put together a list of the 19 scruffiest detectives in crime film and TV. I wrote in that list that “[t]he scruffy detective is one of the purest, most persistent tropes in the crime genre” and that is true. But such is also the case for the suave, polished detective! Crime fiction contains multitudes, what can I say? The gentleman sleuth character is deeply entrenched in the genre, going back to the 19th century. The archetype flourished during the Golden Age of detective fiction at the start of the 20th century, giving us countless well-heeled, refined sleuths ripe for adaptation to television and film. As I did with this list’s rumpled-focused companion, I decided to put together a list of some of the most iconic entrants in this category. As with its counterpart, it is not a comprehensive list! There are many more possibilities than the nineteen I have set down here. This list is a mere survey, a pleasing selection of the erudite, the elegant, the urbane and all-around dignified detectives of modern entertainment. And! As with my “Scruffy Detectives” list from days past, there are no “regular cops” on here—just detectives, of the amateur, private, and police variety. There are also no FBI or CIA agents on this list, just good ol’ gentlemen sleuths (a term which I say includes women!) When I think “suave detective,” I think of Trevor Howard in The Third Man This list is not ranked, because that would be extremely difficult. Why would I put myself through that? Rick Castle, Castle Bestselling author-cum-PI Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) lives in a huge Soho loft, drives a convertible, and has a monthly poker game with James Patterson, Stephen J. Cannell, Michael Connelly, and Dennis Lehane. He’s a rock star of the crime fiction world, and this doesn’t mean he lives a debauched, sloppy life. Nope, he’s very put-together. He has the resources to be! Neal Caffrey, White Collar In White Collar, a show I love and will not hear slander about, Matt Bomer plays Neal Caffrey, a very, very suave conman/forger/racketeer/thief who sweet-talks his way into serving his out prison sentence by solving white-collar crimes with the FBI. He also gets the swankiest living situation of probably any person on this list (including you, Amos Burke). He winds up renting a top-floor studio apartment in a Riverside Drive mansion from an elegant, elderly widow (Diahann Caroll) who has a special place in her heart for sexy bad boys and who is happy to lend Neal her late husband’s wardrobe of Devore suits, skinny ties, and fedoras. Which allows Neal to spend his meager FBI salary on nice wines and art supplies. Perry van Shrike, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang In Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Val Kilmer plays the extremely put-together, on-top-of-things PI Perry van Shrike, or “Gay Perry,” as his sort-of sidekick Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) calls him. He wears suits very well, but his best outfit in the movie is actually the navy blue tracksuit he wears towards the end. Frank Pembleton, Homicide: Life on the Street Though audiences now might know the great Andre Braugher best for playing the extremely polished Captain Raymond Holt in Brooklyn 99. But in the 90s, he played the brilliant, Jesuit-schooled, Latin-and-Greek-reading, all-around-scholarly Frank Pembleton in Homicide. Frank Pembleton brought the brooding scholarly, gentlemanly detective back to the procedural, people! Will Trent, Will Trent The new TV show, based on Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent series, features Ramón Rodríguez as the dyslexic genius Will Trent, who overcomes the trauma of his past by striving for perfection, both professionally and sartorially. Adam Dalgliesh, Dalgliesh P.D. James’s poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh has been adapted to the screen many, many times, but I’m choosing Bertie Carvel’s recent characterization from Dalgliesh, the newish TV series starring Bertie Carvel that chronicles Dalgliesh’s career from the 70s onward. Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe might have made it onto the Scruffy Detectives list, but Humphrey Bogart’s is firmly on this list. Extremely well-dressed and refined, he bears greater resemblance to Chandler’s original characterization. Benoit Blanc, Knives Out & Glass Onion Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc is introduced to us in Knives Out as having been profiled in The New Yorker as “the last of the gentleman sleuths.” I rest my case, your honor. If you need further proof, look at his striped bespoke bathing costume in Glass Onion. Amos Burke, Burke’s Law Burke’s Law was a show from the 60s about an LAPD detective chief who also happened to be a millionaire. He lives in a mansion, wears tailored suits, and takes a chauffeured Rolls-Royce to work, even to crime scenes, which maybe was super cool in the 60s but is less so now. Virgil Tibbs, In the Heat of the Night No one in the whole world has ever been as suave as Sidney Poitier and this is a fact. Howard Rollins‘s Virgil Tibbs from the TV show adaptation of the same name is very suave, but there’s no out-suaveing Sidney. Honey West, Honey West Anne Francis stars in this classic high-tech PI show that ran from 1965 to 1966, about a woman who inherits her father’s detective business. Honey West is the coolest, most put-together person in all of 60s TV (an American, non-espionage equivalent of Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel from The Avengers). She knows martial arts, she has a pet ocelot, she has a male sidekick… she’s just cool. And there is never, ever one hair out of place. Lord Peter Wimsey, A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery This series is not the only Wimsey adaptation out there, but if I have to pick one to emblematize the “polished” gentleman sleuth, I think I’ll go with the series that starred Edward Petherbridge as a staid, scholarly Peter Wimsey, rather than the one with Ian Carmichael, which features Wimsey as a little goofy and eccentric. Inspector Morse, Inspector Morse John Thaw’s Inspector Endeavour Morse is the epitome of the gentleman sleuth. Although he’s technically a working-class police detective, he has champagne tastes: he’s an opera-loving, classics-reading, crossword puzzle-solving Renaissance Man with a love of classic cars and authentic beers. Sgt (Lady) Harriet “Harry” Makepeace, Dempsey and Makepeace Dempsey and Makepeace was a classic British detective procedural featuring an odd-couple, opposites-attractive detective team featuring a tough, blue-collar Brooklynite NYPD officer and a refined English noblewoman who also happens to be an MPS detective sergeant. Makepeace (Glynis Barber) is elegant, clever, and circumspect (and obviously going to slowly fall in love with her new partner). Albert Campion, Campion Crime queen Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion novels have been adapted numerous times throughout the years, notably in a TV series in 1959 and longer one in 1989. I’m using the latter show as my reference point. Peter Davison plays Albert Campion, the aristocratic Englishman who helps the police solve difficult crimes. Remington Steele, Remington Steele I feel like I don’t even need to say anything about this one. I mean, duh. Laura Holt, Remington Steele Actually you know who else is absolutely RAVISHING? Laura Holt, the real “Remington Steele” behind Remington Steele. Let’s give her credit, please! DCI John Luther, Luther Idris Elba’s John Luther is an impossibly suave, imposingly confident detective—who always looks put-together even when his personal life is falling apart. That drip! As the kids say. Hercule Poirot, Poirot “I say, Poirot!” Yes, Hastings, you are correct. There have been many, many Poirots throughout film and TV history, but I’m giving David Suchet’s Hercule a spot on this list. In terms of charmingly vain punctiliousness of presentation, he’s the GOAT. This list isn’t ranked, but if it were, he’d be numéro un anyway. View the full article

This article covers the common symptoms of new and impatient novel writing. Algonkian Writer Conferences reviews this epidemic condition in a frank and direct manner. 1. NEOPHYTE SKILL SET AND A FAILURE TO COMPREHEND THE PROBLEM In the case of the former, we've found in our reviews that the prose itself fails to display the energy, creativity, suspense and cinema necessary to convince an agent to go deeper. This is perhaps the number one cause of failure, and the reason why veteran readers need not go further than a page or two of the manuscript. Usually, the writer is not aware of this condition--or at least, not sufficiently aware to enable productive change (another consequence of obtaining feedback from amateur writer groups. Perhaps this is a first stab at fiction, the aspiring author not realizing that tech or law or medical writing ill prepares one. Also, the writer does not know a truly experienced editor, or reader for that matter, and therefore reviews of their work are conducted without the benefit of nuanced and professional critique. Or perhaps an ego obstacle, a self-destructive narcissism is at play? Also, we have the "birthed baby" phenomenon: the writer has produced a passage, a character, or scene they can't possibly delete. It is sacred to them. So it remains, defacing the narrative like a major pothole, jolting agents and publishers alike each time they meet it. In the case of the storytelling issue, the writer may actually be accomplished at connecting the word dots, a decent if not accomplished prose stylist; however, the agent or publisher gives it a single review then backs off. Why? Well, the story goes nowhere. It is insufficiently interesting, too quiet, or perhaps even confusing. Just recently a fine writer handed us a sample of his ms. His prose skill kept us turning, but finally we bogged down on characters who spun endlessly in place, who never really took action or engaged in any reaction worth noting. ___________ NOTE: if you, the reader of this article, happen to be a year or two into the process of writing a first novel, strive to arrange a professional critique of your story premise and your first 50 pages at least. It shouldn't cost much and will be worth it in the long run. Do not rely on your writer group to provide the expertise necessary for a realistic evaluation. _____________ 2. FAILURE TO ADEQUATELY UNDERSTAND THE MARKET We are not talking about trend chasing... Virtually every time I speak with a student I discover that she or he has not sufficiently researched their market. In other words, they don't have a clue as to what types of first novels are currently being published in their chosen genre (assuming one is chosen). Why is this important? Because the first novels provide the writer with a concept of what the market is looking for. Also, it helps steer the writer away from starting a project that will be DOA on arrival due to being way too deja-vu or trope heavy. Far too many writers make the Tom Clancy mistake, i.e., they attempt to emulate a huge author, falsely believing it will get them published. They don't understand that author gods like TC could get away with terrible literary crimes in their old age and still become published. Instead, the writer must examine first novels published in their chosen genre over the past two years: investigate story types, settings, protagonists, etc. The research always yields productive results because first novels are the weathervane for where the market is going, and on more than one level. _____________ 3. NARCISSISM TIMES TEN EQUALS BOTTOM FEEDING The writer is puffed, living in a state of I-know-better. She or he is therefore incapable of successfully editing their work. Friends, relatives, or bad agents have told them their writing is good, and their story interesting (they dare not do otherwise!). Perhaps the writer is a big success in their other career, so why shouldn't they also know-it-all when it comes to writing? OMG. We once had a millionaire venture capitalist hand us their 15 page synopsis and the first few pages of their novel. The synopsis was absurdly long and unable to summarize the story in any coherent way; and the first couple of novel pages needed a good line editing because the prose was inadequate and one tended to speedbump over at least one awkward sentence per paragraph. Of course, these facts were unknown to the venture capitalist. He presented us the work with a grand TA DAH!, expecting a corroboration. Well, of course, irritation set in when we tactfully pointed out shortcomings. He also did not believe us when we explained that the vast majority of agents would not, repeat NOT read that 15 page synopsis regardless (and if they did, the novel was DOA). Later, he went on to self publish and sell a total of 136 copies at last count. _____________ 4. INCREDIBLY BAD ADVICE SPELLS DOOM Whether the source is an article, a friend, or a writer's conference, the writer has been told something that steered them wrong, or built a false expectation, or made them believe a man-bites-dog story will happen to them. For example, a writer with a manuscript in need of a good final editing told me, "Not to worry. The publishing house editor or the agent will complete the edit for me." I explained that would not happen--not for a first timer with zero track record. Another piece of incredibly bad advice often heard from egoistic writers or agents: "Writers are born, not made." This is simply not true. A clever, determined writer who shelves the ego and seeks to research and learn their craft will succeed. Tenacity wins. See our Top Ten Worst Pieces of Bad Writing Advice and follow up with The Top Worst of the "Worst Writer Advice." _____________ 5. THE COMING OF MORALE LOSS The most common form of morale loss occurs at such time the writer finally realizes their writing is not nearly as good as they suspected. The writer returns to a favorite slice of writing, seeking to admire, build confidence, only to discover their favorite slice has gone stale and offensive. So what happened? Writers who fail to understand that such realizations are necessary watersheds (and they happen to all writers!) and indicators of growth, become disillusioned. They quit. The second biggest cause of morale loss results from no success in selling an agent on your novel. It's been dragging on for years. The novel ms has been shopped around. No one is buying and feedback is confusing. Or perhaps the novel ms is resting like a one ton anchor on your desk (waiting for neck) eight years later and still not ready despite several restarts and who knows how many total drafts. If any of the above is the case, welcome to the club! Buy yourself a drink and get back to work. _____________ 6. IMPATIENCE EQUALS LOTS OF WASTED POSTAGE The story might even be pretty good, fairly original, and the writing likewise, however, the writer is impatient and sends the ms out too soon. Flaws exist in the plot, character development, and God knows what else. No one knew! The writer's crit group was mistaken! Agents and editors will stumble a few times before reaching for a rejection slip. Most likely, the writer will never know why. She or he will just keep sending out the same damaged ms again and again. _____________ 7. INSUFFICIENT CREDS TO PROVIDE COMPETITIVE EDGE Credentials, platform, prior publications--these things can matter, especially for literary/upmarket writers. The vast majority of first novel writers do not get work published in viable short fiction markets. This makes it even more difficult to land a good agent. Many agents will not look twice at a writer whose cover letter does not demonstrate a track record of some type. A publishing record, even a meager one, helps convince publishers and agents that you have what it takes. Even in the mystery/thriller and SF/F markets, you go to the top of the stack if you've published shorts in reputable journals. Contest wins, past mentors, certain types of nonfiction, and participation in writing programs can also matter, depending on the genre and marketing desires of the publishing house. Michael Neff Algonkian Writer Conferences ________________________________

The Savage History of Proofrock, Idaho opens looking through the two eyeholes of a mask, and of course there’s some heavy, menacing breathing. What those eyeholes are fixed on from behind the bushes is a ten-year-old kid. It’s nighttime, well after midnight, and the kid’s sitting in a barely moving swing at Founders Park. It’s where the old staging area for Terra Nova used to be, eight years ago. The kid’s head is down so his face is hidden. He could be dead, posed there, his hands wired to the swing’s galvanized chains, but then a thin breath comes up white and frosted, and he starts to look up, eyes first. Before his face comes into focus, The Savage History of Proofrock, Idaho cuts to an occluded angle into . . . a shed? It is. A dark workshop of some sort, like a room you scream through at a haunted house down in Idaho Falls. No more mask to look through. Just a nervous space between two boards of the wall. Words sizzle into the bottom of the screen and then flame away: the Chainsaw’s been Dead for Years. The irregular capitalization is supposed to make it scarier, like a ransom note. In this shed, on this grimy workbench, a man in a leather apron is working on this chainsaw. This man’s got a bit of size—linebacker shoulders, veins cresting on his forearms. His hands are white and tan, and the camera stays on them, documenting his every ministration on this chainsaw. It’s dark, the angle’s bad and unsteady, but that only makes it better, really. “Is that Slipknot?” Paul says about the music thumping in this shed. Hettie shushes him, says, “He’s old, okay?” He’s old and he’s taking the top cover off the chainsaw, or trying to. Eventually he figures out to push the chain brake—the cover comes right off. It’s enough of a surprise that the cover goes clattering onto the floor, almost loudly enough to cover the squeaky yelp that’s much closer to the camera. Almost loud enough to cover that, but not quite. Instead of a nightmare face stooping down into frame after this runaway chainsaw cover, there’s twelve seconds of listening silence after the song’s turned off. The man’s hands are still on the workbench, the fingertips to the dirty wood, the palms high and arched away so it’s like there’s two pale spiders doing that thing spiders do when their eight eyes and their leg bristles have told them there’s a presence in the room. And then that grimy leather apron is rushing to this camera, blacking the screen out. Paul chuckles, draws deep on the joint and holds it, holds it, then leans forward to breathe that smoke into Hettie’s mouth like she used to like, when they were fourteen. “You’re going to secondhand kill me,” she says with a satisfied cough, holding the videocamera high and wide, out of this. “Only after I first-hand do something else . . . ” Paul says back, his hand rasping up the denim of her thigh. “But did it scare you?” Hettie asks, keeping his hand in check and shaking the camera so Paul’s syrupy-thinking self can know what she’s talking about: the documentary. She pinches the joint away from him for her own toke, and doesn’t cough it out. Where they’re sitting is the doorway alcove of the library on Main Street, right under the book deposit slot. Out past their knees, Proofrock’s dead. Someone just needs to bury it. “Your mom know you snuck Jan out after dark?” Paul asks, squinting against Hettie’s exhale. “She’s more worried about who my dad’s dating this week,” Hettie says from the depths of her own syrup bottle. “Janny Boy’s a good little actor, though, isn’t he? I told him to pretend he was a ghost, just sitting there.” “What’d you do with the snow?” Paul asks, his eyes practically bleeding. It’s nearly halfway through October, now. The snow they always get by Halloween hasn’t come yet, but there’s been plenty of small ones, trying to add up into the real deal. “I edited it out,” Hettie says, sneaking a look up to Paul to see if he’ll buy this, but his stoned mind is still assembling her words into a sentence. Hettie shoulders into his chest, says, “We shot it in July, idiot.” “But his breath,” Paul manages to cobble together, doing his fingers to slow-motion the puff of white Jan had breathed out that night. “I didn’t give him a cigarette, if that’s what you’re asking.” “So he’s really a ghost, what?” “Confectioner’s sugar.” “In his mouth?” Paul asks. Hettie shrugs, says, obviously, “He loved it.” Excerpt continues below cover image. Courtesy of Saga Press, Simon & Schuster “Ghosts and swings and baking goods,” Paul says, hauling the camera up to his shoulder, aiming it at Hettie. “Tell us, Herr Director, why do little ghost boys with sweet white mouths like to frequent parks after dark?” “Because it looks good for my senior project,” Hettie says, cupping the lens in her palm, guiding the camera down. It would be easier to shoot this documentary with her phone, which is much better for low-light situations, but this is throwback. Her dad’s VHS camera was still in the attic, along with everything else he’d left when he bailed, but Hettie’s paying for these blank tapes herself, “to show she’s committed,” that “this isn’t just another passing thing.” What it is is her ticket out of here. The world will roll out the red carpet for footage like this, from the heart of the murder capital of America. First there was Camp Blood half a century and more ago, then there was the Independence Day Massacre when she was in fourth grade, and then, for junior high, there was Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour. Nearly forty dead in a town of three thousand is a per capita nightmare, even across a few years. And that translates to serious bucks. Now if she can only get this Angel of Indian Lake’s tattered white nightgown and J-horror hair and supposedly bare feet on tape tonight, blurry and distant, “ethereal and timeless,” then . . . then everything, right? The doors to the future open up for Hettie Jansson, and she walks through with a Joan Jett scowl, squinting from the sea of flashbulbs but not ever wanting them to stop, either. The problem, though, it’s that the Angel isn’t reliable, is probably just some practical joke the jocks have kept going all the way since summer. Joke or not, though, she’s the missing ingredient for The Savage History of Proofrock, Idaho, the piece that sends it into the horror stratosphere. And they’ve got all night to fit her into a viewfinder, hit record, and hold steady fifty-nine and a half seconds—it’s how long that famous Bigfoot recording is, right? __________________________________ Excerpted from The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones. Copyright © 2024 by Stephen Graham Jones. Reprinted by permission of Saga Press, Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved. View the full article

The whole doctor-patient confidentiality except in the case of crimes committed and threatened makes mobsters going to therapy a difficult needle to thread. If the point of therapy is to open up without reservations, having to sidestep the emotional fallout of murdering someone makes the whole approach less than ideal. Yet, that very concept of mobsters seeking psychological treatment turns out to be the foundation of not one but two major releases from 1999: the pilot and first season of the television show The Sopranos and the movie Analyze This. The Sopranos aired its pilot on HBO on January 10, while Analyze This debuted in theaters later that year on March 5. Both projects feature male protagonists, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro) respectively, who are members of the greater New York City crime families. Soprano and Vitti both begin suffering from anxiety and depression that manifests in panic attacks of varying degrees. Due to their livelihoods and the toxically masculine expectations put upon them, they each begrudgingly seek out psychiatric treatment in secret for fear of backlash and ridicule. Although The Sopranos is a television drama and Analyze This is a film comedy, their thematic and narrative similarities tie them together in more ways than separate them. Examining them as a pair also unlocks a path to consider what it means that 1999 became the year when mob men went to therapy—how putting an archetypal American male character in treatment says as much about American masculinity in 1999 as it does about Tony and Paul. But why in 1999? The mobster film has remained a strand of the American cinematic DNA since the likes of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson helped the genre explode in the 1930s. Like any long-running genre, the mobster story is consistently therefore both a reflection of and commentary on the cultural landscape that surrounds it, which includes the always-changing face of American masculinity. If Robinson and Cagney embodied the fast-talking, hard-living tough guy vision of early and mid-1930s mobsters, the late 1930s and 1940s hard-boiled them into a new strain. Film noir inflections amid World War II and the rise of Humphrey Bogart took the mobster archetype in a darker direction. With hundreds of thousands of American men dying overseas, Bogart led the pack of tortured men on screen who dealt with an America in bloodied freefall. War pictures only had room for heroic and virtuous masculinity, but mobsters and criminals could examine the rising anxieties of what happened after the last bombs dropped. It turns out the aftermath was the 1950s that championed a post-war economic boom and vision of conservative traditionalism. American men were framed as breadwinners and the anchor of a proper (read: white and suburban) society. Technicolor happiness ruled screens pushing mobsters to the side, that is until the roiling counterculture spilled out in the 1960s and filmmakers looked to undercut the homogeny of the preceding decade. It took another ten years until the 1970s for mob men to factor back into American cinema in a major way, but they came roaring back as a central avenue for cultural refraction. New Hollywood was ready to blow up every norm. Francis Ford Coppola used The Godfather (1972) to turn the American mobster into an operatic vision of broken dreams and greed. Martin Scorsese took us onto the Mean Streets (1973) with a gritty and unsentimental snapshot of puffed-out machismo. The gangster genre and the mobster man transmuted into avatars for Vietnam and Cold War-era discontents about the state of the country and how those in power wielded it. This is the era with the most strands to The Sopranos and Analyze This, but they were almost snipped by Ronald Reagan and company. The 1980s, defined by Reaganomics and Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing everything up, promoted the pinnacle of American manhood as a pumped-up action hero—John Wayne’s steroid-crazed descendant. Mobsters went blockbuster, helped by Brian de Palma’s one-two punch of Scarface (1983) and The Untouchables (1987). It was, as theorists across disciplines have dubbed it, the post-Vietnam remasculinization of American culture. That war may not have been a raging success, but Rambo could make up for it with bigger guns and muscles. Mobsters were not at the center. Tommy guns and cigars cannot compete with souped-up rail guns. And so, the 1990s were the era of post-Reagan cynicism and grunge. Just as the 1960s rebelled against the conservative 1950s, the 1990s threw off 1980s traditionalism. Scorsese started the mobster side of the decade with Goodfellas (1990), a masterpiece that stripped the genre of its mystique, laying bear the mob’s aching heart. Genre deconstructions like Scream (1996) over in horror embraced the post-modernist mindset of tearing down and cross-examining what was always accepted as the norm. Add in the Y2K anxieties about what a new millennium held for American life and the road to The Sopranos and Analyze This is complete. Tough Guys in Treatment In the pilot episode, Tony Soprano tells his therapist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end.” Soprano is speaking about organized crime, but he could just as well be waxing poetic about the peak of mobster storytelling. That nugget introduces one of the baseline differences between The Sopranos and Analyze This: Robert De Niro was a recognizable movie star in 1999 while James Gandolfini was unknown beyond a few notable supporting roles. Both casting choices influence the analysis that comes after. By 1999, De Niro’s face was undeniably etched on the Mount Rushmore of mobster actors. His work with Scorsese in the aforementioned Mean Streets and Goodfellas, not to mention a little movie called The Godfather Part II (1974), put him on par with Al Pacino as the definitive genre king. De Niro brings that meta-textuality to Paul Vitti ensuring that the audience thinks about every other tough guy he portrayed in the preceding decades. Therefore, much like Clint Eastwood bringing his cowboy past to bear in Unforgiven (1992), De Niro invites viewers to imagine Vito Corleone or Jimmy Conway in treatment as well. Comparatively, Gandolfini’s blank slate of a public persona means that he becomes synonymous with Tony Soprano. When the audience first sees Soprano waiting in Melfi’s office and staring at a statue of a naked woman, there is no movie-star-sized shadow falling over the character. As a result, Soprano’s station is one of building a character from scratch that echoes the mobsters that viewers are used to seeing but without an A-lister’s personalized baggage. Speaking with Deadline in 2019, the show’s creator said of Gandolfini that “his eyes grabbed my attention right away, those eyes that could be so sad, and then so ferocious.” And so, a new star was born. Even for the divergent casting approaches, Vitti and Soprano quickly fall in step as characters. Both suffer inopportune panic attacks that catch them off guard—Vitti during a meeting after his dear friend is murdered, and Soprano during a BBQ following a stretch of tense family encounters. Vitti’s manifest as rapid breathing and chest tightness while Soprano’s breathing irregularity causes him to pass out. Both then seek out medical attention and have doctors inform them of the diagnosis. While The Sopranos skips showing us Soprano’s reaction to the doctor, it’s easy to imagine him responding just as Vittit does, angrily asking the E.R. doctor “Do I look like a guy who panics?” It’s that question that situates the crux of the men’s shared dilemma: crime-hardened mobsters are not supposed to suffer from anything close to panic attacks and anxiety. As Dr. Benito Chatmon noted in an article for The American Journal of Men’s Health, cultural constructs around American masculinity reinforce “masculine norms” of emotional repression and aggressive behavior. That repression leads in turn to higher rates of depression and anxiety in men because bottling emotions up only succeeds in curdling them into something dangerous. For Vitti and Soprano, decades of this approach culminate in their conditions right when they are most concerned about being at their best. Layered on top of this is the toxically masculine idea that any behavior likening men to femininity is reprehensible. Both Vitti and Soprano speak this into existence. Vitti tells his therapist Dr. Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal) “If I go fag, you die,” while Soprano tells Melfi that “my dad was tough…my mother wore him down to a little nub.” These comments, both early on in their respective treatments, reflect men so afraid of seeming feminine that they vilify and Other women as well as different forms of masculinity in an attempt to reassert their normative masculinities. Beating someone to death with a pipe is ok, but feminine coding is strictly out. This feeling extends to the systems around them as both Vitti and Soprano express concern about what would happen if their mobster associates discovered the treatment. Soprano tells Melfi that “I have a semester and a half of college. So, I understand Freud. I understand therapy as a concept. But in my world, it does not go down.” In turn, Vitti makes sure Sobel knows that the other crime families are “animals,” and would use the therapy development as a way to assert that he was “weak.” Because of the societal norms enforced by toxic masculinity, The Sopranos and Analyze This lay bare how mobster characters, with their repressed emotions and constant violence, are often the personification of a problematic vision of American masculinity. What comes after that assertion in each piece is a systematic deconstruction of the complexes around Vitti and Soprano that reinforce the problems. Yes, Analyze This approaches it with punchlines and gags like Vitti shooting up a pillow instead of punching it while The Sopranos opts for dark drama, but the undercurrent is the same—both men are in distress because of norms around them that are slowly killing them. As each continues in treatment, Vitti and Soprano confront and reckon with who they are and what they have to change in order to survive. In order to zero in on 1999, we will put aside Analyze That (2002) and the subsequent five seasons of The Sopranos. By the end of Analyze This, Vitti has left the mob, citing that his criminal compatriots “have problems” but that he’s in “a better space.” Come the season finale “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano,” Soprano has survived an assassination attempt and weathered a full-scale push to arrest him. While Soprano has not made the complete turnaround afforded to Vittit because of the comedic genre and condensed filmic storytelling principles, he does choose to return to and continue with therapy. As a pairing, Analyze This and The Sopranos offer a coupling of complimentary statements about American masculinity in 1999. Vitti’s arc underscores the idea that archetypal and accepted masculinities, such as the mobsters’ De Niro enlivened for decades, represent an unsustainable lifestyle. He walks away because he is a man choosing to confront his failings and embrace a future self divorced from toxicity. For his part, Soprano’s end of the season is much darker, solidifying the character as a tragic anti-hero caught in the whirlpool of crime that will never fully allow him to be the version of himself that could make it outside. To paraphrase a different famous mobster, he is always pulled back in. In the intervening 20-plus years since 1999, we have had a great deal of further cinematic and televisual reckoning with mobsters and American masculinities, but Analyze This and The Sopranos debuting in 1999 remains a fascinating moment in pop culture history. The turn of a century is as good a time as any to take stock of what should change in a quickly approaching future, and both Analyze This and The Sopranos adeptly turned their eyes on American mob men to do just that. View the full article

The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best first novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) I just got my advance copy of Clémence Michallon’s much-anticipated new novel and I *can* confirm that it’s worth the hype!! It is a beautifully and thoughtfully written book with a pitch-perfect premise, about a man named Aidan, who, after he loses his wife, must downsize. He must move to a new, smaller home with his teenage daughter… and the woman he’s secretly had captive on his property for five years. He is a serial killer, and she is the one woman he has ever spared. Narrated by the three women in his life—his daughter, the woman who falls for his cultivated charms, and the woman whose very existence is the only clue to his vicious true self. This book is fantastic.–OR Polly Stewart, The Good Ones (Harper) Stewart’s debut is a powerful novel about a woman, recently returned to her Appalachian hometown, who grows obsessed with a friend’s disappearance twenty years prior, and with other cases of missing women. What emerges is a sprawling tale about a town’s secrets and lingering traumas, as well as one woman’s reckoning with life’s darkest turns. Stewart is a writer to watch. –DM Adorah Nworah, House Woman (Unnamed Press) This one features a young woman who goes from Lagos to Houston for an arranged marriage. Once she arrives, she finds her soon-to-be-in-laws more controlling, and her husband more indifferent, than she would like; as her conditions deteriorate, and tensions grow, this brutal character study leads to a visceral and shocking ending. –MO C. J. Leede, Maeve Fly (Tor Nightfire) For all those who stan the creepy girls/learned the Wednesday dance, Maeve Fly is a delicious, disturbing treat. Leede’s very-much-antiheroine is a Disney princess by day (one of the Frozen sisters, which makes it even funnier), and a serial killer by night. She has a best friend, a grandmother who understands her, and the kind of beauty that screams innocence. But when her grandmother’s health takes a turn for the worse, and her best friend’s hockey-playing brother comes to town, her perfectly arranged life begins to unravel. Damn, this book is messed up. I’m really enjoying this “hot people can be serial killers too” trend (unless someone’s talking about Ted Bundy, who was terrible and also not hot). –MO Rachel Cochran, The Gulf (Harper) Set in 1970s Texas in a conservative town amidst the rise of the feminist movement, The Gulf is one of several thrillers that show that the Third Coast has come into its own. The Gulf follows a young queer woman searching for answers after the murder of a powerful woman she’d admired greatly, but who was hated by most of the men in town—and her own children. A refreshing read and a strong debut from a powerful new voice. –MO View the full article

When I first learned that “Liv Constantine” was the co-writing name of two sisters, Lynne Constantine and Valerie Rees, I was immediately fascinated. How did they do it, I wondered? We tend to think of the writing process as a necessarily solitary activity, so how could you share that task with someone else? Would it be fun or frustrating, productive or tedious to collaborate with another writer, especially a family member? I couldn’t wait to talk to them about it, and when I saw that their new novel, The Senator’s Wife, was out this spring, I jumped at the chance. I read The Senator’s Wife in one sitting. I’ve always been fascinated by the private lives of D.C. power brokers, and Constantine provides a compelling window into that world. The main character, Sloane, is struggling with lupus and with the death of her congressman husband when she’s surprised to find herself falling in love with his best friend. After her remarriage, her condition deteriorates, and she and her new husband hire a home health aide to help care for her. What follows is a twisty, addictive ride that kept me guessing the whole time. This month I got to talk to the Constantine sisters about a short story from one of the masters of British detective fiction, Dorothy Sayers. As novelists working in a different tradition, they still find a lot to admire and learn in Sayers’s suspenseful, plot-driven tale, where a man named Pender meets a stranger who tells him he’s figured out a way to commit the perfect murder. Why did you choose Dorothy Sayers’s “The Man Who Knew How”? Lynne: I just really love it. The close point of view sucks me in. You’re getting all these details about the stranger, and Pender, the point of view character, is watching him so closely that he begins to seem kind of weird and paranoid. It’s such an interesting situation, and so beautifully written, and right away you know there’s more to it than met the eye. Do either of you write short stories? Lynne: We’ve written two short stories together—not quite this short, more novella-length. And then I just recently finished an Amazon short, which was only 10,000 words. You’d think it would be easier than writing a novel, but I actually found it very challenging, because you don’t have a lot of time to get the whole story arc in there. As a novelist, I’m so used to wanting to provide all this backstory and really flesh out the characters, and you don’t have a lot of space to do that in a short story. Did your process change at all in writing a short story together? Valerie: We had to structure them differently, because we were dealing with shorter periods of time and just one incident. But as Lynne said, they weren’t as short as this. This was really this was just a few pages. Sayers had to cram a lot into that space, and she does it extremely skillfully. “The Man Who Knew How” is reliant on plot to the extent that we know almost nothing about the main character. Do you have any thoughts on why she chose to do that? Lynne: Well, if you don’t know too much about him, you don’t know how reliable or unreliable his perceptions are. You have to put yourself in his shoes, and maybe it’s easier when you don’t know a lot about the person. Valerie: That’s a good observation. It’s almost like you become the point of view character. If you knew that he was a bad person or that he was hiding something, it would be a totally different experience. Have you read a lot of British crime fiction? How would you compare it to the American version? Valerie: I love Ruth Rendell and P.D. James, and I think I’ve read everything Agatha Christie ever wrote. In terms of the comparison, this story was published in 1932, and if we stay in that timeframe, we’re comparing Sayers to writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which immediately brings to mind this detective who’s hard-boiled and hard-drinking, and they have all this baggage, and their lives are a wreck. Whereas in British detective fiction, you have somebody like Hercules Poirot, who has the little gray cells and solves the crime through his intellect. Or sometimes the sleuth is an amateur detective, rather than somebody who’s a real P.I. Then in American detective fiction, there are usually lots of corpses and bullets and car chases and violence, whereas in the British ones, there’s often only one murder, and it’s done quietly. I think those are the big differences between the two. I can understand why you’re drawn to British crime fiction when I think about your work. It seems like you’re most interested in the intellectual process and the manipulation behind a crime. Valerie: Yes, we’re definitely interested in the psychological aspect. What makes characters tick? What motivates them? Lynne: Sometimes we get to a certain point and we have to ask each other, would this character really do that? What’s the motivation? The emphasis is on characterization rather than a high body count. For my last interview for The Backlist, I talked to Andrea Bartz about Ethel Lina White’s The Lady Vanishes, which was written around the same time and also takes place on a train. Why do you think trains are so appealing as a setting? Lynne: First of all, it’s the confinement. You’re in this moving box, in a confined space, and if you strike up a conversation, it feels very intimate because no one else is around. Until the train stops, you don’t really know where the other person is going, so there’s that element of mystery. And it does seem to engender the desire to share secrets. I think we’ve all had that experience, where you just start chatting with someone beside you, but who knows who you’re really speaking to. You could be striking up a conversation with a killer, or maybe you’re meeting somebody who could become a friend. Then there’s an elegance to the older stories with the train. Maybe you’re in first class, and you have cocktails. It’s a very appealing setting. We wouldn’t call Pender an unreliable narrator since the narrative is in third person, but he is, in a sense, an unreliable character. We’re in his thoughts for most of the story, and he makes a lot of assumptions. Without giving any spoilers, why do you think Sayers chose to keep the reader inside his perspective? Lynne: I think thrillers and mysteries have always played with point of view and with the reader’s access to knowledge. The trick is to do it in a fresh way that makes sense. Here, I thought it really worked, because I understood where Pender was coming from. The man on the train tells Pender that he’s developed a method for committing the perfect murder. Do you have any thoughts on why the perfect murder is attractive as a trope? Valerie: Probably there are a lot of us who have tried to concoct the perfect murder, not because we want to go out and commit it, but because it is this age-old riddle. Could you really get away with murder, and how would you do it? Today, with technology and cameras everywhere, it would be even harder, but it’s a mental puzzle that people love to think about. Is there anything else you learned from the story that you would use in your own work or that you think you’ll come back to? Valerie: For me, it was Pender’s obsessiveness. As his obsession with the man on the train increases, so does the suspense and the tension. Lynne: I would agree. I think too it’s interesting to be reminded that you don’t always have to provide lots of backstory, and that it can be just as effective to withhold certain things and let the reader figure it out for themselves. –Author photo by Bill Miles View the full article

How to prepare before sending queries to agents, e.g., utilize Publisher's Marketplace to intelligently narrow down the best possible candidates. Algonkian Writer Conferences reviews each step in turn. Here is our take on the smartest way to go about it. As a bonus, you learn a lot of insider knowledge about the business (like who is in "the club" and who is not--see below) along the way. You might also come to the realization that your ms is not yet ready. Such illumination is always a positive thing. Join Publisher's Marketplace and review it for at least a month (yes it costs a few bucks, but so what?). Search out the deals made during the past two years in your specific genre (or specific sub-niche in your genre). Why? Because it will clearly define who is in the club. Every genre has a club composed of favored publishers and literary agencies. This data mining is going to take a few hours at least, but it's worth it. Make certain the "deals" you review and mine are with major publishers, imprints, or well-regarded mid-sized presses. If your novel is more literary in nature, make certain the deals are at least with respected and traditional small presses. If you become desperate just to get your foot in the door, you might adjust expectations accordingly. With data in hand you'll know the top agencies making the most sales, and the top agents in those agencies. Now, put the top agents on hold for the time being, but choose at least a dozen agencies working in your genre based on the criteria above. And if you haven't already, make double certain you haven't made one of these top seven mistakes. Instead of the top agents, identify the "hungry agents" in these top agencies. Use other sources like MS Wish List if you must. Choose the agent minus a full belly, yes, but only those who have transcended their salad days. Why? Because they'll likely take more time with you, be more lenient, perhaps more open to your story idea, perhaps more willing to provide editorial notes? Perhaps? As for transcending salad days, make certain your picks have at least four to five sales to major publishers under their belts, and in this way, you'll know they've made their mark and are evolving, as opposed to showing signs of dropping out as so many do. It's a very high turnover business. VERY HIGH. Once the above is done, especially if you have not already done so, review your list on MS Wish List just to verify you've nailed the best people. When you query, note in the very beginning something like, "I saw you on Publisher's Marketplace..." because this will mark you as a professional. ________________ Once you've satisfied above, move on to writing the perfect query letter. A few other slivers of advice: Trying to cold-query superpowered agencies like CAA is utter futility. Agents with clients on social media who twitter forth with gushing comments is meaningless. Agents getting axed by grinders is equally meaningless. Personalities are such fragile creations subject to taste and circumstance. Focus rather on the eight steps above. Michael Neff Algonkian Writer Conferences ______________________

Clémence Michallon is an award-winning French journalist, a dog owner, a New Yorker, and a Sopranos convert/superfan. Her US debut, The Quiet Tenant, which comes out this June from Knopf, is poised to be a major summer blockbuster. The book has been sold in over thirty territories and is garnering comparisons to another famous captivity novel—Room by Emma Donoghue. The Quiet Tenant takes place in upstate New York and tells the story of three women affected by an active serial killer, Aidan Thomas. At the start of the novel, Aidan’s wife dies, and he is forced to move “Rachel,” the captive in his shed, into his new home. Suddenly, Aidan’s two identities—family man and monster—begin to blur. In addition to Rachel, we hear from Aidan’s teenage daughter, Cecilia, and a local woman, Emily, who is smitten with the recent widower. What emerges is a portrait of one man’s psychopathic duality and the resilience of the women in his wake. Clémence’s first book, La Dernière Fois Que J’ai Cru Mourir C’était Il y a Longtemps (The Last Time I Thought I Was Dead Was a Long Time Ago), was published in French, in 2020, with a small feminist press. Clémence and I talked about her journey from reporter to small press author to blockbuster genre writer. We also talked about the ethics of writing violence and—of course—about The Sopranos. Kate Brody: You have worked as a journalist for many years. Some of your work has covered true crime. How has that reporting informed your fiction? Were there any real-life cases that inspired aspects of this story? Clémence Michallon: I moved to the US in 2014 to study journalism. I’m a staff writer now at The Independent, a British newspaper, and I still cover true crime in my work. Building a library of personal knowledge is part of the job, but when I sit down to write fiction, I only allow my journalism brain and my fiction brain to communicate as little as possible. I don’t want people to feel like they might talk to me for a journalism piece and then have something end up in a novel. Crime fiction has a relationship with true crime. I wrestle with the boundaries of that. Some stories aren’t mine to tell. Building a fictional serial killer was an interesting exercise. I knew I was entering a very rich field, and I didn’t want him to feel like a fictional avatar of a real serial killer. Recently, there was a serial killer called Israel Keyes. He was caught and died by suicide in prison in 2012. An 18-year-old barista went missing in Anchorage, Alaska, and they arrested him for her kidnapping, which later turned out to be her murder. The FBI got involved, and it turned out that he’d been a serial killer for years. We still don’t know how many victims he had or exactly who they were. He was someone who had a job and a family. Ted Bundy is one of the killers people reference when we think about men who had a mask of normality and managed to keep two separate lives. I thought about Bundy and also about Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Rader (BTK). The through line for all three, when people found out about their crimes: we never would have suspected. Bundy’s former girlfriend, who lived with him for years, had a memoir called The Phantom Prince that fed the novel. Someone living a double life and seeming totally normal, that is the big fear: there is the version of the life that you know, but underneath, there are dark secrets hiding. KB: One way to look at the book and its multiple viewpoints is to think of it as a study of the fallout from a single bad man. There are so many people—women, especially—impacted by Aidan’s actions. Were there any other perspectives that you thought about incorporating? Did you know from the start you weren’t going to include Aidan’s point of view? CM: The Quiet Tenant started with only one point of view—Rachel’s—in the first-person, present tense. Rachel’s point of view is essential and gripping. If there’s one point of view that you can’t remove from the book, it’s hers. But it is limiting. We can’t always be in the shed with her. She sees only one aspect of Aidan. One of the big things I wanted to explore was Aidan’s duality. Sometimes when we talk about people who have double lives, we treat the cruel, violent life as the real one. I wanted to interrogate why we do that. Why can’t we consider the possibility that there is some sincerity in the regular life and in this person’s relationships with their family and their romantic partner? From Rachel, we get Aidan’s identity as a perpetrator. From Emily, we get how he’s perceived in the town. And from Cecilia, we get who he is as a family man. I wrote a version of the book knowing I would add Aidan’s past victims later. I think that was another perspective that none of the other characters would have. It’s the true-crime podcast part of this story: what did he do, and to whom? I didn’t want to show him committing a murder, but hearing from the other victims was a way to address that part. And it seemed fitting to show glimpses of their lives, the great loneliness of their deaths, and the unfairness of it all. It helped paint a fuller picture and increase the menace on the page. With Rachel, the first person never sang. What she describes is dark and painful—too dark and too painful, maybe, to work in the first person. I switched to the second person after reading Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women. She uses the second person in some of her chapters, and I didn’t know why it worked— until I read a piece by Brandon Taylor in Electric Lit, and he said that the second person can be a way to show the fragmentation of a traumatized mind—or, more precisely, “conjure the eerie, oblique angle between a person who has been traumatized and their sense of themself.” KB: The three sections sound distinct. Cecilia’s voice is very young, and Emily’s version of things is almost like a Hallmark movie featuring a small-town widower. CM: That’s exactly what I was going for. I was watching a lot of rom-coms when I wrote the novel. Emily’s chapters were fun to write because she doesn’t know. It’s the viewpoint of a woman who’s had a crush on this man forever, and he’s finally paying attention to her. That was the mindset I had to be in to write those chapters. Cecilia’s voice was the hardest one to nail. Teenage girl is a hard voice. I went voice-shopping for her by re-reading Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, a French book about a teenager who spends a summer in a beach town with her father and his two girlfriends. Teenagers are so smart, but they’re also kids. They can’t understand every single nuance of everything that happens around them. I didn’t want to compromise on that; I really wanted Cecilia to be a kid. Even though I was once a teenage girl, it was hard to access that again, to get back there. KB: As I was reading, I thought about a friend of mine who recently discovered that the man she was planning to marry was not who she thought he was. He wasn’t a serial killer, but he was basically living a double life. Thinking now about Emily—what is the cost to her of Aidan’s betrayal? CM: I imagine there are some pages where Emily is a tough sell, but I’ve always had a lot of empathy for her. She’s getting love-bombed and then ghosted in a way that is designed to make her lose the plot. I read somewhere that Ted Bundy did something similar to a woman he’d been involved with. There’s this romantic cruelty aspect, where the cruel temperament can trickle down to lower stakes situations than a murder. Most cruelty isn’t a serial killer having his hands around someone’s neck. Most cruelty is casual. It’s people pretending they don’t understand what’s going on and acting callously. I thought a lot about the people we forget in these stories. We think about the perpetrator and the victim. But there’s a form of victimization for every relative, every romantic partner who is lied to and has to go on afterward and rebuild their lives. I’ve always been interested in how things unfold on a granular level. There was a day for Ted Bundy’s girlfriend when he was arrested and never came back. Taxes were still due that year. She still had to care for her daughter. Her job still expected her to show up. And I think that requires the kind of compartmentalization that is not unlike the type that killers deploy. KB: Do you think Aidan does love his daughter? How is he able to kind of separate these women in his life from those who are completely disposable to him? CM: I do think Aidan loves his daughter. Love maybe looks different to him, but there are as many different kinds of love as there are people. He loved his wife in his own weird, maladaptive way. We get a hint that a big part of why he kept Rachel alive for the five years that precede the novel is because he saw a shade of his daughter Cecilia in her. Something I keep coming back to is that we know people who can be cruel in socially acceptable ways. But when you go on these people’s social media, all their friends and family can’t stop talking about how marvelous they are. There is a way to switch off the loving and empathetic parts of ourselves and act in very different ways. Killers do this, too, to a much more extreme extent. KB: How does the presence of Cecilia in the house change Rachel’s relationship to her captivity? CM: Having Cecilia is a big help for Rachel. To survive for the five years that precede the novel’s start, Rachel has to numb herself to the memories of her past and her life outside. But in Cecilia, she sees shades of her younger, more tender self—the one that loved and was vulnerable. KB: As someone also in this space (let’s call it feminist, literary thriller)—I often think about Truffaut’s claim that “there’s no such thing as an anti-war” film. I worry that all crime writing involving horrors against women turns the horrors into entertainment. Do you think about that at all? How do we wrestle with these ideas in a way that is complex and moral? CM: The way I write about rape and sexual assault in the novel stems from reflecting on how to write responsibly. When we write about violent crime, I don’t think it’s inevitable that we will turn it into entertainment or make it titillating. But it’s a risk we run if we’re not careful. I wanted the book to be respectful of its victims—of the women and of what they’re put through. Also, I couldn’t go there. It made me uncomfortable. There is no draft where those scenes are more detailed. I was trusting the reader to fill in the blanks. Those scenes have plenty of menace and darkness in them. I don’t think it needs to be anatomical. Those scenes work in contrast with other scenes in the novel. There’s a spectrum of non-consensual to extremely consensual sex in the book. There is a flashback involving Rachel’s boyfriend—it’s not consensual, but it’s not chained in a shed, you know? Every rape is a violent crime but every rape doesn’t look the same. And one person in a lifetime—and even a few months and even a couple of days—can have nonconsensual and consensual sex. The same man can be a perpetrator and a partner. That’s realistic. When allegations of rape surface against a man, we always hear: “he never did that to me,” or “he’s not like that.” But just because he didn’t do it to one person doesn’t mean he didn’t do it to someone else. KB: There’s the negative space of the atrocities. Somehow, it’s more menacing to just see this man eating breakfast with understanding that he’s done all of these terrible things than to be dragged through all of them. CM: It’s chilling, right? When I was writing those breakfast scenes, I thought: why am I spending three pages on this breakfast? Should we be spending so much time having breakfast with this man? But the answer is yes because the subtext is important. What’s scary is that he switches from doing these horrible things to making breakfast for his kid. That’s the thing we can’t make sense of. That’s the thing that is interesting. KB: I don’t know if you ever watched Breaking Bad, but that show was famous for so much breakfast. But it was the crux of the show: How is this man who’s a meth kingpin sitting down with his kids and having breakfast? Same for The Sopranos, of which I know you’re a fan. CM: Possibly the best episode of The Sopranos is the season one episode “College,” where Tony tours colleges with his daughter Meadow and ends up strangling a guy with piano wire. The absurd juxtaposition of Tony with his arm around his daughter’s shoulder, taking part in the time-honored family tradition of touring colleges—and even getting to be a cool dad because she comes back drunk and he doesn’t berate her—and then splitting his knuckles open while he strangles this man to his death. In his podcast, Michael Imperioli said that HBO worried that fans would disavow Tony if he killed the guy—who is a rat, by the way. But David Chase said viewers would disavow Tony if he didn’t because of the codes of organized crime. So they ended up going with it. That’s why the episode is so gripping. Because we have the contrast between the two. KB: And once you know his violent potential, it loads all of the domestic moments. In The Quiet Tenant, Rachel can watch Aidan eat breakfast, and as the reader, you’re nervous, because you understand that this man could flip on a dime. CM: I read an interview where David Chase was saying —I paraphrase a bit—that he wanted to do The Sopranos because he was fascinated by the fact that mobsters don’t spend most of their day doing mob stuff. They’re not whacking guys eight hours a day. They’re caring for their kids, fighting with their wives, buying stuff, and having coffee. That was a big part of my thing with The Quiet Tenant and why I wanted to tell a serial killer story in the first place. We think about serial killers as otherworldly machines, but in reality, they spend most of their time on Earth not doing what they’re infamous for. Usually, they’re not killing people. They are working their jobs, driving their kids to school, and in line at the supermarket. I’m fascinated by both the psychological duality and sheer logistics involved. I was trying to depict a serial killer as they exist in the real world. They’re usually just some guy. Some unimpressive person. KB: I think this gets at a question I had about setting. “College”—part of the reason that works is because of the setting. How did you approach setting? The town and the house in The Quiet Tenant felt so claustrophobic, almost like detailed set pieces. CM: I was interested in working with the smaller setting of a captivity story. I spent the first few months of the pandemic upstate in Rhinebeck at my in-laws’ house. We were home all day, and we could see what each of us did with every hour of the day. And I thought: what if one of us had a terrible secret we’d been able to keep because everyone else was away during the day? What if suddenly we didn’t have that distance anymore? What do you do with your secret? I ended up basing Aidan’s house on my in-laws’ house. I based the town on their surrounding town, Rhinebeck. The town is lovely—it has a bit of a Gilmore Girls vibe—but the surroundings are spooky. Upstate New York has a particular beauty that lends itself to a thriller or a mystery. KB: It’s funny—both Gilmore Girls and a lot of horror stories are set vaguely upstate. That setting can often gesture towards wholesomeness, but also you have Washington Irving and that dark, spooky Sleepy Hollow element. Which is the dichotomy between Emily’s version of events and Rachel’s version. CM: I would go on runs on these deserted roads and see maybe one pickup truck for miles. It is gorgeous, but the nature is almost overpowering. KB: I know you released a small press novel in French, in 2020, and it was not a thriller. What are the common threads that you see in your writing, across genre and language? CM: My book in French is a literary novel about a female bodybuilder who ends up having to manage her sister’s bakery, which is a challenge for two reasons: it doesn’t give her time to train, and she doesn’t have the healthiest relationship with food. The bakery becomes a proxy for figuring out her own issues. The books have a similar theme: bodies and how other people use our bodies to be cruel. The idea of control, the idea of trauma, the idea of male callousness. There’s a male figure in my French book, who isn’t Aidan. He is a well-intentioned guy who can hurt people without realizing it. I’m happy that I had the experience of publishing something smaller before jumping into The Quiet Tenant. And then—I had the idea for The Quiet Tenant, which had to be a thriller. Most of my favorite thrillers are in English, so I decided it had to be in English. And here we are. KB: In your mind, what works are in conversation with The Quiet Tenant? CM: To write a captivity story in a world where Room exists is to be in conversation with Room. And what a formidable conversation partner. Room is one of my favorite books because it showed this incredible literary voice paired with this gripping story of crime and resilience and trauma. It blew my mind. And, of course, the film adaptation, for which I believe Emma Donoghue wrote the screenplay. There’s a moment that I watched a lot when I was working on The Quiet Tenant: the moment when Ma leaves the house. To me, that’s the emotional core of a captivity story in a few seconds. A book that came up during my first round of edits with The Quiet Tenant was Misery by Stephen King. I hadn’t read it when I wrote my first draft, but I read it during revisions. It’s a captivity story, where the main character and captive Paul tries to do things undetected but also relies on his captor, Annie. He needs her to bring him food, but he’s trying to outsmart her. I ended up putting a little Stephen King easter egg in the pages of my book. In Misery, Paul uses his typewriter as a weight to regain his strength. And in my book, when Rachel is trying to regain her strength, the book she uses is IT. All the books mentioned in The Quiet Tenant are easter eggs. The Andromeda Strain is a pandemic novel that I wanted to mention. Loves Music, Loves to Dance is about a nice guy who is secretly a serial killer. The third book that I am in conversation with is a nonfiction book: The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule, which is the book she wrote interrogating her friendship with Ted Bundy. It’s extremely well-written. I don’t think she gets enough credit for her craft. There are so many writers who showed me the way in terms of writing female-focused crime fiction. Jessica Knoll with Luckiest Girl Alive. I thought that was a mind-blowing book. Everything Megan Abbott has ever written. I adore her work. And I don’t think I would write what I write if I hadn’t read her books. KB: What’s next? Are you working on another novel? Does it share any elements with TQT? CM: I am working on something else, also in the psychological suspense realm. I’m very excited to have entered this genre and want to become more comfortable in it. But it is funny—the first time you try to write something with the new ecosystem around you (agents, publishers, etc.), it’s a different experience. There’s something nice about doing it yourself because you’re doing it in the purest possible way. I was looking back on the first draft of The Quiet Tenant yesterday, and it was wild. Not formatted. No page numbers. One long stream-of-consciousness piece of writing. The most I did in terms of formatting: each new perspective was in bold. I forgot how casual the writing experience was for me. I was writing on my phone when I had 10 minutes. I was out there, having fun. Hopefully I have a more polished process now, or more of an idea of what I’m doing. But I have nothing but admiration for 2020-Clémence, who was like, let’s go for it. Formatting? I don’t need that! View the full article

The first time I met Wanda Morris, we talked, in depth, about body odor. I won’t go into the details, but it was the sort of conversation that sticks with you. The same is true of Wanda. She’s a bestselling author, a lawyer, and a mother of three. Wanda’s stories mirror her life. They’re infectious and down to earth. Above all, they’re real. Readers and critics agree. Wanda’s work has won numerous awards. She’s received praise from every major media outlet. And, if that weren’t enough, her first novel All Her Little Secrets was recently optioned for a limited series starring Emmy-award winning actress Uzo Aduba. Needless to say, I was thrilled to talk shop with Wanda. Eli Cranor: So, you’re a lawyer. When did writing become a thing? Wanda Morris: I have always loved writing and dreamed of writing books. But I tamped down the desire for a host of reasons. One day, I was in a meeting at work where I had been disrespected, and it hadn’t been the first time either. I went home that night and wrote the first scene of what eventually became the opening of my debut novel. But it was a long and jagged road from writing that first scene to becoming a published author. In the 13 years it took me to get there, I had a baby, got sick, got well again, and amassed over 90 rejections. The straw that nearly broke the proverbial camel’s back came when I participated in an agent showcase as part of an online mentoring program. Over 20 agents requested to see my manuscript—and every single one of them rejected it! After that particularly disastrous round of rejections I was ready to give up. Then I realized I had paid money to attend a pitch event months before. I didn’t want to waste my money so I decided to attend the event and give it one last try. I did and that’s where I met my agent, Lori Galvin. I was on the verge of giving up and here I am, three books into this crazy, exciting, wonderful ride. I tell unpublished writers to keep going because you never know how close you are to a “yes.” EC: How has your “day job” shaped your writing process? WM: I was already telling stories in my day job as a lawyer. It’s a different format–trying to persuade a jury or a group of business executives—but storytelling nonetheless. But as a writer, I’m not limited in the facts I can convey to the reader. I get to make up the facts, which makes this form of storytelling deliciously enjoyable. Lawyers are also accustomed to meeting deadlines and giving attention to details. Both things I use in my work as a novelist. EC: Do you write every day? WM: I try to, but I also have a family and I want to make sure I’m being a good wife, mom, sister, friend so there are some days when I don’t. But every day, I do something related to writing, whether it’s actually writing, outlining an idea, reading or simply thinking about my writing. EC: Has the mega success of your first two books impacted your writing? If so, how have you combatted this? WM: I consider writing a business. As with any business, you must manage your time and your projects. I make sure I reserve time for the core of my business—writing. Sure, I’m a lot busier with book promo and events, but I’m not complaining at all. I love what I do! EC: When you are working, do you aim for a daily word count? WM: I don’t aim for a specific word count or a specific number of writing hours. That would put too much pressure on me and get all into my head. Instead, I make sure I’ve got my butt at the desk, and am working productively. That means working with focus and without distractions. I am an early riser and I do my best writing in the morning hours. EC: What are the tools of your trade? WM: I’m a dinosaur! I start all my first drafts in longhand. I use yellow legal pads and blue Pilot G-2 gel ink pens. After I get a sizable portion of the manuscript done, usually 10-15 thousand words, I transfer that into the computer and move forward. When I have a manuscript of at least 40-50 thousand words, I print it out and start handwritten revisions on that document with a red Pilot G-2 ink pen. It is the most ridiculous and inefficient process, I know, but somehow it works for me. I think this harkens back to my days as a lawyer, interviewing witnesses and taking meeting notes on yellow legal pads. I’ve tried going straight to the computer to write a first draft and I wind up staring at a blank screen for hours. EC: Always happy to find authors who work longhand. You’re now officially part of the club. Next question: when do you write? WM: I I work better in the early morning hours. A lot of times, I’ll get up before everyone else in the house so that I can write uninterrupted. My brain is usually fried by 5 or 6 o’clock. EC: Do you have any rituals you return to that get you in the mood to write? WM: I have to have a cup of tea and natural light. EC: Do you outline your novels? Just dive straight in? Or do some combination of the two? WM: I think I’m a bit of both although I lean heavily on the plotter side. I start a book idea with a very loose outline. I’m talking 2-3 pages. I know a few of the major plot points. From that I start to write. I never know how my books will end until I start writing and am about mid-point in the manuscript. EC: When you’re done with the first draft, what does your revision process look like? WM: If I’m not on a tight deadline, I will let the manuscript sit for a week or so and marinate. It’s constantly rolling around in the back of my brain so that when I go back to it, I have plenty of ideas to flesh out. If I’m on a tight deadline, all bets are off. I’m in the manuscript until everything is tight. I do use beta readers. The number of revisions I do has resulted in the partial loss of innocent trees (aka the use of yellow legal pads) and tanks of blue and red gel ink! I revise until the book feels right to me—that the characters are in a good place and the story in my head has made its way onto paper in a coherent, and if I’m lucky, emotionally satisfying way. EC: Do you read certain books for inspiration prior to writing? WM: If you count the Bible, yes. EC: Best advice for writers just starting out, especially when it comes to the actual act of writing/developing the habits necessary to craft a novel-length manuscript. WM: I think every writer has to figure out what works for them personally. When I was unpublished and desperately searching for an agent, I got so much advice on what you “should” and “shouldn’t” do—always write every day, only write when you’re inspired, always plot, never plot, etc. It was mind-boggling and often conflicting. So I tend to shy away from absolutes when giving writing advice. The only thing I do encourage newer writers to do is to read A LOT and read outside your genre. Reading is the best way to learn the craft of writing because you learn what a good book sounds like. You learn what works and doesn’t work when it comes to pacing and characterization and dialogue. Everyone eventually finds their stride. EC: Finally, WHY do you write? WM: I guess I write to untangle those things that take up space in my head and my heart. By that, I mean that I write about topics that make me mad and sad and hopeful and enlightened. It is more than cathartic for me. Writing is an intellectual and emotionally charged experience that helps me sort out the world we live in. View the full article

There’s a scene in the 2019 movie Captain Marvel where Brie Larson’s character crashes to Earth in 1995, falling through the roof of a Blockbuster video store. She walks through the dimly lit aisles of VHS tapes, before getting startled by, and blowing up, a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger advertising the 1994 movie True Lies. Captain Marvel is full of nostalgic relics—troll dolls, a payphone in front of a Radio Shack, and songs from No Doubt, Garbage, and TLC. As someone born in 1985, it conjured visceral memories of Friday evenings, walking through Blockbuster, clutching the plastic VHS cases and trying unsuccessfully to get my parents to buy some of the overpriced movie candy sold near the checkout counter. At one point while watching the movie, I turned to my husband and asked, “Can you be homesick for another time?” I’m clearly not alone in my nostalgia for the late 90s and early aughts. There are TikTok and Instagram accounts like @shinypretties and @90s_00snostalgia sharing images of dElia’s catalogs, tamagotchis, bottles of Fruitopia, inflatable furniture, and disposable cameras. Fashion has honed in on the yearning, too, with low-rise jeans and Doc Martens becoming ubiquitous again. Meanwhile, reboots of TV shows from the time, like Bel Air, Girl Meets World, and That 90s Show, have become common, along with shows set in that period, like Yellowjackets and PEN15. It’s no wonder I set part of my novel, Don’t Forget the Girl, in the early aughts. While writing, I reveled in the details—like chunky Nokia cell phones, answering machines, visible thongs, and music from the Pussycat Dolls. But nothing is ever simple, especially our hunger for the past. As I wrote the book’s 2003 timeline, I started to remember the era’s darker parts—the sexism, homophobia, and diet culture. Crime fiction seeks to unsettle the reader, and there’s something disquieting about viewing the past—even the recent past—through the lens of our current era. Recently, podcasts like You’re Wrong About and various documentaries have relitigated the treatment of famous women from the late 90s and early aughts. The 2021 New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears lays bare the misogyny the teen pop star faced from the media before her ultimate breakdown and conservatorship under her father. Two more vehicles reexamining the treatment of women during that era would follow in 2021. Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, was another New York Times documentary, focused on the effects on Jackson after the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime performance—one of the few vehicles that center the treatment of a woman of color during the era. The FX series Impeachment: American Crime Story allowed Monica Lewinsky, who served as a one of the show’s producers, to share her side of the late 90s sex scandal with Bill Clinton. This year, Netflix’s Pamela, A Love Story, allowed actress Pamela Anderson to talk about the misogyny she faced from the media after her sex tape with rocker Tommy Lee was stolen and sold. I found this relitigation of the past happening in my own novel, too. Don’t Forget the Girl follows three friends—one of whom, Abby, was presumed murdered by a now notorious serial killer while they were in college. In the present timeline, the surviving women face the true crime media circus that threatens to erase their friend’s memory. In the 2003 timeline, the final months of Abby’s life unfold while the girls are freshmen in college. Early on, the girls sit in their dorm room watching an episode of America’s Next Top Model. As part of a challenge, the contestants must writhe around covered in oil half-naked on a bar, symptomatic of the period’s objectification and body-shaming—what culture writer Constance Grady dubbed the era’s “bubblegum misogyny.” Throughout the novel, Abby grapples with her romantic relationship with her friend and roommate, Chelsea, struggling with her own internalized homophobia and society at-large’s anti-queer messages. Beyond relishing the early 00s nostalgia, writing the book allowed me to reckon with how young women, including me, were treated during that time and the impact it had on us. While I wrote it, I listened to a lot of pop artists from the early aughts—Britney Spears, the Black Eyed Peas, Christian Aguilera. Eventually, though, I switched to moody covers of these songs performed by present-day artists. I needed to hear those familiar, bubblegum melodies with a darker edge. *** View the full article

There’s just something about the Gulf Coast region that invites gritty crime stories. From Dennis Lehane’s Joe Coughlin stories to the work of Carl Hiaasen to Nic Pizzolatto’s Galveston (not to mention the absorbing first season of Pizzolatto’s True Detective), there are many popular examples of hardboiled and noir stories in particular that revel in griminess of the Gulf’s swampy settings and rotten milieus. As someone who grew up on the Gulf, I can understand how the region became so strongly linked with the bleakness of noir. My hometown was a grim, two-faced place: if you wandered a few blocks past the short stretch of road along the waterfront that sold driftwood carvings and seashell tchotchkes for tourists, you’d find a lot of impoverished clusters of homes, still scarred from whatever storm last swept through, probably plastered with signs about the second amendment as a threat to potential trespassers. I haven’t been back to my hometown since Hurricane Harvey made landfall there in 2017, so I’m not sure what you’d find now. In my imagination, it still lies in broken shambles, the scattered pieces I saw in the news coverage days after the storm. That’s one of the things Gulf Coast noir stories capture best: the extreme vulnerability of the region to the whims of nature. In particular, noir novels set in the Gulf tend to focus on the way hurricanes can rewrite a community’s history, shape a place’s identity in the aftermath of trauma, and even seem to stop time entirely. In Hell or High Water, Joy Castro’s 2012 crime novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans, protagonist Nola Céspedes is a young reporter desperate to leave the city, her hometown. “The plan,” she tells the reader, “is to write a few knockout features, get noticed, pack my bags, and then take my clips to some real newspaper in some real city” (42). Those last words emphasize one of Nola’s major complaints about New Orleans: its artificiality, the gaudy pageantry that hides the poverty underneath. In that way, at least, there is something honest and revealing in the storm. After Katrina, the popular images of New Orleans finally change from the images “of Mardi Gras, of feathered masks and dancing down the streets” that had once falsely lured Nola’s mother from Miami (21). Now, according to Nola, the new face of New Orleans is “[t]he Lower Ninth—the wasteland you see on TV . . . a hot, sad, barren mess” (170)—much closer to Nola’s own experiences growing up in project housing. Of course, even this picture falls into a dualistic trap, one that benefits the people with the power to choose whether they would rather exploit New Orleans or condemn it. The divide between the experience of the people who live there and people who experience the place as tourists bears much more insidious consequences than mere aesthetics: the serial killer at the heart of Hell or High Water only receives serious press coverage and police investigation when he chooses a pretty white tourist as his third victim. When such a divided community experiences a cataclysmic event like a hurricane, it is always telling to see who ends up being the most vulnerable; the tentative harmonies that can exist between the haves and have-nots end up being exposed for all their imbalance. Other recent Gulf-set novels—such as Melissa Ginsburg’s The House Uptown and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, which takes place in rural southern Mississippi—also examine Katrina’s effect on the region. In The House Uptown, Ginsburg depicts Katrina as an all-encompassing experience, one profound enough for near-wordless reference to deflate conflict between strangers, reminding them of their shared trauma. The experience of Katrina and its aftermath seems to shape future experiences of trauma, as well, such as when, in the wake of a violent crime, one character finds himself “back in Katrina time, a numbed-out, slowed-down hellscape where nothing made sense” (233). Interestingly, Salvage the Bones is framed, not in the devastating aftermath of Katrina, but in the build-up to it. As narrator Esch’s family prepares their property for the storm, Ward builds a sharp tension that lets her reader understand there is no preparation which will keep them safe from the violence that is awaiting them, in the form of wailing winds and rising waters. In this way, these novels use classic man vs. nature conflict as a thematic parallel to the man vs. man conflicts they contain–the crimes against both natural and human laws that the characters inflict upon one another. Water is often a site of violence and its discovery in Gulf-set crime novels, as in Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season; the novel’s inciting incident comes when the murdered body of a local witch washes up in a canal in a small Mexican community, the seed of a story that will bring many hidden violences to light. The same water that shapes these communities’ geographies and economies also ends up revealing their darkest truths. Other sites of discovery are similarly revealing of the primary tensions within the settings’ histories, as in Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season, where the murdered woman is discovered on the grounds of an old plantation house that has been turned into a popular tourist attraction: clearly, the violences of history refuse to be fully sanitized and suppressed. In the U.S., after all, the Gulf is also the South, and Gulf noir often blurs with Southern Gothic as a result, as with Jesmyn’s Ward’s later novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, in which the afterlives of violence (both criminal and state-sanctioned) live on as literal ghosts, appearing in and—in the case of ghost-narrator Richie–commenting on the devolving noir-style trajectories of the living cast. My novel, The Gulf, also blends elements of noir and the Gothic. When the eccentric, aging Miss Kate buys up Parson House–the crumbling old mansion that had been built long ago by the founding family of Parson, Texas–nobody in town knows what her plans are, or how she could afford the property. Even Louisa “Lou” Ward, whom Miss Kate hired to help her fix up the place, has no idea. After Miss Kate’s violent, unexplained death in the Parson House garden, the police seem all too eager to call it an accident. But Lou feels great affection for Miss Kate, who was a sort of mother to her when Lou was abandoned by her own mother as a child. She can’t help but suspect something darker is going on. That’s when the hurricane comes. Anyone with any sense, including most of Lou’s family, flees inland, watches, and waits. When the waters finally recede, there isn’t much of Parson left to rebuild. Lou, though, can’t bring herself to leave… not when she has so many unresolved questions about what happened to Miss Kate. She is especially suspicious when Joanna—Miss Kate’s estranged daughter and Lou’s first love-turned-enemy—returns to town, looking to make a profit on Parson House and leave as quickly as she can. Lou, who’s held an obsessive grudge against Joanna for years, starts to dig around, asking questions that stir up old dirt. The ghosts of Parson mingle with the suffering of the living as Lou tries to unravel the truth about what happened to Miss Kate… truth that threatens to reveal many more secrets about Parson, Joanna, Miss Kate, and even about Lou herself. The Gulf is part of a rich tradition of novels set in the Gulf region: a region that can never disentangle itself from the consequences of its vicious past, and one in which the destructive force of nature serves to expose its communities’ darkest sins. *** View the full article

With the collapse of communism in the Soviet satellite states in 1989 and in Russia in the early 1990s, the transition to various types of capitalist democracies began. This transition proceeded at a different pace in each country, and to various degrees of completion, but most shared two uncanny facts: an obscene degree of corruption and the sudden appearance of immensely rich oligarchs. Oligarch is a term most used to refer to a person whose wealth resulted from his/her relationship with the ruling party or leader. The common image created by many articles on the rise of these oligarchs is that of savvy individuals “fooling” or “taking over” weak, ineffectual governments that were ill-equipped in democratic/capitalist norms to capture valuable state assets at bargain basement prices. During a few short years these governments sold off natural resources (oil, gas, and earth minerals), banks, chemical plants, factories, hotels, media, and transportation facilities, to a select few individuals who suddenly became the new Rockefellers and Carnegies of Eastern Europe. But how did this really happen? And who were these lucky individuals? To begin to understand what occurred we must look at the situation before the collapse of communism. As early as the late 60s and 70s, communist governments, including that of the Soviet Union, realized that a centrally controlled system could not compete with a free-market economy. In fact, it could not build anything of quality that could be sold on the open market in the West, or even provide for the basics needs of domestic populations. These governments realized they needed two essential elements: hard currency, and people who knew how to function in the free-market economies of the West. They found both in the black market gangs that were active throughout the communist states. These gangs had long-established transportation routes and contacts in Western markets that allowed them to sell raw domestic materials, such as earth metals, grain, or oil, which they stole from the State, for hard currency, or barter them for produce or other essential products not available in communist countries. Terrified of a popular uprising, the communist governments were eager to employ any method, including the black market, to ease the people’s plight. Thus, during the 70s the security services made unofficial pacts with criminal gangs, easing border crossings, helping with transportation, security, even finances. Much of what the gangs brought in was stolen from European companies or purchased at cut prices from European criminal gangs. After a few years, the security services created their own private companies in Western Europe to facilitate these black market operations, which included the smuggling of arms, cigarettes, narcotics, and prostitution to obtain hard currency. In this way a small cadre of individuals was formed from inside the security services and the criminal gangs who were versed in the free-market economy and world financial markets. When the communist systems collapsed, these countries, including Russia itself, needed people who knew how to create a free-market economy and maneuver in the international finance system. The few who were knowledgeable were those members of the security services and the black marketeers who had managed the smuggling companies in the West. These individuals formed an alliance with leaders of the security services who remained in power to transfer to them the newly privatized industries at bargain basement prices. Initial capital was provided by the government from funds intended for departments of the security services that were no longer needed, such as the vast sums previously used to spy on its own citizens. It is thus no surprise that in most of the previous communist states the new oligarchs were either former agents of the security services or were closely related to high officials in the security services (e.g. the KGB in Russia, the Securitate in Romania, the State Intelligence Agency of Bulgaria). Since the politicians in power during and immediately after the transition were members of the old communist guard, they managed the scheme, getting hefty bribes or becoming secret shareholders of the newly privatized entities. Thus, rather than the new oligarchs taking advantage of the government, they actually formed a symbiotic relationship with the government, resulting in a class of wealthy individuals either in positions of power or closely aligned with one, all getting rich either directly or indirectly by stealing the country’s assets. In addition to bribes, the security services had another powerful tool to use against members of the government who initially resisted their corrupt schemes. Throughout the many years of communist rule, millions of dossiers were created on private citizens who the communist governments thought might pose a threat to their power. When Germany was reunited in 1990, for example, they discovered that the Stasi, the East German security service, had amassed millions of dossiers on 111 kilometers of shelves, containing compromising material on its citizens. Since the security services of the Soviet satellite states were based on the Soviet model, they all had massive intelligence on the private lives of their citizens, especially those in any position of responsibility. Most of these government officials had been corrupted during the communist years, either by directly stealing from government budgets, accepting bribes, which was the norm in the communist system, or being informants for the security services. During the transition process, the security services thus not only employed bribes but used this intelligence to blackmail officials of the government, including members of the parliament and the judiciary, to pass favorable laws and rubberstamp illicit transactions. An element that partly explains why such corruption was allowed to continue even after the transition to democracy goes to the heart of the communist system itself. The communist bureaucracy was opaque, filled with layers of red tape on every level with little oversight. It allowed those in authority to demand bribes, even in the most mundane, everyday transactions, such as applying for a job, dealing with the cop to avoid a ticket, with the butcher to save you a slab of beef, or with the doctor to even agree to see you. Ironically, rather than creating an egalitarian society, the entire communist system functioned in the most raw capitalist manner, with those with even minimal power increasing their income from bribes or outright theft. Generations of people grew up being compromised by being either donors or recipients of bribes. Despite the transition to democracy, this system of corruption remains alive and well to this day in most of the former communist countries. It is no wonder that, until recently, these countries, which are now members of the European Union and NATO, were listed as the most corrupt in the world, only recently being replaced by Sub-Saharan countries. Even countries like Poland and Hungary, which experienced a rapid transition to democracy without an initial period of formation of oligarchs, turned to the oligarch system after a few years. In Hungary, President Victor Orbán openly gives government contracts to his allies, friends, and relatives, even declaring that the creation of oligarchs bolsters capitalism. He calls it an “illiberal democracy.” In Poland, President Duda is doing the same. These new oligarchs, as in present Russia, further increase the power of the ruling party by buying up media companies and turning them into propaganda machines, not unlike during the communist days. It is not difficult to see how democracy can thus be stolen right out in the open by using “legal” means to consolidate political power in one party or ruler. Others outside the former communist sphere have also learned this lesson. In Turkey, President Erdogan has used this same model for the past twenty years to create a system of crony capitalism that has consolidated media and industry in the hands of a few close friends and allies. In the US, one large media company has become a veritable propaganda machine for one of our two political parties, and the power of the wealthy to control politicians through campaign contributions has resulted in laws that favor them, with little regard to the wishes of the majority. This gradual loss of democratic institutions and values before our very eyes is a danger that must be taken seriously if we want to save our own brittle democracy. *** References: Dimitrov, Martin K., From Spies to Oligarchs: The Party, The State, The Secret Police and Property Transformations in Postcommunist Europe. Paper prepared for the conference 1989: Twenty Years After, UC Irvine, November 5-8, 2009. Huang, Mel, Wannabe Oligarchs: Tycoons & Influence in the Baltic States, Conflict Studies Research Centre, ISBN 1-903584-83-3, May 2002 Marandici, Ion, Poster Session D100-004: Poster Group: Political Economy in the Communist and Postcommunist Region (2014). APSA 2014 Annual Meeting Paper, Ion Marandici. 2014. “The Post-Soviet Oligarchs and the Nomenklatura Capitalism Hypothesis.” Paper presented at the 2014 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, August 29. , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2455177 Roland, G. (2018), The evolution of post-communist systems. Econ Transit, 26: 589-614. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecot.12164 View the full article

I stood there like a waiter left hoping for a tip. “I was actually hoping to speak to you a minute, Mr. Danby.” He was slow to turn. “’Bout what?” “I’m looking for work.” “Ain’t got any, pal. Sorry.” “You sure? I’m probably better than any guy you got right now.” “A steam tramper from Duluth? Shit, pal, you probably ain’t better than my sister.” The giant that came in with Danby slapped the table so hard the bottles jumped and clinked. The kid had spittle running down his chin. I waited until they were done laughing and said, “I don’t know your sister, Mr. Danby, so I can’t comment on that. When I said I was probably better than any man you got, I was looking at who you got sitting here with you tonight.” Danby had a beer bottle going to his mouth and it stopped midway. The giant sucked in his breath so fast it sounded like a wind tunnel. The kid looked like he’d just been slapped. “What did you just say?” “You heard me. I’ll tell you more—I came two thousand miles to see you, Mr. Danby, because Jimmy Metcalfe’s a pal of mine and he said if I ever needed a place to go and start over, Cape Rage was the place to go, and Finn Danby was the man to see. Stand-up guy, our kind of people, Danny. That’s what Jimmy always told me. “But here I am, standing right in front of you, telling you I’m a friend of Jimmy’s, telling you I need work, and you try to blow me off with a beer and a shot. I’m getting pissed off at the unfairness in this world, Mr. Danby, I truly am.” Danby kept the beer bottle where it was before slowly taking it the rest of the way. He took a big, long gulp, and put the bottle back on the table. “Know what, pal? Don’t think I’m buying you that drink anymore. Say hi to Jimmy for me.” It had always been a long shot. The Danbys had run Cape Rage for more than a century and the last time someone worked for them who wasn’t from Cape Rage was probably around the time they started. I was going to need to improvise and had always suspected as much. Although I didn’t even have a backup plan this time, and I normally won’t leave home, cross a busy street or climb a high flight of stairs without one of those. It would come to me. That was the new plan. Excerpt continues below cover. I stood and waited. Eventually the giant stood, walked around the table and put his hand on my shoulder. “You wanna take this outside, pal? Finn just told you to blow.” The giant smiled. It was the sort of smile someone has right before they accept an award or take a large sum of money from an outstretched hand—a smile of sweet, entitled superiority. I smiled back. He couldn’t have looked more like a backup plan if he’d had the words tattooed to his forehead. “Take your hand off my shoulder,” I said quietly. “I’ll put my hands wherever I fuckin’ wanna put ’em, asshole, including upside your fuckin’ head if you don’t get your ass out of here.” Finn Danby laughed. The giant gripping my shoulder laughed. The kid laughed. Men sitting at nearby tables started laughing too and I wondered—Why is there always laughter? Most acts of violence have someone laughing just beforehand, and half the time, the person laughing is the last person who should have been. Fifty percent. From what I’ve seen of the world, those are the odds of ever knowing where you’re truly standing in this world. “I’ll leave when I finish my beer,” I said. “Already paid for it.” The giant looked at Finn, who shrugged his shoulders and started talking again to the man sitting at the next table. I raised the bottle, taking my time about it, took a good, long sip—it was nearly full, which seemed a waste—and then I threw the bottle over my shoulder. It missed the giant, but he yelled in surprise and lessened his grip on my shoulder enough for me to slip free. Without turning around, I drove my elbow into his gut. It bounced off like I’d hit a guardrail. The giant never flinched, let alone buckled or lost his balance. I was diving to the ground when his punch came, a right-handed undercut that would have ended the fight right there if it had connected. But it swung over my head harmlessly, and when it did, I kicked out with my right leg, hitting the giant above the ankle. This time he screamed. When he bent down to grab his ankle, I hit him in the face with my other foot. It was a beautiful kick. So square in his face I never saw it land; only saw my boot pasted above his crouched-over body, like my boot had become his face, then he flew backward. When he started to get up, I rolled in his direction and gave him a second kick to the face, almost as beautiful as the first. This time he fell backward and when his head hit the wooden floor it sounded like a high-noon cannon shot. He stayed down and an awkward silence filled the tavern. It didn’t last. I’m not sure how many men tried to jump me right then, but it would have looked like a football scrimmage for a while: men pawing each other trying to reach me on the floor; the kid trying to bite my arm; the man who had been talking to Finn now screaming, “Pin the bastard’s arms an’ll give’m a kick he won’t forget.” I stayed on the ground and brought them down one by one. I like fighting on the ground, Brazilian jiu-jitsu some people call it, and it was a Brazilian—an old cut-and-corner guy in Detroit—who taught me how to do it. He told me not only the techniques but the history, stories about the Gracies and other fighting families from the jungles of Brazil, showed me grainy black-and-white videos of matches in outdoor rings, thatched buildings in the background, thousands of people watching a way of fighting I had never seen. “People think being on the ground is a bad thing,” the cut-and-corner guy told me. “In Brazil, we made it a weapon.” The man who wanted to give me an unforgettable kick went first. I waited until he had raised his foot and then I kicked him in his right shin. He dropped like dead weight. When he started screaming, I knew I had ripped the tendon. I pulled the kid off me and got my knees around his head, squeezing until his eyes rolled back and his hands stopped clawing my legs. People stopped to look at that, and then I threw the kid aside, arched my body while still on my back—as though I were doing a reverse plank—and crabbed my way to the nearest man. He looked at me like I was a circus act. Was still looking at me like that when I grabbed his leg with one of mine and brought him down. I jumped onto his chest and gave him a flurry of short jabs to the head. He was helpless from the first blow, unconscious from probably the second or third. But I kept punching him. I broke his nose and blood squirted out in a fine, high arc, like a pipe bursting. I kept punching.. I knew I had probably done enough to get Finn Danby’s attention, but there was a way to ensure it. Violence was considered a good thing by men like Danby. Gratuitous, over-the-top violence—that was considered a better thing. I feigned the last couple punches, but it wouldn’t have made much difference by then. I’d been careful to avoid his eyes, and his teeth, but he was never going to thank me for what I’d done. Both cheekbones looked broken. His nose was a mess. I finally stopped, took some deep breaths and stood. The tavern was quiet now. Except for the cries of one man, writhing on the ground and clutching his shin. Three other men lay around him, unconscious. One was a giant; one was a kid; one was the man I had just beaten to a bloody mess. I looked at all three, to see if there was an urgent need for an ambulance, then I went and stood in front of Finn Danby. “They’ll live,” I said, and didn’t say anything else as that seemed to be all that needed to be said right then. Danby flipped his hair back, took a last sip from his beer bottle, put it carefully on the table, smacked his lips, and asked, “What did you say your name was, pal?” __________________________________ Excerpted from CAPE RAGE by Ron Corbett Copyright © 2024 by Ron Corbett. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. View the full article

I’m so, so, excited to present the conversation below to y’all. I’ve been a huge fan of Grady Hendrix and Riley Sager for years, both as great writers and great genre thinkers (they are also in that rarified category of “men who write women well”), and the conversation below proves that these two are some of the best, and funniest, folks around. Grady Hendrix’s latest novel, How to Sell a Haunted House, was released in January, and Riley Sager’s new novel, The Only One Left, releases today. The following discussion delves into horror, thrillers, 1980s paperbacks, and so much more. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads senior editor Grady Hendrix: Let’s start out with questions neither of us has ever been asked before, where do you get your ideas? Or why do you write horror? Riley Sager: In all seriousness, though, that last question does bring up an interesting point, which is that I don’t think of myself as a horror writer, although I know many people do. In my mind, I write psychological thrillers … that contain elements of horror. I think it boils down to intent versus finished product. I always set out to write a thriller, but slasher and supernatural elements often end up sneaking in because I love them and enjoy writing them. Because of that, what I call a thriller could just as easily be labeled horror by someone else. Which is awesome. I love straddling both worlds. Working in an industry that insists on putting genre labels on things, I like not being so easy to classify. Since you also blur genres, combining horror with humor and big-hearted emotion, I’m curious if you feel it’s the same with you. For example, I know lots of people who claim to not be into horror but read—and love—your books. GH: For me, horror vs. thriller really feels like more a marketing department concern than something I’m too focused on when I’m writing. I recently pitched something that got rejected because it was a “thriller” and they wanted to sell my next book as “horror,” so clearly I’m no good at telling the difference. In a world where your books or Silence of the Lambs can be sold as either horror or a thriller, and where Toni Morrison’s Beloved doesn’t get sold as horror at all, I think those genre boundaries are largely in the eye of the beholder. And they cut both ways: I know people who won’t touch something marketed as “horror,” even as they hope someone reboots “Hannibal,” and I know some horror-heads who stay away from thrillers because for a while those were overly identified with Gone Girl. Which is pretty horrific, if you ask me. RS: Well, I would love to read a Grady Hendrix “thriller,” because I know you’d put your own distinct spin on it. But there’s definitely this unspoken rule in the publishing world that once you establish yourself in a particular lane, you should stay there. You’re allowed to widen that lane every so often, but not too much. It then becomes a tricky balance of growing and expanding as an author, keeping your publisher happy, and not alienating those wonderful readers who’ve been with you since the very beginning. Sometimes, though, it’s unavoidable. My last book, The House Across the Lake, went full-on supernatural in a way I hadn’t done before. When writing it, I knew it was going to be polarizing and that I could lose some longtime readers—which, unfortunately, I probably did—but creatively, it was worth the risk. I had so much fun coloring outside the boundaries I’d set for myself with my previous books. But I also know my limits. I’d love to write a Jaws-esque thriller about something big with lots of teeth lurking under the water and munching on swimmers, but I probably never will. It’s too big of a swing and I’ll likely embarrass myself in the process. But Jaws had a huge impact on me. I think a lot of authors have these seminal childhood experiences in which we saw something or read something that seared itself into our psyche. Did you have that experience? What was the first thing that really scared you? Mine was the Disney version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. When I was a kid, The Wonderful World of Disney had this Halloween special in which they showed the scariest parts of Disney movies. One of them, of course, was the climactic chase between Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, including the bit at the end where the Headless Horseman throws this flaming jack-o-lantern into the covered bridge Ichabod has just crossed and it comes barreling toward the viewer. That part utterly terrified me, but in a way that made me want to watch it again, I guess to understand why it scared me, but also because I liked being scared. For a kid living a comfortable, mostly carefree life, fear was a potent emotion. Scooby-Doo is another influence, although it never scared me. I always knew the monster or ghost was someone in a rubber mask who would be foiled by Scooby and his pals. But I loved all the places they went. Gothic mansions and “haunted” houses and abandoned theme parks. It was all so atmospheric. Whenever I get compliments about the evocative settings in my books, I say a little thank you to Scooby-Doo, because I’m convinced that’s where I get it from. GH: Every second of that Disney Halloween special made me wiggle my butt with pleasure, from the Headless Horseman throwing his motherfucking head at Ichabod Crane, to the Evil Queen turning into a senior citizen and getting crushed by a boulder. I even loved that gloomy Magic Mirror MC-ing. Also harrowing was my first and only encounter with the wailing Banshee at the end of Darby O’Gill and the Little People, an otherwise drecky leprechaun movie starring Sean Connery which traumatized every child at Peter Mansfield’s fifth birthday party. The two deepest brands pressed into my brain did not come from a publicly-traded corporation. One was the house around the corner that turned its front yard into a veritable horror prom every Halloween. On the night itself, the family who lived there dressed as monsters and every half hour they did a lip-synched dance routine to “The Monster Mash,” which I found simultaneously stupid and unmissable. As a kid, Halloween seemed deeply subversive since it was a holiday that didn’t celebrate things like patriotism or peace on earth and good will to all men but reanimated skeletons offering you trays of human brains and child sacrifice. The other wound was Rhett Thurman’s carpool. Mrs. Thurman drove carpool once a week from first through sixth grades, and to keep us pacified she told ghost stories. Today, I’ve realized that most of them were pulled from Ye Olde Book of Standard Issue Local Ghost Stories, but she held us rapt with her delivery, bringing back our favorites on request, changing endings just to mess with us, and giving characters the names of people we knew. It was the first time I saw that you could hypnotize a car full of small boys into submission with nothing more than your voice. RS: Well done, Mrs. Thurman! Is there a book or short story that had that same effect on you? For me, it’s definitely And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. It might have been the first book for adults I ever read, and it blew my mind. I was like, “This is what adults read? Sign me up!” I became a mystery and thriller junkie because of that book. GH: The book that turned me into the writer I am today was, of course, Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Star Wars Spectacular. I inherited the magazine from one of my older sisters and it was already battered when I got it, but even creased and stained it still promised to tell me “All About the Most Fantastic Adventure Movie Ever Made!” A padded-out promo rag printed on pulp paper designed to cash in on the Star Wars craze, it was barely 50 pages long, but it set me on fire. Its stilted, grandiose synopsis electrified my eight-year-old brain, but the most important section was “The Best Science Fiction Films Ever Made.” In the days before VCRs, it was impossible for a kid from South Carolina to see old movies, and here were fifteen I’d never heard of, boiled down to short, 200-word descriptions that were little more than punchy lists of marvels, their descriptions like some kind of word-drug injected directly into the base of my brain. An unedited excerpt from the Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe entry read, “The Buster Crabbe serials. Featuring almost more marvels than the human mind can remember: The Sharkmen of the Underwater Kingdom. The Tree Men of Mars. The Octosac…the Gocko…the Clay Men. The Hydrocycle, the Spaceograph, the Gyroships, Nitrogen Ray Machine.” “So many nouns hinting at so many things! No connective tissue, no boring plot, no tedious story, just one amazing thing I’d never heard of after another, flying at my face as fast as I could read.”-Grady Hendrix So many nouns hinting at so many things! No connective tissue, no boring plot, no tedious story, just one amazing thing I’d never heard of after another, flying at my face as fast as I could read. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I wanted some. I didn’t need to see these movies, I just studied their descriptions until I knew them by heart. I knew that 2001: A Space Odyssey was about a starship full of hibernating space vampires. I knew that Things to Come was about a war between underground mole men and surface dwellers who were addicted to PBS. Buck Rogers was about space fighters in blimps getting mail order rayguns and robots out of a catalog and, also, something about scuba diving. Years later, I finally saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and was disappointed there wasn’t a single space vampire in sight. RS: I was lucky enough to grow up with a local PBS station that showed lots of classic horror late at night. On weekends and in the summer, my parents let me stay up to watch whatever midnight movie was on, I guess because it was PBS and they thought it was educational. So that’s how I first saw The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Great stuff! Switching gears, this is a question you’ve probably been asked before, but what’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? When I sent my agent the first draft of Final Girls, the main character, Quincy, was all over the map in terms of actions and emotions. At one point, my agent wrote, “Who is this Quincy?” because she’d never seen the character act that way before. The gears of the plot were all in place and working well, but I had let the plot dictate the character and not the other way around. It forced me to go back and examine every single character action to make sure it fit and was consistent. Now with every book, I make sure to step back and ask myself, “Who is this person?” If I don’t know, it means the book isn’t working. GH: I hear you! For me, the best writing advice I ever read was Elmore Leonard’s “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue.” That’s it. No need to be fancy, no need to get cute. Something is said, or something is asked. Readers don’t notice those words when they read and they keep the dialogue moving and if you use anything different you’d better have a really good reason. This one rule taught me to stop being so clever, keep it simple, get the hell out of my own way (and the reader’s), and just tell a story. RS: Finally, where do you see the thriller/horror genre heading in the next few years? GH: The push for diversity is my favorite thing publishing has done in a long time. I’ve heard what white dudes have to say about horror. I’m bored of myself. I want to know what a Chinese serial killer story looks like, what a Kenyan possession novel reads like, what a trans body horror movie feels like. Give me more, more! MORE! I would also like more sex, please. Reading ‘70s, ‘80s, and especially ‘90s horror paperbacks to write Paperbacks from Hell dosed me with more bad sex scenes than I thought I could survive, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And in the years since the ‘90s we’ve gone from boom to bust, and I think that what the world needs now is a reborn literature of flesh. Clive Barker and Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice tried, but they can’t do it alone. Everybody into the pool! I don’t write sex scenes because I’m a middle-aged man writing mostly female main characters so that would be creepy, but I vow to one day write a sexy book. I’ve got a werewolf novel in mind and that one’s going to be chock full of sex because werewolves were born horny. And I think every writer should promise to try to write a sexy book, because if the results are terrible you have permission to seal them in a lead-lined casket and bury them at the bottom of a swamp and no one will ever read them. But we live in a world full of violence and pain so why can’t we make it nice and fun and sexy every once in a while? Do you write sex scenes? Do they stress you out? Do you avoid them? RS: That’s a really interesting observation about sex disappearing from horror. I wonder if it was a kind of subconscious striving for “legitimacy.” By the nineties, horror definitely had that reputation of being sex and violence. So by removing sex from the equation, creators hoped it would be seen as more reputable? I don’t write very many sex scenes, for the same reason as you. Also,it’s trickier than people think. There’s a fine line between sexy and ridiculous. Get too explicit and it veers into pornography. Use too many euphemisms and it becomes campy. I’m fine with leaving it to the reader’s imagination. Sometimes the Hitchcock solution of ending North by Northwest with a train entering a tunnel is all we need. But if you write that horny werewolf novel, I’ll write my Jaws-esque thriller with a bunch of sexy swimmers. And if they don’t work, we can burn them or bury them. Or both. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Wolff, The Man in the Corduroy Suit (Bitter Lemon) “A memorable voice in the genre, Wolff’s prose, all sharp edges and abrupt surprises, keeping the reader in a state of edgy discomfort.” –New York Times Riley Sager, The Only One Left (Dutton) “Perennial thriller favorite Riley Sager is back with another page-turner this summer, this one riffing on one of America’s most famous and most notorious true crime cases. . . . The kind of book you’ll stay up late into the night trying to finish.” –Paste Magazine Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) “A gripping psychological suspense novel . . . Michallon’s riveting tale shows a killer through the eyes of the women in his life.” –The Washington Post Melissa Adelman, What the Neighbors Saw (Minotaur) “In the armful of suburban domestic thrillers publishing this summer, this debut—with its wild, super-spin of a plot, in which everything is turned upside down—is one not to miss.” –Brian Kenney, First Clue Sarah Stewart Taylor, A Stolen Child (Minotaur) “The bucolic setting, emphasis on family and leisurely pace make for a nice end run around traditional police procedurals.” –The New York Times Book Review Julia Heaberlin, Night Will Find You (Flatiron) “This gripping page-turner from Heaberlin conceals its secrets from even the cleverest readers…Vivian is an intelligent, perceptive character who’s a pleasure to spend time with, and when the plot kicks into gear, it’s nearly impossible to stop reading. This is Heaberlin at her best.” –Publishers Weekly Andrea Bartz, The Spare Room (Ballantine) “The novel is delightfully salacious and rampant with suspense and sex, and there’s a reason why Bartz is known as a hitmaker in the field.” –Shondaland Ruth Ware, Zero Days (Gallery/Scout) “The action and tension are relentless from the opening to the conclusion, which will astonish, but certainly not dismay, readers, who will be captivated by this very original and very real protagonist. It has been said that in Ruth Ware’s books the pages just turn themselves. She has been heralded as ‘the new Agatha Christie’ for good reason.” –Booklist Rebecca McKanna, Don’t Forget the Girl (Sourcebooks) “A heartbreaking story of female friendship, first love, and betrayal, Rebecca McKanna explodes onto the thriller scene with her debut, Don’t Forget the Girl. Absolutely phenomenal!” –Julie Clark Jon Bassoff, Beneath Cruel Waters (Blackstone) “Jon Bassoff never wastes a word in this pitch-perfect tooth-chipper of a novel about the frayed realities of the human condition. His prose crafts a claustrophobic and haunted past in order to decipher the pieces of a tortured present. A mesmerizing and satisfying display of storytelling.” –Frank Bill View the full article

There’s a scene in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film Unforgiven where a kid named Schofield has just killed a man for the first time, and he’s obviously distraught. He’s trying to rationalize what he’s just done, and how this man will never walk or breathe or love again. Finally, he takes a swig of booze and mutters, “Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.” Clint Eastwood’s character, Will Munny, stares off in the distance and says, more to himself than the kid, “We all got it coming, kid.” It’s a poignant line and is a response to the moralistic good vs. evil westerns that dominated the early days of film to a more cynical and complicated world view. More than providing history lessons, the western, like horror and science fiction, has always been a vehicle to express the fears and moral uncertainties that face our nation. And in recent years, as we have been more and more consumed by a sense of increasing violence and pervading doom, it is no wonder that the western has turned darker and more violent, as much gothic as western. The west has always represented the American mythos, a wide-open land of freedom and possibility. But freedom can easily transform to loneliness, and those wide-open spaces can transform to isolation. In Terrance Mallick’s 1973 film, Badlands, you have dramatic juxtapositions between the beautiful landscapes of the west and the senseless violence delivered by the people within those landscapes, namely Kit (played by Martin Sheen). Near the end of the film, after having killed seven people, including his lover’s father, Kit records a message. In part, he says, “Nobody’s coming out of this thing happy. Especially not us. I can’t deny we’ve had fun though.” It’s a chilling final line, and one that illustrates the growing sense of nihilism in America, a far cry from the white hat-wearing protagonists of early westerns. Equally chilling is the role of Holly, played by Sissy Spacek. Holly is enamored with Kit, who comes across as a psychopathic James Dean. She’s the (innocent?) bystander as Kit goes on his rampage. Instead of being horrified, she seems mostly indifferent, commenting how “I didn’t feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you’re sitting there and all the water’s run out of the bathtub.” In many ways, Holly represents the ethos of America. We stand by and watch all of the violence on our televisions and are no longer able to muster rage, only an ambiguous feeling of “blah.” Nearly a decade after the release of Badlands, Bruce Springsteen released the album Nebraska. It was a stunning departure for the rock star, especially considering that his next album would be the bombastic Born in the USA. He recorded the songs on a 4-track recorder, carried the cassette in his pocket for weeks, before finally deciding to release the album as is. The entire album is filled with dread, narratives of isolation and violence, and no song better illustrates this dread than the title song, a retelling of Mallick’s Badlands, which itself was inspired by the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather. In a somber voice, Springsteen ends the song with this chilling line: “They wanted to know why I did what I did. Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” But Springsteen wasn’t the only singer one using the west as a setting for carnage. Artists like Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Steve Earle, The Handsome Family, and even cheese balladeer Richard Marx (listen to his surprisingly dark track “Hazard,” which also takes place in Nebraska) wrote songs that could be credibly classified as Western Gothic. Like the genre of gothic or the subgenre of southern gothic, western gothic is as much about a feeling or an aesthetic as it is about a set of definitions. Music is capable of providing this feeling more than all of the other arts. Take the soundtrack of Paris, Texas by Ry Cooder. Although there are no chilling lyrics, Cooder presents a stark landscape with his somber guitar and eerie background noise. Here the Promised Land isn’t anything to search for, it’s something to be avoided at all costs. Here the Promised Land isn’t anything to search for, it’s something to be avoided at all costs. While gothic fiction uses decaying settings, claustrophobic atmospheres, and the possibility of the supernatural, and western fiction relies on beautiful vistas and good men pushed to the limits by black hats or the brutality of an indifferent nature, western gothic fiction combines those elements, holding hostage the beautiful settings and creating a tableau of something more foreboding. As far as I can tell, the first novel to make mention of western gothic is Richard Brautigan’s absurd tale, The Hawkline Monster, which even uses “Gothic Western” in its subtitle. This is more of a parody novel, poking fun at westerns and gothics, but some of the tropes are there, namely the amoral gunmen, a character that would be expanded upon in Stephen King’s novel, The Gunslinger. The opening line of King’s novel is iconic, perfect in its simplicity: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” But for a western novel to be truly gothic, we need more than starkness and loneliness; we need more than a morally ambivalent antihero. We need a sense of the grotesque. I would argue that, in this case, Cormac McCarthy is the master of the western gothic. Novels like Blood Meridian and The Road combine this western aesthetic with something truly terrifying. Sometimes McCarthy’s lyricism distracts us from the grotesqueness of his vision. In Blood Meridian, he writes, “…all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.” Throughout the novel, McCarthy forces us to reckon with the realities of the Old West, realities that include blood-soaked scalps, dead infants, and severed body parts. Other of his novels, namely The Road and No Country for Old Men, continue with this brutality within the setting of the west, but they don’t quite match the pure grotesquerie of Blood Meridian. Of course, no discussion of the western gothic would be complete without mentioning the roles of Indigenous writers on the landscape. Contemporary novelists such as Stephen Graham Jones, Erika Wurth, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and Eden Robinson have used the vast setting of the American (and Canadian) west to explore Indigenous themes such as identity, representation, and trauma. In Robinson’s Monkey Beach, for example, she utilizes many tropes of the gothic including a descent into madness. However, while in the western gothic visions of demons and the supernatural are often symbolic for mental illness, in Robinson’s novel, and in much of Indigenous fiction, these visions can be a sign of healing. Wurth also brings an Indigenous sensibility toward the gothic in her novel White Horse. Wurth’s protagonist, Kari, is gifted an ancient bracelet, and this bracelet turns out to be a portal of past traumas. And while these traumas are personal, it’s hard not to extend beyond her personal experiences to the never-ending horrors that Indigenous people have faced in our nation’s bloody history. But, as in Robinson’s novel, in White Horse the revealing of the supernatural also leads to a type of spiritual healing, a healing that is not usually evident in the western gothic. America is a country steeped in violence as much as the mythos of freedom and self-determination. And while we might be tempted to follow Horace Greeley’s advice and “Go west, young man,” artists are here to remind us of the monsters—usually in human form—that lay wait across the plains and mountains and deserts. *** View the full article

If you’ve ever been stuck on a bad date, you might have found yourself looking at your watch and considering if there’s any way you can escape through the bathroom window. As a single man, I became slightly addicted to dating. I downloaded every app going and went on literally hundreds of dates. And while I never had to squeeze through any bathroom windows, or slip through any fire escapes, I did have my fair share of close calls. I spent many, many hours conducting small talk over a game of mini-golf, or trying to flirt while badly salsa dancing – and even getting brutally dismembered at an improvisational murder mystery theatrical experience. It was there, gurgling on the carpet, doing a very bad impression of a murder victim, when I realized: this isn’t so different to my love life. And not just because I was dying alone on a slightly grubby carpet—but because, just like a good crime novel, dating exciting and a little bit scary. And if dating was like being in my very own whodunnit—was I the amateur sleuth, on the trail of the elusive villain? When I swiped left on those dating apps, wasn’t I just like a detective, eliminating the least likely suspects? And on the dates, when I was gently interrogating them, surely that was just me trying to find out their motives? There was The One Who Got Away, that seemingly perfect date who just stopped texting. Or what about The One with an Ulterior Motive—who says she wants a boyfriend, but was really just after a friend with benefits. And then there’s The Prime Suspect: all the evidence points to them the one you’re looking for, but on the date, there’s just no spark. Of course, finally, there’s the big twist. In the end it’s always the last person you think it’s going to be. Because somehow, up until now, you’d missed some vital clue, but in the final chapter everything makes sense, and really, it was obvious all along. So maybe my search for The One was just like the whodunnits I loved to read. And if I played my part right, with any luck, I could dodge the red herrings, and eventually meet my match, finally coming face to face with The One. But after almost a decade of largely unsuccessful dates, I started to see things in a different way. Dating apps could make people seem very disposable. There was always another person waiting in the wings if things didn’t immediately work out. Despite the, ahem, exotic locations, the more dates I went on, the more each one blurred into the next. The same rote questions about jobs and hobbies, the same awkward goodbyes at the bus stop. After three hours finding out the most minute details about someone’s life, I’d jump on the number 169 home and never see them again. I began to wonder if really, I wasn’t the detective in this murder mystery, but actually the villain, causally swiping through victims until I found my ‘Final Girl’? As an author, I immediately began to think this would be an interesting idea for a thriller. What if dates really were literally disposable? And what if someone was using a dating app to find their victims? That’s how I came up with the idea for Don’t Swipe Right, a millennial murder mystery set in the equally terrifying and mystifying world of online dating. It’s the story of Gwen Turner, who, reeling from a disastrous break-up, downloads a new dating app. Each man she meets on ‘Connector’ is even more toxic than the last, but luckily, she can simply ‘un-match’ and never have to think about them again. That is, until she matches with a serial killer who is intent on murdering all the men she’s previously dated. When she realizes that one of her dates may hold the clue to the identity of the murderer, Gwen is forced to track them down— before the killer can get to them first. (And yes, she does have to flee through the odd bathroom window and slip out a fire escape. But she just happens to be running away from a serial killer.) As she tries to figure out the mystery, Gwen is forced to re-live those awful evenings that she’d tried so hard to forget. But in the process, she also has to reconsider the real people behind the dating app profiles. When she does, she realizes that her motivations for dating weren’t as honorable as she thought. In the end, she has to analyze herself as much as her dates to solve the case. Writing the book, I began to realize the same thing. The people I dated weren’t disposable. They were more than just a handful of photos on my mobile screen to be scrutinized and eliminated. Dating wasn’t a game of cat and mouse, and I was never going to find The One if I didn’t forget all the evidence and use my heart instead of my brain. Despite their immense talents, Poirot, Marple and Holmes all struggled to solve the mystery of love. Maybe that’s because dating isn’t about forensic deduction or ‘little grey cells’, it’s about going with your gut. *** View the full article