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What’s a puzzle plot mystery? In a “fair play” puzzle plot mystery, the author provides the reader with all the clues, allowing the reader to match wits with the detective. All the pieces of the puzzle are hidden in plain sight. The genre was at its height in the Golden Age of detective fiction in the 1920s and ‘30s, and continued in popularity for decades. Ellery Queen novels (1929 – 1971) were famous for Ellery directly addressing the reader at the point in the story in which both the reader and the detective had all the clues needed to solve the mystery. Ellery presented a “challenge to the reader.” Who would solve it first? On the most devious end of the puzzle plot spectrum, you’ll find locked-room mysteries and impossible crimes, where a crime isn’t just puzzling but looks as if it’s truly impossible. (A deeper dive into locked-room mysteries can be found here and here.) A resurgence in the genre Thanks to modern developments such as publishers reprinting out-of-print books from the Golden Age of detective fiction, mysteries from around the world being translated into English for the first time, and wonderful podcasts including Shedunnit and All About Agatha, there’s been a modern resurgence in interest in Golden Age style puzzle plot mysteries. Here, I’m highlighting a handful of present-day authors putting their own spin on the classic genre. If you love classic puzzle plot mysteries, I encourage you to seek out these authors and more. Cluefinders, sealed solutions, and directly challenging the reader Several modern authors are bringing back delightfully playful elements from classic puzzle plot mysteries, including cluefinders, sealed solutions, and directly challenging the reader. Martin Edwards is one of the people helping bring Golden Age mysteries back into print through the British Library’s Crime Classic series and his nonfiction, but he’s also leading the way through his Rachel Savernake Golden Age Mysteries. Mortmain Hall and The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge both resurrect a fun element of mystery novels not seen in decades: a cluefinder. Cluefinders are lists at the end of novels that spell out all the clues, including the pages where the reader can find them, so readers can review what they spotted or missed. Tom Mead’s Joseph Spector mysteries feature the most baffling type of puzzle: impossible crimes. His debut novel Death and the Conjuror gives all the clues to the reader—and the Japanese edition even includes a sealed solution section. Nearly a century ago in 1929, the Harper Brothers launched a “Harper’s Sealed Mystery” series with the end pages of their mystery novels sealed. Once a reader broke open the solution pages, they could no longer return the book. Both Edwards and Mead write historical settings that evoke the Golden Age mysteries they pay homage to, but other authors are writing similar puzzles in present-day settings and openly playing with conventions. Comedian Benjamin Stevenson writes modern whodunnits set in Australia, with fair play clues explicitly spelled out as a challenge to the reader. In both Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and its follow-up Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, the narrator directly addresses the reader throughout the book, telling them exactly where to find the clues they need. The clues are cleverly hidden, of course, but it’s deliciously fun to attempt to work them out. Characters for a modern world One complaint that some modern readers have of Golden Age novels is a lack of character depth. While I disagree with this critique, especially in books by authors whose books have stood the test of time, it’s true that characters’ personal lives were less central than they are in most current mysteries. Well-rounded diverse characters were also difficult to find in Golden Age novels, even though it’s historically accurate to find a wide range of cultures and intermarriages in that time period. Christopher Huang has incorporated a multicultural main character into a Golden Age style historical mystery. Huang’s A Gentleman’s Murder features a puzzle plot with many familiar tropes, such as a murder at a gentleman’s club in London, but his sleuth is half English and half Chinese. Singaporean-Canadian Huang adds depth to the mystery by weaving in background details of British colonialism, but the focus is the traditional puzzle plot. J.L. Blackhurst’s Three Card Murder, the first in her Impossible Crimes series, deftly places a twisty fair play mystery in a modern police procedural. The mystery perfectly blends fully modern sensibilities and family drama with baffling clues that the biggest fans of classic mysteries will delight in when the clever solution is revealed. My new novel A Midnight Puzzle is my own modern spin on the classic puzzle plot mysteries I love reading. When I set out to write a series focused on locked-room mysteries, I wanted to give readers the same joy I feel when a cleverly constructed puzzle comes together, but also add the character depth that I enjoy in modern novels. Sleuth Tempest Raj isn’t only using her skills as a stage illusionist to see through misdirection and solve a murder involving a mysteriously regenerating booby trap. She’s also getting help from her multicultural family and the quirky crew of Secret Staircase Construction as she unearths family secrets that give her the last pieces of the puzzle. Present-day puzzle plot mysteries aren’t identical to those from a century ago, but if you follow the clues above to find your next great read, I guarantee plenty of fair play fun. *** View the full article

Two historical fiction authors meet up for a cyber “cuppa” and imaginary scones with clotted cream to celebrate Women’s History Month and chat about the pleasures and pitfalls of writing historical fiction based on real life characters. The topics range from catching ghosts to resurrecting long-forgotten women on the page; from muses to murders; from data to dogs. Please join us! (And if you prefer coffee and cookies, that’s okay.) Kate Thompson, author of The Wartime Book Club, is a U.K. author with roots in serious journalism. K.D. Alden, author of Lady Codebreaker, is an American author who accidentally fell in love with history after decades of writing romantic comedy. K.D.: Hi, Kate! I have become an instant fan of yours since reading The Wartime Book Club. Though your book is set in the British Channel Islands and mine in the United States, we both write women’s historical fiction about characters who are inspired by real events or real people. Funny though, when our publisher brought up the possibility of co-authoring an article for CrimeReads, I blinked in surprise. Do I write about crime? I wondered. I suppose I do! What are saboteurs, smugglers and spies if not criminals? The protagonist of Lady Codebreaker spends three quarters of the book cracking open secret messages to catch these bad guys. In The Wartime Book Club you also write about criminals: Nazis, collaborators and traitors. Did you ever think of yourself as a crime or thriller writer? Kate: Hi K.D. So good to meet you. Thank-you for such brilliant questions! And back at you. I adored Lady Codebreaker and I’m awed at how much research and love went into the novel. I could sense you almost bleeding words onto the page! Firstly, great question. I don’t regard myself as a thriller, or crime writer and yet, when you dig into it, most of the Wartime Book Club is about the subversive behavior of two strong women fighting against a totalitarian regime, who end up getting arrested! Publishing is very genre driven isn’t it. It has to be to enable the reader to know what they’re getting. But often, readers will pick up my books and then later say, “it was quite dark wasn’t it, I wasn’t expecting you to tackle such heavy issues such as domestic violence, or subjunction of women”. We make assumptions based on books covers and titles. I think all good books must contain surprises and be there to challenge, shock and emotionally move the reader, as well as entertain. What do you think? K.D.: I absolutely agree. A book’s cover and title are, by necessity, only “teasers” or clues as to what exists within its pages, and it’s truly impossible to sum up a hundred-thousand-word story with an image or a tagline. A novel is a simulacrum of life for its characters … and every life is full of unexpected events and circumstances. Full of questions, tests, twists, tragedy and comedy. My favorite books play the full range of human emotion like a violin, eliciting laughter, tears and everything in between. Writing historical fiction is, to me, an attempt to capture a few ephemeral but extraordinary ghosts in a butterfly net. I love having the chance to resurrect forgotten heroines from the past, breathe new life into them and introduce them on the page to today’s readers. Kate, you have a background in journalism and have also written non-fiction. What inspired you to make the transition to fiction—and historical fiction in particular? Kate: I think, like you, I feel aggrieved that so often women are hidden in the margins of history, their voices rarely amplified. So when you stumble upon an incredible woman you want to do what you can to celebrate their achievements. I’ll give you an example. The first novel I ever wrote, Secrets of the Singer Girls, was inspired by a woman I shared a name with. The other Kate Thompson was a tough apron-clad East End matriarch, who, in addition to raising nine sons in a notoriously rough tenement slum, formed a tenants’ association to take on greedy landlords and pioneered the country’s first rent strike. She forced her ‘slumlord’ as she called him, to back down and reduce rents and this led to a change in housing law in the UK. By the time of the Second World War she was putting out incendiary bombs and fighting local government for better shelter provision in the Blitz. She was then crushed to death in a preventable accident on the steps down to the tube in 1943. Uncovering her life gave me the history shivers. She was a magnificent woman, yet not even a footnote in the history books. I realized that the best way to get people to read and care about her, was to weave her into a work of fiction. Barnes and Noble said recently, “if you want to learn about the past read non-fiction, if you want to be moved by the past, read historical fiction” and it’s so true. I realized I had more chance of people reading about these amazing women I was discovering, if I had them walking, talking, breathing and living in the pages of my novels. What inspired you to write fiction? K.D.: I’ve had the dream of writing ever since I can remember—probably because I was such a voracious reader as a child. Somehow I knew I’d write a book one day, but I had no idea what kind of book it would be. Kate, what you said above about weaving real people into fiction to move readers resonates so strongly with me. I learned about world events and famous figures through reading historical novels, because when I was young volumes of history were too dry for me, and I didn’t find them engaging. But if I could step into a protagonist’s shoes and feel that I was living story events along with her, then I could gulp down history and digest it with pleasure! My previous book, A Mother’s Promise, is about a simple young girl who finds herself at the heart of a 1927 Supreme Court case called Buck v. Bell. I was absolutely insistent that I write it from her point of view, despite the fact that the story evolved from the extremely convoluted topic of eugenics. Why? Because it was about grand theory put into practice on an unfortunate, pregnant and unwed teenager (a victim of rape) whose mental acuity was misrepresented. She neither knew nor cared about the pompous philosophy espoused by eugenicists who believed that traits such as poverty and crime could be passed on genetically. She must have felt that an asteroid had hit her when the court ruled that the government could sterilize her. And I wanted readers to feel the tragedy that had been visited upon her. So, a change in topic, Kate: While I’m most comfortable hiding behind my laptop and playing with my imaginary friends, you also host a podcast called From the Library With Love. (I can’t wait to listen to more episodes!) When did you begin this, and why? Kate: Ha ha, trust me, as an introvert I am all too familiar with the ease and comfort of hiding behind my laptop with my imaginary friends. I was forced to come out from behind it by the women I was interviewing. Last year I was sitting in front of a 100 year old Bletchley Park codebreaker, Betty Webb, listening to her unique voice, when it struck me, other people need to hear this. I couldn’t find many podcasts out there sharing stories of the men and women who made history, ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times, and that’s where the idea came from. So now I have a mix of authors sharing stories from the past, and our wartime generation telling their remarkable tales and you know what? I love it! It’s helped me to fight my own shyness. So when are you coming on? I’d LOVE to interview you for the podcast. You can listen to Betty’s episode here. K.D.: I’ll certainly listen to Betty’s interview! And thank you, I’d love to be on your podcast! So we both delved deeply into history in order to write The Wartime Book Club and Lady Codebreaker. Did you ever feel overwhelmed by facts and timelines and so many real tragic stories while you constructed a workable fictional plot? (I did!) Kate: Yes, I read in your authors note that you literally ran screaming when a five inch thick tome on The Codebreakers arrived in the post. I get that! Writing about the past often comes with a heavy duty of care to get it right and it’s easy to feel crushed under the weight of so many stories. Someone wiser than me said, you have to accept this is your version or interpretation of the past. All you can do is your research and then try to distill the essence of it into your narrative, whilst staying true to the people you are writing about. I wrote about a real woman called Louisa Gould, who harbored an escaped Russian slave and was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbruck. I became so worried I’d offend her family by including her that I contacted her family, who very kindly replied to say, ‘we aren’t proprietorial about her history, this is your interpretation of her story’. I tried to keep uppermost in mind that the plot must come first, and that everything must weave itself around that. I love how you said, ‘I wrote and worried and researched and wrote and still the plot dangled like a burglar, stuck in the window with his pants down,’ I get that. I do. How long did it take you to pull up the burglar’s pants? K.D.: I’m laughing so hard as I read that question! The burglar got stuck as he was raiding all the history that would fit into Lady Codebreaker’s forty-year timeline. And it was finding a way to tie it all together that put him in that predicament. At last my Muse took pity on me at 3 a.m. one night. She said, “You need a MacGuffin.” (For people not as nerdy as I am, that means something in fiction that is an object to chase.) “Are you kidding me?” I asked the Muse. “I have about 47 MacGuffins already!” I don’t know what your Muse looks like, but mine is about 8 feet tall and carries a satchel that contains zip-ties, a hatchet, a shovel, a tarp and lye. “ONE MACGUFFIN,” she growled, as the floorboards shook. Then she vanished again, thank God. Once I pulled the covers back down from over my head, I figured it out. The first saboteur/spy my Lady Codebreaker caught could be blended with some others … giving her a worthy villain to chase and ultimately catch. ONE MacGuffin. So that’s when I was able to pull up the burglar’s pants. LOL. Thanks for asking, Kate. On from a metaphorical burglar and a muse to our characters: I based Lady Codebreaker on a real woman, Elizebeth Smith Friedman. Kate, you drew heavily on the history of Occupation in the Channel Islands and included many real people as minor characters in The Wartime Book Club. But your two main protagonists are fictional, correct? Kate: Yes, kind of. I would say that Grace is an amalgamation of all the librarians I interviewed, both for this book and The Little Wartime Library. Bea is very much the funny, feisty, irreverent wartime East End women I interviewed, especially a flamboyant blonde called Minksy who used to entertain shelterers during the Blitz. Her voice was always in my mind when I was writing. I love how you say Elizebeth Smith Friedman almost seemed to be challenging you from the past, daring you to resurrect her. K.D.: Do you relish the opportunity to right some of the wrongs from the past in your historical fiction? I was so outraged at the fact that J. Edgar Hoover took credit for my character’s work that I was inspired to give her a chance to “get even.” Kate: Definitely. Books are great medium for getting even. I discovered this awful pompous, patriarchal librarian who in wartime said, ‘if women have not enough energy to read anything but trash, we should be doing them a real service if we prevented them from reading at all.’ My hackles instantly went up and I turned him into a character in The Wartime Book Club and eventually got him sacked, disgraced and packed off to live in a dreary suburb. It was very liberating! In your book the stakes are even higher. Without any spoilers can you tell us how you tackled J. Edgar Hoover’s appropriation of Elizebeth’s work? K.D.: Well, the main thing I did was to make it clear to the reader what he’d done. But there is an over-arching plot that involves Hoover and Elizebeth (renamed Grace in LC) at odds, shall we say. But back to you! Both The Wartime Book Club and Lady Codebreaker have at their core one relationship which deepens and changes over time as the characters develop, mature and are faced with dramatically rising stakes. Your novel examines a friendship between two women, mine a friendship that deepens into love between a woman and a man. Eventually one friend—and one spouse—make ethical choices that they would not have made at the beginning of each novel. Do you see this as a strength, a weakness, an “immoral imperative” or simply poetic justice? Kate: I think I see it as a reflection of life. We all change as we grow and develop. I think womens’ capacity for empathy grows as they age. I definitely see it amongst my friends. The choices we make define us as we age and we do all change as we get older, so it would seem natural that the plot of a book should reflect real life. Wartime brought out the best (and worst in people) The occupation of the Channel Islands was a moral quagmire for so many and I enjoyed exploring the moral dilemmas and ethical choices that islanders faced daily. I hope it also makes the reader reflect and think, ‘what would I have done living under Nazi Occupation, how would I have behaved?’ What drove the development of your characters? K.D.: In the case of Elizebeth and William Friedman (Grace and Robert Feldman in my novel) I built on information I could find about their relationship. And I noticed that there was an interesting “arc” to their marriage: while he initially was her protector, she became his over the decades they were married. And so the story question that entered my mind was, “How far would she go to protect him?” I’ll leave it at that to avoid any spoilers. What’s next for you, Kate? Are you working on a new historical fiction novel? Kate: I can’t say too much about it yet, but I am returning to non-fiction. I am working with a very special 95-year-old woman and together we are journeying back in time to research and write the story of how she survived the Holocaust. It’s been the most emotionally draining, challenging and life-changing book and I’m only half-way through. What’s next for you? K.D.: I look forward to reading it! I’m working on a proposal for a follow-up book. At the risk of sounding like a lunatic, I can hear it calling to me … I’m fascinated by the protagonist’s psychology. Kate: Can I finish please on a question for you, K.D? I see you have two rescue greyhounds. I have two rescue lurchers. Do you think historical fiction authors see the past lives in everything? K.D.: I do! Klepto and Sally. They’re retired racers and such love-bugs. And lurchers are part greyhound! What a coincidence. Re: past lives. I don’t know about all historical authors, but I do wonder myself whether humans and other creatures get, for lack of a better work, recycled. My dogs have such wisdom and understanding and empathy in their eyes … as if they’ve seen it all. Kate, this chat has been such a pleasure! I hope we’re able to meet in person one day! *** Click to view slideshow. Kate Thompson was born in London and worked as a journalist for women’s magazines and national newspapers before becoming a novelist. Over the past ten years, Kate has written twelve fiction and nonfiction titles, three of which have made the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list. She now lives in Sunbury with her husband, two sons, and two rescued Lurcher dogs, Ted and Saphhie. Her new novel, The Wartime Book Club, is now available. K.D. Alden is the pseudonym of an award-winning author who has written more than twenty novels in various genres. She has been the recipient of the Maggie Award, the Book Buyer’s Best Award and an RT Reviewer’s Choice Award. A Mother’s Promise is her first historical novel. K.D. is a graduate of Smith College, grew up in Austin, Texas, and resides in south Florida with her husband and two rescue greyhounds. Her new novel, Lady Codebreaker, is now available. View the full article

You ever watch a TV show or a movie and the characters are watching something that only exists in that universe? Like Rochelle, Rochelle in Seinfeld or M.I.L.F Island from 30 Rock or The Alan Brady Show in The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mock Trial with Judge Reinhold from Arrested Development? Remember when Stanley Tucci plays an actor studying Adrian Monk to play him in a movie on Monk? They’re adapting the Nikki Heat books in that one plotline of Castle. That kind of thing. Well, creating a fake show or movie within a show or movie is an art, and today, we are here to celebrate that art. For your fake watching pleasure, we present the ten best fake crime movies and TV shows, in movies and TV shows. Ten might not seem like enough, as there are many, many more great ones in the annals of entertainment. But these are the ten which we, at CrimeReads, find the best in terms of satire and pertinence to our site. Also, there’s a bonus entrant at the end. This list is not ranked, because how would I do that? I haven’t seen these things! Come on. Firestorm (Seinfeld) I love the fake movies on Seinfeld. Ponce de Leon! Prognosis Negative! Death Blow! The Pain and the Yearning! The Muted Heart! But I would really like to see Firestorm, an action flick that everybody in Seinfeld loves. It’s got everything: Harrison Ford, who “jumped out of the plane and was shooting back up at them while he was falling,” an “underwater escape,” and a helicopter landing on top of a car! It’s “a hell of a picture.” Man oh man. Sure sounds like it. Just don’t spoil it for people! Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) In my opinion, the funniest part of Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the fake CSI-style TV show that the actress Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) stars in. It’s called Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime. (There’s another show in this universe, too, Crime Scene: Phoenix.) Her co-star is Billy Baldwin (as himself). SAY no more. Brazzos (Only Murders in the Building) I would give all my money away to see just one whole episode of Brazzos, the fake show on Only Murders in the Building that Steve Martin’s character Charles Hayden Savage had worked on for most of his career. Aristotle Brazzos is a tough, shades-wearing, leather-jacket-clad, brilliant detective (in the vein of Telly Savalas’s Kojak, I’d wager). What’s his catchphrase? “This takes this case in whole new direction.” (I’d also give all my money and all of someone else’s money to see more of Season 3’s fake murder mystery musical Death Rattle Dazzle. I actually think a full run of Death Rattle Dazzle should be this year’s NBC live musical event.) The 14 Fists of McCluskey (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) I love Quentin Tarantino’s 1969–set LA epic Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, and one of the things I love the most about it is Rick Dalton, Leonardo DiCaprio’s washed-up actor protagonist, who had once starred in a black-and-white Western TV show called Bounty Law and now moonlights as a villain-of-the-week on other people’s shows. He’ll go on to make Spaghetti Westerns, but before that, he has a relatively successful turn in a violent War World II film called The 14 Fists of McCluskey in which he plays an American Sergeant named Mike Lewis who, among other unknown plot points, takes a flamethrower across enemy lines and barbecues a room full of Nazis. “Anybody order fried sauerkraut?” Classic. Tarantino, a true maestro for chillingly-accurate mid-century movie details, also lists that the supporting cast includes Van Johnson, Rod Taylor, Sal Mineo. The realism! Chicago Homicide (Curb Your Enthusiasm) Larry David can’t stop making fake TV shows and movies. And, in a late season of Curb, one appears. The very, very schlocky TV procedural Chicago Homicide is a joke about Dick Wolf’s Chicago TV series empire. “People will watch anything with ‘Chicago’ in the title, it’s been proven,” Larry’s censor girlfriend Bridget (Lauren Graham) tells him, and she seems right. This fake show features Ali Larter and Jerry O’Connell as two, you guessed it, homicide detectives. In Chicago. Habeus Corpus (The Player) Robert Altman’s The Player, a black comedy about murder and Hollywood studio politics, has a great fake movie! Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a greedy executive, and he gets a pitch for a movie called Habeas Corpus that the writers swear will be an Oscar contender. It’s going to be a legal drama about capital punishment starring no-name actors, and the main character will die. Because of complicated machinations that I will not get into here, Mill agrees to let them make it. By the time we see a clip of it, Mill has obviously already got his hands on it and turned it into more mainstream fare, because it now stars Julia Roberts in the lead role of a death row inmate. Originally on trial for killing her husband, she is horrified when the opposing counsel pushes for the death penalty. Then she lands on death row. The movie also stars Bruce Willis, Peter Falk, Susan Sarandon, Louise Fletcher, and Ray Walston. Looking for LaToya (Insecure) Issa Rae’s wonderful HBO series Insecure does a lot of brilliant things, including featuring a fake TV true-crime docuseries called Looking for LaToya that all the characters bingewatch. LaToya is a 26-year-old Black woman who mysteriously vanishes outside a Red Lobster. A pitch-perfect true crime satire, Rae had designed the fake show to underscore the lack of media coverage and care around real-life disappearances of Black women. The Rural Juror (30 Rock) 30 Rock is a GOLDMINE of fake TV shows and movies. The Dealbreakers Talk Show? The aforementioned M.I.L.F Island? The game shows Celebrity Homonym and Goldcase? God Cop?! Queen of Jordan!? Bitch Hunter!? Not to mention the show TGS with Tracy Jordan or all of Tracy Jordan’s movies. BUT if I have to choose one to go on this list (just one, lest this list actually just become a 30 Rock appreciation post), it’s gotta be The Rural Juror. It’s just got to be! The virtually unpronounceable nature of the title The Rural Juror is a running gag throughout a good chunk of the show. In the film, Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) plays a small-time Southern lawyer named Constance Justice. It is an adaptation of the fake Kevin Grisham novel of the same name. (Yes, Kevin Grisham, John’s fake brother, who also penned the fake sequel Urban Fervor. God I love this show.) The movie apparently co-stars Tony Hawk. Detective Lucerne (Columbo) I love the Columbo episode Fade Into Murder, in which the actor who plays the eponymous detective protagonist on a crime show called Detective Lucerne kills his wife and Columbo is brought in to solve the crime! Lucerne is the “world’s greatest detective” and he is played by the actor Ward Fowler who is played by William Shattner. Tell me you don’t wish this existed, and I won’t believe you. Angels With Filthy Souls (Home Alone) Ah, Angels With Filthy Souls, the James Cagney-esque fake gangster movie that Kevin McAllister puts on when he realizes that he’s got no adults around to stop him. The dialogue, exchanged between two mobsters named Johnny and Snakes, is some of the most memorable in the film. “Keep the change, you filthy animal!!” BONUS: Stab (Scream 2, etc.) I would have been criminally remiss if I didn’t at least mention the Scream movies in this list. Stab, the franchise–within-a-franchise of the Scream cinematic universe. The Scream movies all knit together to make one giant, conceptual mise-en-abyme and outlining all the tendrils of referentiality here will take all day. So, to keep it simple, the events within Scream spawn a book called The Woodsboro Murders (by Gale Weathers), which gets adapted into a film series within the second Scream installment that is almost identical to the first Scream installment. Heather Graham plays Drew Barrymore’s original part, but as the films continue, they allow the films to push the envelope of referentiality to crazy levels. View the full article

There is a flea-market in Oldsmar Florida – “Largest in the South” it claims – that I visit when I am in the area. At the end of one of the many outdoor aisles of the flea-market is a used bookstore. I have been to the flea-market, and this bookstore, often enough that the owner knows me, although I don’t know his name, nor the name of his store – there is no signage – and he gets oddly secretive when I ask for a business card — “Darn, I just ran out.” Hardcore booklovers can have their quirks, so I don’t press him on this, but as I said, he knows me and when I walked into his shop recently, he greeted me with: “You’re back. Looking for more of them, are you?” “If you’ve got any.” “Which one?” “Does it matter?” “Ahh, but it does. Got plenty of one Macdonald, can’t keep the other one on the shelves. That’s a sad thing, don’t you think? But let me see what I have for you.” Then he scurried away and started rummaging through cardboard boxes, looking for the books he knew I would want to see (much of his store is in cardboard boxes). I laughed at what he said, although later in the day, when I started to think about it, as he had suggested, I decided it was rather sad. The two authors my anonymous bookstore owner was referring to are both acclaimed mystery writers — John D. MacDonald and Ross Macdonald. The similarities, and differences, between the writers are striking. As has been the critical response to their work since their deaths in the 1980s. Both men are also best known for a detective – Travis McGee for the MacDonald with the upper-case D and the middle initial, Lew Archer for the no-middle-initial, lower-case-d Macdonald. Which one had the better detective? It was a question I found myself wondering, as I walked through the buildings and outdoor aisles of the largest flea market in the South, a new bundle of books in my arms. *** Before we try to answer that question, let’s go through the similarities between John D. MacDonald and Ross Macdonald. For starters, both men were born within months of each other, MacDonald on July 24, 1916. Macdonald on December 13, 1915. Both men would die in the 1980s, MacDonald on December 28th, 1986, from complications following heart surgery, Macdonald on July 11, 1983, from Alzheimer’s disease. (In an odd detail, the birth month and death month for each man would be the opposite of each other.) Both men would have one wife that they would out-live, and one child. Both would earn prestigious, post-graduate degrees – an MBA from Harvard for John D, a PhD in Literature from the University of Michigan, for Ross without-a-middle-initial. Both would move North to South – John D from Utica, New York to Sarasota Florida, Ross from Kitchener, Ontario to Santa Barbara, California. When you look at a map, you will see that the cities of Utica, New York and Kitchener Ontario are not that far apart, more or less (bit of a stretch) on opposite shores of Lake Ontario. Neither Mac – d-D-onald would move again, and both would use their new home-states as the settings for some of the most highly regarded detective mysteries ever written. *** Now for the differences. Ross Macdonald is a penname for Kenneth Millar. Born in Los Gatos, California, Millar returned to his mother’s hometown of Kitchener when he was four, after his father abandoned the family. He lived with various relatives throughout his childhood and teenage years, eventually earning an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Western Ontario. John D Macdonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania. His father, Eugene MacDonald, worked for the Savage Arms Corporation, eventually becoming treasurer of the company, and re-locating the family to Utica. Macdonald attended the Wharton School of Business and Harvard University. He worked for banks and insurance companies, before deciding upon a writing career. For Millar it was a testament to his character – and almost a miracle – that he graduated from university. In Canada, he and his mother were virtually penniless. He was in constant trouble with the law, a street fighter, a thief. Relatives paid for his tuition. It was at university that he met his wife, Margaret, and his life turned for the better. John D MacDonald’s one act of rebellion was becoming a writer instead of a banker. He worked in his study in his home in Sarasota, sunrise to sunset, with the exception of quitting early on Friday afternoons to take his wife to dinner at a nearby country club. Their one child, a son, gave them five grandchildren. If there was tragedy in John D’s life before his untimely death following surgery at the age of 70, it is unknown. Kenneth Millar’s life, on the other hand, always seemed a struggle. While John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books were immediately popular, the Lew Archer books had moderate sales for years, and Millar constantly worried his publisher would drop him. Millar’s one child, a girl, had a troubled childhood, and at 16 was charged with vehicular homicide. She died at 31. The two men’s deaths could not have been much different, either. Following coronary artery bypass surgery, John D MacDonald, on December 10, 1986, slipped into a coma and died 18 days later. He had been writing, and writing well, until he entered hospital. Ross Macdonald battled Alzheimer’s and tried to keep it a secret for seven years, or more, before his death. His good friend and fellow writer Eudora Welty remembered receiving a letter from him in the early ‘80s that asked the question: “It scares me, my hands can’t write, what happened?” *** Back to my wanders through the Oldsmar Flea Market, a handful of books under my arms, my anonymous bookseller’s observation ringing in my ears – “that’s a sad thing, don’t you think?” What the bookseller found sad was the selection he was about to show me – many Ross Macdonalds, no John Ds. “Nobody wants Ross anymore,” he told me, once he had finished going through his cardboard boxes. “He used to be bigger than John D, but when all the Travis McGee books were re-issued and Stephen King and Koontz said all those nice things about him, I can’t keep John D on the shelves.” When Random-House re-issued the Travis McGee catalogue a number of years ago (twenty-one books) Stephen King, in case you missed it, called MacDonald “the great entertainer of our age.” Dean Koontz called him “my favourite novelist of all time.” John D is one of my favourite novelists as well. I have, by going to various flea-markets and used bookstores, collected vintage paperback editions of all but two of the Travis McGee novels (I am missing only The Turquoise Lament and A purple Place for Dying). He was, as King said, a great entertainer. He was, as Koontz said, a great novelist. But – The Way Some People Die, the third Lew Archer book, is the best detective story written by someone named Macdonald, whatever the spelling of the last name. The tragedy in Kenneth Millar’s live can be heard – almost as waves crashing on a beach – in every chapter of that book. It is heart-breaking. I’ve loved every Travis McGee book. None of them have haunted me the way that book did. Macdonald has been hot at times – two Lew Archer novels were turned into Paul Newman movies, one of them being Harper – but he is stone-cold right now. Not even a long-anticipated 2022 biography has done much to generate new interest. I wish his long-time publisher – Alfred A Knopf, now owned by Penguin Random House, as fate would have it – could do what the parent company did for John D – re-issue the Lew Archer collection, with the appropriate star-author praise. He deserves it. *** View the full article

‘A traumatised person does not remember the trauma, but experiences it over and over again,’ writes the author and psychologist Paul Verhaege. The past is alive, and it takes its toll. Many years ago, we paid a visit to Jim Swire and his wife in their lovely, rambling house, which was full of comfortable clutter; there were family photos on the walls and a smell of baking in the kitchen. Our daughters played with their two dogs in the sun-drenched garden, among fruit trees and flowering shrubs. Jim Swire was a practising GP then; he was also, and very famously, a campaigner. In 1988, over a decade previously, his 23-year-old daughter Flora had been on the Pan Am Flight 103 to the US; the plane had a bomb on board, and it crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all its passengers. What do you do when a beloved child is killed; how do you survive your grief? When we met Jim Swire (one of us, Nicci, was there to interview him), it felt to both of us that he was keeping the full knowledge of Flora’s death at bay by his tireless, relentless, unending campaign to find the people who were guilty. He was impassioned, fierce, dry-eyed and urgent – it was almost as if he felt he could still rescue her. His wife, Jane, on the other hand, was soft and worn with accepted sorrow, which seemed folded into her. As Bessel van der Kolk argues in The Body Keeps the Score, traumas inscribe themselves on a primal part of the brain, become embedded in the self. That visit was a quarter of a century ago. Every so often, we would read stories about Jim Swire in the papers: he was still campaigning; he would never stop, and perhaps by now he couldn’t. For if he did, it would mean accepting that the catastrophe he was seeking to avert had already happened, and what would become of him then? We didn’t leave the Swire’s house thinking we would write a thriller about the long term effects of trauma, yet the powerful impression of how differently and often unexpectedly people react to intense grief remained with us. We talked about it often. A great shock happens, a sink hole opens up in a family, say, and each person is affected in unique ways. In Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?, four siblings, in their teens and early twenties, have their lives upended when their mother vanishes, as if into thin air. And she doesn’t come back. Her children are cast into a state of perpetual uncertainty, of agonised waiting. How do you mourn someone and heal if you don’t even know they are dead? This is our twenty-fifth thriller. Almost all of our previous books take place over short periods of time: weeks, days, in one case (Losing You), a handful of hours, the same time as it takes to read it. In those, trauma is quick and sharp: a shocking event happens and it’s like a flash of lightning over the landscape. With Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? we wanted to do something very different, and explore the effects of life-long trauma upon a group of characters. The novel opens on a winter night in 1990, at the fiftieth birthday party of Alex Salter. His wife, Charlotte Salter, does not turn up. Bewilderment turns to anxiety, and then to terror. The first section of the novel ends as a botched and incompetent police investigation runs into the ground. Jump cut forward thirty years, when the four children return to their childhood home and we can see what the years of have done to them and how their mother’s unsolved disappearance has blighted their lives. The eager and hopeful young people are now middle-aged and they are all damaged in their own particular way. And they are still waiting, still in thrall to the past and haunted by their mother, who is like a radiant ghost in the novel. Of course, Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? is a psychological thriller: in the end, not knowing will be replaced by knowing. There will be a solution. When the family’s reunion triggers another violent death, the stubborn and clear-headed Detective Maud O’Connor arrives to lay a healing hand on chaos and grief. One of the great satisfactions of thrillers is that they can give a narrative structure and meaning to the mess of most lives. They are therapeutic in the way they often deal with rupture and repair. We have always wanted to write about the victims of crime, not the perpetrators: how ordinary people are affected by extraordinary events; how a life can unravel in a matter of moments; how we are all precarious and just a few steps from disaster. For the Salter family, the disaster is not sudden, but plays itself out in terrible slow motion. The Salters will find out what happened to their mother, but they will still be motherless. Crimes can be solved; life is another matter. *** View the full article

I often wonder, what is it about a haunted house that truly scares us? Is it the sounds of tapping against window frames, a creaking door, or shadows that seem to dance along the periphery of our eyesight? These are just sounds, aren’t they? These are just sights, right? A noise or the wisp of something rushing past can’t really hurt us. What is it really and truly that generates dread regarding a haunted home? Is it the possibility that a human form can materialize before us? And even if it does, can a ghost harm us? Who knows? I believe that much of what generates fear in a house thought to be haunted is the memories, and the history that lingers, of cruel and awful occurrences. People die in homes every day, often from natural causes or accidents. Perhaps the home that you are seated in right now was the place where someone last drew their final breath. Maybe if ghosts are real, they are trying to tell us something, communicate a great wrong from the past that must be righted in the present. Or maybe ghosts, if they are real, simply just want to tell us that they are here watching, listening, because there really is no true end, just a continuation of things. I love a good haunted house story. I especially love when a haunted house story can peer into history and pull it into the present for the current homeowners to confront. Haunted houses in literature vary, but very often these are homes with secrets that demand to be told. And how powerful is that? In the possibility that ghostly energy can stir with such an intensity so as to communicate with us. In my most recent novel, Forgotten Sisters, two sisters live in a historic bungalow along the Chicago River. They are careful, and very cautious, to keep the home immaculate, because they believe that in caring for the home that the home will care for them as well. The house is haunted, full of disembodied voices and doors slamming, and the ghostly sounds of water dripping in the distance somewhere. Yet, the sisters make a great effort to ignore the haunting, because to speak of the haunting will give it power. When they fail, and they finally are forced to confront the activity in their home, the trajectories of their lives are forever changed. Following are some novels that include haunted houses and haunted buildings, ghosts and memories, and in many ways, challenge what a haunted house story is. The Spite House by Johnny Compton Eric Ross moves into the Masson House with his two daughters. It’s Eric’s job to look for proof of paranormal events in the home, recording all activity. The Spite House is a terrifying Gothic novel with an atmosphere dripping with danger and dread, The story asks how far will a father go for the love of his children, and we are there the entire time hoping everyone makes it out safe. The Reformatory by Tananarive Due This is not a traditional haunted house. This is a haunted building, and Tananarive Due’s magnificent and masterful The Reformatory is inspired by real events. This novel will break your heart. This story is emotionally harrowing, but it is one of the best novels you will read this year and beyond. In it, there are ghosts but there are also humans as villains, and we learn of the horrors in the real world that often create ghosts. How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix I love all things Grady Hendrix, but this is my favorite of his novels. This novel is not just about going back home to deal with the memories of loved ones, but it’s about the heaviness of grief and how it grips us. Of course, this is told in Hendrix’ classic darkly, charming and humorous style, but the horror here does contain a lot of heart. The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste isn’t just about a haunted house, but a haunted neighborhood, haunted memories and more. The prose is absolutely enchanting. The story is thoroughly haunting, complex, and terrifying. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s certainly an exemplary example of a modern-day haunted house story and one of my favorite reads this year. Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman releases this summer and I am begging you all to preorder it now. This is one of the most terrifying novels you will ever read. This novel is told entirely from the perspective of a young child, which adds to the richness and complexity of the terror. There are secrets here and there is dread, and the danger of something else living within the walls of this home. The September House by Carissa Orlando The September House is another novel that takes a very new approach to the haunted house story. Here, the owner of the home very much knows that it’s haunted and refuses to leave. The novel is completely unique, blending multiple genres and concepts. This is one of those books that was spoken about widely and for very good reason. It’s dark, shocking, but entirely original. *** View the full article

There were no queer people in history. At least, that could be a reasonable take-away from pursuing one-star reviews of some of the best historical fiction novels out there. Perhaps the—very—slight uptick in LGBTQ+ representation in everything from World War II novels to Regency romances seems overwhelming to some because there was so little of it before. That reaction reminds me of the saying, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Until recently, if queer people showed up on the pages of historical fiction at all, their stories often ended in tragedy to make the inclusion palatable to mainstream audiences. We became solely defined by the darkest moments in our history—we were the AIDs epidemic, we were hate crimes, we were conversion therapy and bullying and beatings from police. We were punished for having the audacity to simply exist. The trope developed into such a cliché that it earned its own name: “Bury your gays.” Yet when I deep-dived my way past that surface-level portrayal, I did not simply find death and tragedy as so many novels and shows—and, quite frankly, history books—would have me believe. I found joy. I found the cabarets in Berlin in the 1920s and the gay neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1930s and literary salons in Paris throughout the ages; I found Boston marriages and Gold Rush miners who were fondly known as “the wedded couple” by their friends and an island in the Pacific during the war where American servicemen could openly walk down the streets with their partners; I found sonnets from poets whose names everyone knows and pictures in shoeboxes capturing a love that can be seen even at a distance of decades. I found people who were beautiful and petty; strong and flawed; courageous and jealous and proud and stubborn and kind—all of whom experienced the full range of human emotions and experiences. Flattening their existence to tragedy does them a great disservice, but erasing them from history all together is both ignorant and cruel. It’s also a dangerous thing to do in our current trying times. When you study the past, you start to see patterns emerge. Like Mark Twain said, history might not repeat itself but it certainly does rhyme. There was a thriving queer scene in pre-War Berlin, one with its own magazines and newspapers and films and coffeeshops and night clubs. A cutting-edge institute was conducting research decades ahead of its time, research that then became one of the primary sources of fuel for the flames when Nazis burned thousands of books on May 10, 1933. In the span of a decade, Berlin went from one of the most open-minded, progressive and welcoming cities in pre-War Europe to the heart of fascist Germany. It doesn’t take many leaps to see similarities today—the forward movement and then the backlash that follows. No one who studies history is surprised that it’s queer authors and queer books that are being targeted by the radical book banners currently making headlines. The fact that after all this time those people who want to control how others think are still targeting novels is quite telling. That’s because books remain the gold standard in terms of creating empathy and compassion, and broadening worldviews by tearing down preconceived notions and prejudices. In 1999, powerhouse romance writer Shirley Hailstock received a fan letter. “I guess I might sound bigoted, but I never knew that Black folks fall in love like White folks,” it read. “Silly of me. Love is love, no matter what color or religion or nationality.” While distressing in many ways, the message illustrates just how powerful reading can be and anecdotally adds to countless research that’s proven just that. Scientist Natalie M. Phillips, in particular, has done important work on showing how reading doesn’t just affect the language center of the brain, but also increases blood flow and engages the motor cortex. Put simply, reading fiction actually engages the brain as if the reader was doing the activity portrayed. You share someone else’s experience as if it was your own. You understand other’s experiences—maybe not as if they were your own, but as ones that are as complex and as interesting as your own. And it’s through understanding that other people are, well, people instead of one-dimensional stereotypes and caricatures that we can better insulate ourselves from anyone trying to sow divide and distrust in the hopes of more easily seizing power. Hitler—and other authoritarian dictators like him—succeeded in part by creating silos, by isolating the populace into rigid groups, and then stripping away the humanity of those who were in the groups he could target without repercussions. The past might be prologue, but too often we fail to take any lessons from it to avoid the worst of previous generations’ mistakes. Here is a moment, though, where we can embrace the reality that queer people lived and loved and thrived through every era of history—and by doing so we can recognize their humanity. I’ve long said that books are the way we leave a mark on the world, they show that we were here, that we loved and grieved, that we laughed and made mistakes. They show that, contrary to what some might think, we existed. Below are a few books to start with. In Memoriam, by Alice Winn Setting: World War I Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are school boys when the Great War breaks out. They join the fight, they fall in love, they watch everyone around them die, they acquire ghosts along the way that stand in the spaces between them, and then they try to find their way back to each other. Lucky Red, by Claudia Cravens Setting: Wild Wild West Red-haired, country girl Bridget arrives in Dodge City and is recruited to work at the only brothel in town run by women. The story follows her adventures—and misadventures—while giving a voice and depth to the women from history who are too often written as stereotypes or foils. It’s also very fun. Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen, by Sarah James Setting: World War II Get transported into a 1940s movie, replete with quick dialogue, quicker quips and a murder-mystery plot that will have you gasping. Playwright Annie Laurence, a woman who was just dumped by her married lovers, is the flawed and three-dimensional protagonist at the heart of it all. Harlem Renaissance Mysteries, by Nekesa Afia Setting: Harlem, Late 1920s Tiny, tired lesbian Louise Lloyd solves Jazz Age murder mysteries in this sumptuous series that kicks off with Dead Dead Girls. While the corpses pile up, the true heart of the story is Lloyd, her neighborhood and the rest of the cast of characters that give a glimpse of a time-period and setting that isn’t often explored in historical fiction. Pull of the Stars, by Emma Donoghue Setting: Dublin, The Great Flu We follow nurse Julia Power over the course of a weekend where she cares for expectant mothers who have come down with the Spanish Flu. The tight timeline and claustrophobic setting create an atmosphere taut with emotion, which in turn allows readers to feel like they really know the complex characters that make up the cast. Phoenix Crown, by Kate Quinn & Janie Chang Setting: San Francisco Earthquake 1906 Gemma, a soprano opera singer, crosses paths with Suling, a Chinatown embroideress, in the days before the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake in 1906. They realize they are searching for the same missing woman, an artist they both love in different ways as the clock ticks ever closer to disaster. Mademoiselle Revolution, by Zoe Sivak Setting: Paris 1790s Sylvie de Rosiers flees the Haitian Revolution to wind up smack in the middle of another one in Paris. Sylvie’s maturation throughout the story is a masterclass in character development layered beneath a fascinating setting and vivid, lush writing. The meticulous research the author did is the cherry on top. *** View the full article

Jason De León’s second book is the result of an exemplary commitment to what he and fellow anthropologists call “deep hanging out.” In Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, the UCLA professor and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient spends countless hours with people often written off as ruthless miscreants. On cable news and in pop culture, his subjects are known as “coyotes,” but De León suggests that guía—guide— “more directly reflects the work.” For varying fees—these depend on what route is chosen and the cost of bribes paid to gangs, drug cartels and civil servants—the young Latin Americans in De León’s book lead groups of migrants bound for the US-Mexico border. Set against a backdrop of safehouses, smugglers’ homes and freight trains in Mexico and Central America, De León’s group portrait includes all sorts, from intimidating ex-cons to relatively easygoing 20-somethings who opt for smuggling over sub-$5-a-day manual labor. Attesting to the brutality and suffering inherent in their work, one of De León’s subjects gets stabbed and ends up dying in a hospital in Honduras, unable to pay upfront for the care he needs. “I completely understand that because of the nature of their work they are unlikable, if not outright detestable,” De León writes. But smugglers are empowered by “the monstrous injustices created by capitalism” and “climate change patterns created by the richest countries and disproportionately felt by the poorest.” Indeed, two major hurricanes hit Central America within two weeks in 2020, “displacing hundreds of thousands of impoverished people.” Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, De Leon talked about how he earns his subjects’ trust, why migrants need smugglers and what many Americans misunderstand about undocumented immigration. At the start of your book, you say, “human smuggler and trafficker are very different things, a concept that popular media and the general public often fail to grasp.” What’s the difference? One is sort of voluntary, the other is coerced. There’s obviously an overlap, and oftentimes, someone agrees to be smuggled and then gets trafficked. But nobody sets out to be trafficked. Some people definitely set out to be smuggled. Why do migrants turn to smugglers, or guides, as they call themselves? Migrants turn to guides in response to changes in border security. A hundred years ago, maybe you needed a guide, maybe you didn’t. You’re Chinese and you need to cross the Sonoran Desert because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. You might try it on your own or you might find a guy who knows the routes. But starting in the mid-1990s, with the US policy Prevention Through Deterrence (this increased enforcement in populated border areas, forcing undocumented immigrants onto more remote, more dangerous routes), getting across the border becomes incredibly difficult. So to overcome these multifaceted enforcement practices, you need someone who knows the geography, someone who has contacts. And as there’s a need to migrate—whether it’s economic, climate change or whatever it might be—the response from the Global North has been to harden these borders. But migrants are not going to stop needing to get across these borders. Who becomes a guide? As you make write, it runs the gamut from gang members to people who, like migrants themselves, are running from gangs. It’s such a wide range. In our imagination, the people who become guides are criminal masterminds, but the low-level folks are just desperate people who need money. Maybe they’ve already been to the US and know the routes. And as organized crime has become more interested in taxing migrants, they need a smuggler. Years ago, it was more of a mom and pop operation—a dude who knew some folks who would get you where you need to go. But with rising levels of violence, some gang members have a particular set of skills that allows them to handle this stuff. That’s a major shift. Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t hand your money to a hardcore gangster to get you across. One of the men in your book had a job clearing brush for $2 a day. But as a guide, he made real money for a time, and he was in control of something for the first time in his life. I think that’s part of the attraction. A lot of the guys who do it for extended periods of time are really smart. Unfortunately, it’s hard for them to translate their skills into more reputable businesses. How much do they pocket from smuggling people? They might clear $10,000 in a month of work. That’s if everything goes well. But a lot of times, they’re making a couple thousand max, and the lower-level guys are making a couple hundred. It’s boom and bust—it feels like you’re making a lot of money, but you’re actually not when you count the hours worked. Some guides told you that they’d much prefer steady jobs and uneventful lives, but those things just aren’t available to them. Do you believe them? I think a lot of them would be happy to toil in the US, where they could be making way more than they would in Honduras or someplace else. There are some other folks who are just in it for too long, and they don’t really want a straight job. Some of them are maladjusted to society in some way, and unfortunately that maladjustment has allowed them to succeed in other worlds—someone like Kingston. He would say to me, Look what’s happened to me in my life. What did anyone expect me to become other than what I am now? Kingston has a big presence in the book. Before he was a smuggler, he was forced to join the Honduran military at around 14 years old. Yeah, he’s just been groomed to be an aggressive person. He tried off and on to go straight, and it was one catastrophe after another. Some of it was self-sabotage, and sometimes when you’re in that world, people see you trying to get out and they don’t want you to. Like, once you’re in, you’re in. How do you show someone like him that you’re not going to get him into trouble, that you just want to be an observer? Part of it is just time. Ethnography is so difficult because it just takes so long to do, just to build that trust. What I’ve found is that when I go back the second time—after I’ve been there for a while, leave and then return—people recognize that I wasn’t lying to them. As far as the deep hanging out, it’s committing myself to a lot of boredom. That was a surprising thing with smuggling—how much boredom there is. Sometimes you’re just sitting around listening to music, drinking beer, waiting for something to happen. Which is probably why I’m good at it, because I like listening to music and drinking beer. I’m very patient in that sense. Once you’re that bored with someone, they recognize: Oh, you really just want to be here and you’re trying to figure this out, there’s no alternative motive. Maybe it’s boring sometimes, but your work is also dangerous. One of the guys you got to know was murdered. How do you approach mental health and physical safety? It was rare that I felt like I was in danger physically, probably because a lot of the guys I’ve worked with saw that I was trusting them, and they did a really good job of reassuring me that things were going to be OK. The thing that I didn’t really anticipate was the mental toll that this took on me. I stopped going to therapy in graduate school because I was like, I’m totally fine, everything’s great. This book sent me back into therapy and got me thinking about a lot of personal things. It took me to these dark places, but it was really important for me to go to those dark places because as I sit here now, I think I’m the happiest and most well-adjusted that I’ve ever been in my entire life. Both of your parents were in the military, and you moved around a lot as a kid. You think that informed your decision to go into anthropology? For sure. I need alone time, but I also like to be around people most of the time. Part of the desire to be around people was from this deep sense of isolation and loneliness that came from always being the new kid in school and moving around so much. There are lots of anthropologists who were Army brats, or their parents were diplomats or missionaries, just moving around. I think that builds a person who has some comfort in those new cultural spaces. What do people who consider themselves well-informed maybe not understand about migration? What are the biggest misconceptions? That it’s stoppable. We need to think about migration not as something to be stopped, not something to be dealt with at the US-Mexico border, but something to be talked about and dissected and understood for all of its complexity. We waste so much money at the US-Mexico border, and it doesn’t work. The US has a deep need for undocumented labor, which is one thing that I think the American public doesn’t want to admit. The other thing we have to admit is that there is no wall that is going to stop climate change or stop poverty. People are going to keep coming. And the approach that we’ve been using—the border wall and infrastructure—is just not sustainable. View the full article

With crime readers ever worshipping at the stacks of dark academia (myself among them), is it any wonder that the category’s wicked pen has bled onto neighboring shelves? Its fatal quill planting itself into the backs of unwitting genres? In fact, if we wander just beyond dark academia’s oak-paneled recesses and shadowy archives, in the direction of the science quad, the classroom merges with the laboratory to reveal a cache of academically ambitious mysteries and thrillers I like to think of as dark science. Don’t call it science-fiction—although there may be some crossover—and you wouldn’t mistake it for dark academia’s touchstone, The Secret History, either, although who’s going to object to a Donna Tartt comparison? Instead, dark science is any mystery/suspense/thriller steeped in the disciplines of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, or any of the natural sciences. So when you’re next craving intellectual villainy, consider instead one these eight dark science gems: some are recent, some prefigure the dark academia craze entirely—all use science to underpin the murkier aspects of human nature. And just maybe there’s a character or two who harbors that morbid longing, if not for the picturesque, then for nature’s most guarded secrets and dangerous riddles. Give Me Your Hand, Megan Abbott This is truly a laboratory novel. Abbott’s story pitches between past and present, but we spend much of our time among the benches of a chemistry lab getting a sense for our heroine Kit’s postdoctoral research into a severe premenstrual disorder, right down to the grim business of the laboratory mice. After the research group’s newest hire turns out to be Kit’s high school frenemy—and a dead body on the grounds throws their relationship into a shaky détente—the already fraught tension of the lab is heightened by a police investigation. Add to that a rich backstory of female friendship tainted by grave secrets and academic competition, and you’ve got an all-consuming science thriller. Destination Unknown, Agatha Christie It still amazes me that Christie wrote a few straight-up spy novels, let alone one inhabited by scientists. This one concerns the sudden postwar disappearance of England’s most prized chemists and nuclear physicists—among the vanished is a Nobel Prize winner celebrated for his discovery of the enigmatically named “ZE fission.” And who should the country’s spy agency choose to track them down but an ordinary English housewife? ZE fission is never satisfactorily explained, nor does it matter, because Christie has created such a pacy everywoman caper, that we’ll follow her over the deserts and mountains of North Africa (and through a musty plot point or two, be forewarned) to the novel’s ultimately satisfying end. Christie may be grappling with a post-atomic world here and the responsibility of the scientific community, but it’s her jaunty sense of adventure that prevails. Properties of Light, Rebecca Goldstein Discovering Rebecca Goldstein in my twenties felt like stumbling upon something entirely new: literary fiction populated by painfully human physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers. Though her plots are intricately constructed, her novels are also deft character explorations about what it means to live one’s life absorbed in the world’s great mysteries. In her luminous Properties of Light, Goldstein not only blurs the distinctions between scientific passion and romantic obsession, she cleverly uses the conundrums of theoretical physics to deepen the mysteries she’s woven into her brisk plot. Liquid Snakes, Stephen Kearse In Kearse’s biochemistry thriller, a chemist uses his cover as a coffeeshop owner to exact a long-game revenge for his daughter’s death at the hands of an environmentally reckless corporation. A pair of Atlanta epidemiologists, meanwhile, scours Fulton County determined to stop the next death. Having constructed an imaginative, mind-bending revenge plot—which he pushes to a simultaneously horrific and satisfying climax—Kearse uses the novel’s conceit to denounce, with satirical precision, an America that places its most noxious industries upstream from our country’s BIPOC communities. The MANIAC, Benjamín Labatut If the horrors committed against the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the crime, J. Robert Oppenheimer may be an obvious scientific perpetrator. However, it was not Oppenheimer, but Hungarian physicist and mathematician John von Neumann who calculated the precise altitude at which the bombs should be detonated so as to exact maximum destruction to the Japanese civilians below—and then convinced the Army to use it. In Labatut’s fictionalized investigation into one of the twentieth-century’s lesser known monsters, he creates a portrait that is both sensitively rendered and chilling. Yet the story also reads as a kind of suspense thriller building to the evils of the atomic age, and ultimately to another of von Neumann’s legacies bearing down on us now: AI. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears This Restoration whodunit features a cast of scientists—or “natural philosophers”—living in the wake of the English Civil War and at the dawn of the Royal Society. The poisoning of an Oxford don is merely the prelude to the testimonies of four unreliable narrators: an amateur physician, an Oxford student, a mathematician, and a historian. But if this is the Enlightenment, it’s one in which the basest cruelty goes hand in hand with scientific discovery, and where the central murder isn’t even among the worst crimes (nor is it the point). In this sprawling tale of medical investigation and political intrigue, Pears excavates scientific and moral questions of the time through real-life personalities, including chemist Robert Boyle, physician Richard Lower, and mathematician John Wallis. But it is an entirely fictional character, a woman not of their world, who is destined to last longest in readers’ minds. Arcadia, Tom Stoppard This is a play, to be fair, but what a play! Stoppard’s brainy valentine to mathematics, quantum mechanics, and philosophy is by now an undisputed classic. As is often the case with Stoppard, one must read carefully (or listen, if you’re lucky enough to catch a production). As he bounces between the early 19th century and the present day—and between ideas of chance and determinism—we unravel the mystery of a teenage girl who anticipated chaos theory by 150 years. But don’t mistake this for drawing room drama: there is no shortage of literary sleuthing and dark twists to make the cerebral mystery lover swoon. The Distant Dead, Heather Young When a high-school math teacher is found dead in the most gruesome manner imaginable, a colleague sets out to unravel his shadowy former life as a mathematician and university professor. What she uncovers is the story of an academic forced into small-town exile by an unspeakable secret that has pursued him to his grave. Young merges concepts from number theory with an examination of family dysfunction, the opioid crisis, and the private desperations of a desert town, ultimately drawing a painful divide between the promises of higher education and the realities of an addiction-devastated America. The novel’s conclusion is a calculated emotional hammer blow. *** View the full article

Every writer likes to think they’re a psychologist. Inventing a character means having at least a cursory sense of their backstory, motivations, past traumas—the history that makes them unlike every other person in this world. By definition, writers are observers and people-watchers, and most of us believe that this gives us an uncommon understanding of what makes them tick. But Jonathan Kellerman really is a psychologist. Prior to his career as a novelist, he worked as a staff psychologist and clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine and then opened a private practice. He is now a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine, but he is better-known to the general public as the author of the Alex Delaware series, which spans thirty-nine novels published over thirty-eight years. Delaware is a forensic psychologist who often partners with LAPD detective Milo Sturgis. The latest installment in the series, The Ghost Orchid, was published in February. For this month’s column, I sat down with him to talk about another great Southern California crime writer, Margaret Millar. Why did you choose Ask for Me Tomorrow by Margaret Millar? Well, here’s the thing: I never read fiction while I’m writing fiction, and I’m almost always writing fiction. So in between books, I will treat myself to some good fiction, and I want it to be really great. We’ve got thousands and thousands of books in this house, many of which I bought decades ago in thrift shops and used bookstores during my starving graduate student days. I first got interested in Margaret Millar through her husband, Ross Macdonald, who was a big influence on me as a writer. When I was finding my voice, he helped give me a focus, and after I learned about him, I learned about her. I became especially fascinated by them because like my wife Faye Kellerman and me, they were a husband and wife writing fiction. I’m not going to say books helped me or influenced me. I’ve been doing this for forty years. I don’t like to be distracted, even on a subconscious level. But I love this book, especially the darkness and mordant humor in it. It’s probably not a novel that could be published today because it’s not politically correct, but it’s all the better for that. The old cliché is that you have to have likeable characters, but Millar didn’t have a lot of likeable characters. She had a very dark view of the world. She and her husband were both alcoholics, and they had a very tortured marriage. In her pictures, she looks like a nice matron from Santa Barbara, but she was producing these amazingly dark stories. I was glad to get the chance to read Millar, because I knew Macdonald’s work but not hers. I love Sue Grafton, and that’s how I got to Macdonald, because he was such an influence on her. I knew Sue very well. We broke in around the same time, and one time we found ourselves doing a joint signing at a mystery bookstore here in the Valley. Nobody showed up, so we were just sitting there getting to know each other, as happens a lot. Sue had copies of A Is for Alibi, so we bought one, which later turned out to be a collector’s item. Sue was just lovely, really smart and extremely witty and a lot of fun. We were both big fans of Ross Macdonald—I think he’s the greatest. I know a lot of people like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and I think they’re talented, but I think Macdonald is just way superior. He really helped give me a voice. I’d been writing since the age of nine, but I didn’t know what I wanted to write. I wrote comedy or satire or nonfiction, and I wrote medical stuff. Then, when I was working at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, I was on my way to work, and I saw a book shop with a sign on the window saying Going Out of Business. I went in and I bought Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man for fifteen cents, and that really pointed me in the direction of where I wanted to go. I felt that what I did as a psychologist was detective work, basically, and I had quite a lot of experience with the criminal justice system. The rest is history. One of my favorite parts of the novel was the setting. I’ve never been to Baja, but I imagine it’s no longer much like the sparsely populated, lawless wasteland described by Millar. That was before my time, of course. When I was a kid, we’d go down to Tijuana, and it was just known as a place where you bought tacky stuff. Then later I had some friends who wanted to go down and engage with the hookers. I begged off; it wasn’t my thing. There were strip clubs and live sex shows back then, and now it’s dominated by the cartel, so I don’t go there a lot. Most of the writers we’ve been talking about lived and wrote in Southern California. What do you think is significant about that landscape for crime writers? How do they manage to instill so much darkness into that sunny landscape? I think the greatest American crime novels have been written in Southern California, in L.A. and Santa Barbara, or Santa Teresa as Macdonald and Grafton called it. I’ve always wondered why New York doesn’t produce the same kind of great crime fiction, the exception of course being the Matt Scudder series by Lawrence Block. The only thing I can think of is that L.A. has these extreme differences between the haves and the have nots that create tension. Warm weather helps too, because even bad guys don’t come out when the weather’s really terrible. When my family first moved to L.A., it was more of a conventional city, but now it’s utterly and totally dominated by the film business, which is a business that traffics in illusion. It traffics in falsehood, and until recently, it trafficked in a lot of immorality. I knew Elmore Leonard quite well, and I always think about his book Get Shorty, about this guy Chili who’s a bone breaker for the mob in Florida. He’s a terrible guy, he beats people up for a living, but then he comes to L.A. and gets involved with the film business and is appalled by the immoral people he meets. I always thought that was Dutch getting back at the industry. You still see people coming here because they’ve run out of places to go. When I was a psychologist, I’d take a family history before I treated a child, and it was amazing to me how many people who settled in L.A. had no relatives there, no connections. It’s a place that tends to cater to disjointed people, and that’s great fodder for a crime novel. The greatest hardboiled novels have taken place in southern California and I’m happy to be part of that. Do you know much about the working relationship between Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar? Did they ever collaborate? I don’t think they ever collaborated. I’ve spoken to people who knew them personally, and I don’t think they had a happy marriage. They were both heavy drinkers, and that probably didn’t help. Ross Macdonald was a very quiet man, from everything I’ve heard. The musician Warren Zevon, who was a very close friend of mine, knew Ross Macdonald, and he said the thing with Ross was he just wouldn’t talk. You had to get used to long stretches of silence. Faye and I have collaborated on a couple of novellas, and it was wonderful, but we decided we didn’t want to do it again. We’ve been together for fifty-three years, and we have four kids and a dozen grandkids. When you’re raising four kids, you have no privacy, so the only privacy we ever had was coming into our separate offices and writing. And there was a desire to keep that, even though we love being together. When I started out, it took me a long time to get published as a novelist. I finally broke in, and since then every book has been a bestseller for forty years, but it definitely didn’t happen overnight. Faye had a degree in theoretical mathematics and a doctorate in dentistry, and I never saw her as the literary type, even though I knew she had a great imagination. Then unbeknownst to me, she started writing. One day I was holding our third kid, and Faye came up and handed me a sheaf of papers and said, “Here, read this, you’re going to hate it.” But then I read it and it was really good. I called my agent and said, “I know what this sounds like, but my wife wrote a book.” He said later that his eyes were rolling back in his head, but he loved it and she got published right away. In the beginning, we would show each other what we’d written every week, and it led to some cold nights. I wanted to be tactful, but sometimes it was hard. Then we stretched it out to once a month, and then after several novels, we basically didn’t show each other anything until the book was finished, and that’s how we’ve been doing it ever since. We don’t ever talk about the craft of writing, but we talk about the business of writing. People used to ask our kids in interviews, “What’s it like growing up with two bestselling authors as parents?” and our son would always say, “It’s not like that.” We were a regular family, very child-oriented, and we talked about the same things all families talked about. I think I owe my wife that because she she’s just the least presumptuous, pretentious person you’re ever going to meet. She just doesn’t take it that seriously. View the full article

Any study of Aphra Behn is really a study of shifting disguises and political guesswork. She is remembered in history as the first woman to make a living by writing in English, all the way back in the seventeenth century. Few know that she became a writer while exploring her first intriguing career: Spy for the British crown. Fittingly for a spy, Behn was secretive and her reputed garrulity among friends did not extend to anything autobiographical for future generations to rely on. Most of what we know of her is uncertain, gleaned from the literature she left us. Her espionage career might have begun in 1659, when she was about nineteen years old. The death of Oliver Cromwell sent the bumbling Sealed Knot secret society into a flurry of activity on behalf of the Royalist cause. Her foster-brother Sir Thomas Colepeper and his half-brother Lord Strangford were caught up in covert activities. Behn would have been able to travel to France to liaise with Lord Strangford more easily than Colepeper, who was being watched. She also may have served as a living dropbox for letters exchanged between plotters. But true to the nature of spies and covert plots, no solid evidence of this role survives. Her presence in it is only hinted at by her relationships with others involved. A version of Behn’s life story says that she was one of the children of John Johnson, a gentleman appointed Lieutenant General of Surinam, a short-lived English colony in what is now Suriname, South America. In this tale, Johnson died during the transatlantic voyage to his appointment, which meant his widow and his children, including young Aphra, were temporarily stranded in South America. This tale is almost certainly false though. Crucially, there is no record of a Johnson destined for a high office in Surinam, nor any Johnsons among the recorded settlers of the colony. However, that Behn did go to Surinam in the 1660s is not in question. The descriptions of the colony in her most famous novel, Oroonoko, are too detailed for her to have gleaned them only by reading other people’s reports. In the other stories she wrote, Behn didn’t trouble herself much with research. Stories she wrote set in France and Spain are no different from stories set in England. The setting often remains a mere suggestion, but Oroonoko is different: It gives the impression of the author writing down what she heard and saw around her, lending it a reality that she clearly wasn’t achieving through meticulous research. The setting often remains a mere suggestion, but Oroonoko is different: It gives the impression of the author writing down what she heard and saw around her, lending it a reality that she clearly wasn’t achieving through meticulous research. It is how and why Behn ended up in Surinam that is up for debate. Her biographer, Janet Todd, argues that Behn went to Surinam as part of a spying mission for King Charles II. This would explain why, on her return to England, she had an audience with the king to “give him ‘An Account of his Affairs there,'” an incredibly unusual outcome for a young woman’s family trip to South America. Surinam was supposedly overrun with spies at the time, probably because a far-flung colonial outpost was a perfect place for any dissidents in Restoration Era England who had plans for seizing control of a colony or fomenting a revolution. She may have been there to spy on any number of brewing conflicts. The governor of Surinam at the time, Lord Willoughby, was absent, leaving a power vacuum filled by various personalities. This was also a time of “gold, glory, and God” and various people were reporting back to King Charles II about the possibilities of any and all of these plans succeeding. Spain had already grown immensely rich from riches found in North America, but England hadn’t struck gold yet. Many were taken in by promises of El Dorado, including Behn, who would find herself disappointed that Charles II was already tired of the empty promises of the mythical city. Behn was profoundly impacted by her trip to Surinam. Though she did have a mission to complete, with few friends and more time on her hands than usual, she began writing. Possibly she was already considering plays or translations as sources of income in case she could no longer engage in spy craft due to age, shifting political tides, or notoriety. She also had connections to the theater world back in England, and may have already been considering how to further insert herself in those circles. Interestingly, she does not seem to have been considering marriage as part of her future at all at this stage, though it would have been the thing to do for a woman her age in Restoration society. She found much inspiration in the social mobility colonists found in the Americas, especially Virginia, where transported criminals found themselves impossibly rich from tobacco and beaver hunting. Behn hated this sort of class mobility and frequently lampooned it in her work for the rest of her life. She also made time to meet the Indigenous population living near the English colony. Like many European colonists of her time, she found in the Surinamese a sort of pastoral innocence, and she carefully recorded her exchange of her garters for a set of feathers which she took with her back to England. Her work often reflected a paternalistic attitude toward any person of color. An avid reader, especially of pastoral romances like the works of dramatist Gauthier de Costes, seigneur de la Calprenède’s, Behn tended to see her own surroundings through that lens. When she transposed the reality of Surinam back into fiction, the very real political dramas took on the pastoral lens of the fiction she enjoyed. While in Surinam, she probably wrote her play The Young King, a tragicomedy of heroic lovers in Arcadian pastoral settings. It was written with an eye toward pleasing Charles II–he was known to love Spanish-style drama. Though the play wasn’t staged for at least fifteen years after her return to England, she never seems to have edited it–it retains youthful criticisms of power and privilege that she refused to engage in again later in life. Female spies were—and continue to be—positioned as fetishes and commodities, constantly sexualized and reduced to a roadblock to be overcome by the dominant male spy. While Behn was in Surinam, she almost certainly met William Scot, the exiled son of an executed republican. His father Thomas Scot had been a member of the House of Commons and instrumental in the trial and execution of Charles I. William also had political aspirations, and though he probably would have been safer somewhere further from English society, he was in Surinam, probably making deals and trying to find his way back into political influence. Rumor had it at the time that Behn and Scot were having an affair. He was married with a child, though living apart from them. The affair was remarked upon by their contemporaries in letters home, though Behn’s given name is Astrea, taken from the seventeenth-century French pastoral romance L’Astrée by Honoré d’Urfé. She later adopted the name as her pen name; she may have already been using it as a pseudonym in Surinam. The immensely long novel centers on a fictionalized pastoral idyll in France during the fifth century, where a young shepherdess and shepherd—Astrée and Celadon—fall in love. Celadon is a perfect lover, but Astrée is “a curious combination of vanity, caprice and virtue; of an imperious, suspicious and jealous nature, she is not at all the ideal creature of older pastorals.” It makes sense that Behn would choose such a codename. She would challenge many of the “superficial associations of such a name” throughout her life, and though a lot of her writing relied on pastoral imagery and tropes, she often challenged those as well. Behn returned to England in 1665. She gave her report of English affairs in Surinam to Charles II. What she was up to for the next year is unclear, though we know that she kept up with the ongoing dramas of the colony through the pamphlets that were published about it. Some of these intrigues found their way into Oroonoko, her novel published in 1688. The failed rebellion of the eponymous enslaved prince, Oronooko, was foretold in an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Surinam’s Governor Lord Willoughby. The would-be assassin, the troublesome Thomas Allin, was someone Behn may have reported on during her time there. He died by suicide rather than be executed for his attempt; her protagonist was executed instead. She must have made inroads in the political and theatrical spheres, because in 1666, Thomas Killigrew sent Behn to the Netherlands as a spy. Killigrew was the dramatist heading up the King’s Company troupe and secretly working in intelligence for the King. This was during the darkest point of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, so Behn probably only landed this precarious role because she had done good enough work in Surinam. Her mission on behalf of the English king was to meet with her old flame William Scot, who now claimed to have information for the Royalists about a Dutch-sponsored uprising in England. She was to assess what information he had and whether it was worth anything. Killigrew knew of their romance in Surinam and was happy to exploit it for the king’s gain. Behn was ill-equipped for this dangerous mission. Though adept at role-playing, she was somewhat naive. She was a bad judge of character and more easily fooled by false sincerity than someone undertaking a third espionage mission should have been. She was also quite talkative and would never be remembered as discreet. Unsurprisingly, she was not successful. Scot was hard to deal with, and Behn didn’t have the resources to succeed even if he had been helpful. They both asked for too much from their spymasters and received nearly nothing. It was a plight shared by all Royalist agents taking risks for the Crown. Behn returned to London in May 1667, having had the good fortune of missing the catastrophic Great Fire of London the year before, but with little else to show from her trip. Writing became an urgent necessity after her return from the Netherlands. Charles II was infamously stingy with payments to his spies, often simply not paying them at all. Behn’s stay in Antwerp had left her in immense debt, and she spent time in a London debtor’s prison before being released with a patron’s help. She had good handwriting, so she began copying manuscripts for fast money before looking toward the theater for her next adventure. On September 20, 1670, Behn had her theatrical debut: her play, The Forc’d Marriage, was staged by the Duke’s Company. Like many of her works, it was a tragicomedy that ends in two noblemen marrying commoners against their parents’ directives, a scandalous concept at the time. She would return to the concept of escaping a bad marriage numerous times in her work; her biographer Janet Todd assumes the repeating theme was inspired by Behn’s own bad luck in love. The women in Behn’s stories often live bleak lives, even when they’re removed to pastoral idylls. They are forced to manipulate and negotiate through places where men have all the power. Behn led a similar life working in the theater; calling her a whore would have been only a slightly lower insult than calling her a poetess at the time. Yet, it was threatening to men that this female writer was so popular. In an essay, Rutgers University professor Elin Diamond writes, The conflict between (as she puts it) her “defenceless” woman’s body and her “masculine part” is staged in her insistence, in play after play, on the equation between female body and fetish, fetish and commodity….Like the actress, the woman dramatist is sexualized, circulated, denied a subject position in a theatre hierarchy. Similarly, female spies were—and continue to be—positioned as fetishes and commodities, constantly sexualized and reduced to a roadblock to be overcome by the dominant male spy. Behn’s experience in both worlds would have led her to navigate them as only she could–an independent agent set on getting what was hers. ______________________________ Unruly Figures by Valorie Castellanos Clark is available via Princeton University Press. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Steve Cavanagh, Kill for Me Kill For You (Atria) “Explosive, game-changing reveals that, combined with an uncommon attunement to the central characters’ emotional arcs, make for a wild, deliciously satisfying ride.” –Publishers Weekly Sulari Gentill, The Mystery Writer (Poisoned Pen Press) “Gentill’s worthwhile novel is full of compelling characters, including doomsday preppers, online conspiracy theorists, and overzealous publishing agents. Recommended for readers who enjoy mysteries from Riley Sager, Ruth Ware, or Louise Penny.” –Library Journal Nova Jacobs, The Stars Turned Inside Out (Atria) “Jacobs elevates the death-in-the-workplace trope to staggering heights in this science-based thriller that fuses physics and philosophy in mindbending ways… Jacobs delves into subjects as deep as the nature of the universe and the space-time continuum and as quotidian as romantic love and professional jealousy, giving careful readers much to contemplate.” –Booklist Nicci French, Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? (William Morrow) “Husband and wife writing duo Nicci French are always a must read, and their latest, Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?, is one of their very best. Compelling, moving and beautifully written, it’s about how real people are affected by (and driven to) murder…. An absolute winner.” –Guardian Cynthia Pelayo, Forgotten Sisters (Thomas and Mercer) “This compelling mystery within a unique haunted-house story is told in gorgeous prose, with sympathetic, complicated characters who feel as if they could materialize off the page. Pelayo has given readers another can’t-miss novel, marked by its pervasive unease and riveting storyline. For fans of ghost stories that mine memory, fairy tales, and mystery, such as the works of Simone St. James, Jennifer McMahon, and Helen Oyeyemi.” –Library Journal Ron Corbett, Cape Rage (Berkley) “Corbett enhances his nail-biting plot with vivid depictions of the moody rural Washington State setting and convincing characterizations of cops and criminals alike.” –Publishers Weekly Gigi Pandian, A Midnight Puzzle (Minotaur) “Pandian triumphs again… with this fiendishly clever, intricately constructed whodunit. It’s another home run from a major talent.” –Publishers Weekly Alexia Casale, The Best Way to Bury Your Husband (Penguin Books) “A wife and her trusty frying pan fighting the patriarchy can elicit a silent cheer… Casale’s book goes beyond the statistics to tell four very human stories — morbid, funny and sadly relevant.” –The Washington Post Eric Rickstad, Lilith (Blackstone) “Rickstad delivers a second suspenseful thriller, one that reflects our politically divided times.” –Booklist Parker Adams, The Lock Box (Crooked Lane) “This taut, page-turner debut from Adams is perfect for fans of James Patterson and Jonathan Kellerman.” –Booklist View the full article

If Chris Bohjalian were to write a memoir—or a manifesto on craft—it could be called: I was a teenage magician. It’s a history that has served him well. A master of misdirection, Bohjalian—the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books including The Lioness and The Flight Attendant—occupies unique territory in the literary landscape. While his novels often incorporate crime, they aren’t often considered crime novels (which is why you’ll usually find them shelved in Fiction as opposed to Mystery). And yet Bohjalian considers crime his MacGuffin, or the pistol that marks an opening salvo. Case in point: While Bohjalian’s newest genre-bender, The Princess of Las Vegas (March 19, 2024; Doubleday), centers on a popular Diana impersonator simultaneously losing and finding herself in Sin City, it opens with a gunshot—and more bullets fly (and more bodies fall) before the final curtain comes down. It’s casino culture meets cryptocurrency meets organized crime on Nevada’s infamous strip, and everybody’s secrets will be laid bare in a high stakes game of survival that has the potential to become a royal mess. But the story is really about estranged sisters floundering in the wake of their mother’s (suspicious?) death. Crissy (aka Diana) and Betsy are forced to reconcile when Betsy—who recently adopted a surprisingly worldly teenage girl—follows her boyfriend from Vermont to Vegas, where they’ve both found employment in a lucrative bitcoin venture. The promise of a fresh start, however, is tempered by the reality that their new “business associates” hold all the cards … and can cash out their lives if they don’t fall in line with the family way. Now, Chris Bohjalian talks about the sleights of hand that add elements of magic and mystery to his transcendent tales. John B. Valeri: The Princess of Las Vegas, like many of your books, straddles genre lines (i.e., it may not be a crime novel but it’s a novel that contains crime). How do you conceptualize crime as a catalyst for storytelling – and what does the threat of (further) violence/death jeopardize here? Chris Bohjalian: Crime is often the MacGuffin for me, that element of a story that seems critical, but is actually a bit of storytelling misdirection. (I was a teenage magician, and so I love misdirection.) In some of my novels it figures more critically than in others: it’s more important to The Princess of Las Vegas than to The Guest Room, for instance, even though The Guest Room has rivers of blood in the first two pages, and plenty more later on. But I never viewed The Flight Attendant as a crime novel, even though it literally begins with a dead body in a bed. I always viewed that book as a story of a functional alcoholic with serious demons. In my mind, The Princess of Las Vegas is an exploration of two damaged siblings, and how they deal with their childhood traumas. But I also wanted to explore the meaning of Princess Diana, and why this remarkable woman is still in the zeitgeist decades after her death. (For the record, I never considered a novel about the Princess herself. I love to write “historical fiction,” but I couldn’t write “novelized history” about a woman whose children and husband are still alive. That feels unfair to them and her memory.) Now, as I dove deeper into the novel, Las Vegas loomed larger as a character. I’m fascinated by the city and its history. Most people are, even if they prefer not to admit it. And what might have been merely another MacGuffin in another novel grew more integral to the plot. To use a gambling term, it upped the ante for me. It got me excited, because the stakes grew ever higher. JBV: Crissy Dowling has reinvented herself as a Princess Diana tribute performer in Vegas after having escaped the childhood trauma(s) she survived in Vermont. What of the princess’s life (and death) resonates with her – and how is Chrissy able to both lose and find herself within Diana’s persona? CB: I think Diana was Crissy’s savior. I shudder to think where Crissy would be if she hadn’t begun channeling her inner Diana. Other than the fact they resemble each other, Crissy shares one thing with Diana, and that is what leads to the profound identification. And I think Crissy understands that the late Princess saved her. Her sister, Betsy, might not agree with that. But – on some level – Crissy views herself as another of the sick and the sad and the wounded who have been touched by the Princess, and, if not healed, made better. JBV: Speaking of Princess Diana: What drew you to explore the royal family and their enduring cultural significance – and how did you endeavor to balance an honest yet respectful commentary, knowing they’ve inspired endless fascination and reverence among so many? CB: That first decision I made was the best one: the book would not be historical fiction about the woman set at Kensington Palace or on a Mediterranean yacht. It would be about a wannabe princess, someone who has studied her but is not her. I must admit, there is so much about Diana I learned that I did not use in the novel, because the book is about two American sisters in Las Vegas, not the Royal Family. Still, I think I was drawn there for a variety of reasons, including my own interest in the Royals, my interest in Las Vegas, and the idea of marrying the two. I think it’s fascinating that there is a Princess Diana museum in Vegas. Alas, it opened in September 2022, after I had finished writing the novel. Still, I hope it’s an indication that my pairing has an unexpected logic. JBV: Crissy’s estranged sister, Betsy, and Betsy’s newly adopted teenage daughter, Marisa, are also POV characters (Crissy and Marisa in the first-person and Betsy in the third). Tell us about the appeal of this narrative structure. How did using multiple perspectives allow for both an organic sense of character development as well as the heightening of suspense and tensions? CB: I’m a fan of narratives with multiple perspectives – that Rashomon effect. I’ve used it (off the top of my head) in The Lioness, The Sandcastle Girls, The Flight Attendant, Secrets of Eden, and The Guest Room. The truth is, in real life, no two witnesses see one event the same way. Why not use that reality in fiction? And, as you observed correctly, it increases the tension, because readers can know things that a character doesn’t. JBV: Betsy unwittingly finds herself mixed up with members of organized crime when she follows her boyfriend to Sin City, where they’ve found employment in a burgeoning bitcoin enterprise. Share with us why Vegas, with its colorful past and ever-evolving present, presented itself as the ideal setting for a cautionary tale about the mob’s influence on the cryptocurrency business (which remains a mystery to many of us). CB: Las Vegas is that fiery meteor that shoots across all our skies at some point in our lives, and demands that we watch. It’s a fever dream of hope and desire. And while the city is known for many things, crime is certainly a part of its DNA, and has been since it was founded. My apologies to the teams in tourism there, but let’s face it: it was a city mayor who helped create a mob museum in Vegas. Organized crime is a part of – and I love your use of this expression – “its colorful past.” I’m not sure if or when cryptocurrency will become big in Vegas or a currency on casino floors. And most of us barely understood cryptocurrency. So, crypto is – to use that word again – a MacGuffin. It’s a basis for possible next-generation criminality and corruption. But to enjoy the novel, you don’t need to know anything at all about crypto. Moreover, Vegas is at once ahead of the curve and behind it. It’s cutting edge and old school at the same time. It’s always changing. So, I set the novel in the summer and fall of 2022, because I needed a marker that wouldn’t change. I have no idea the role that crypto will play in the city, or in all our lives, in five or ten years. JBV: Like crime (organized or other!), history also informs many of your stories. Why is it important to look at the past in contextualizing the present – and how does your Armenian heritage factor into this desire to enlighten readers as you entertain them? CB: One of the most quoted lines from any of my novels is this one from The Sandcastle Girls: “But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans.” We know that fiction engenders empathy and it can teach history. (I suspect that perhaps millions of people first learned about the Armenian Genocide from The Sandcastle Girls and the publicity around the novel.) I fear that a lot of Americans know too little about history, and if you don’t understand the past, well. . . We know how that goes. We repeat mistakes and we do that with far more cataclysmic consequences. So, yes, as a novelist, I want to entertain. But as a human being, I hope to share some of the things I’ve learned. JBV: In addition to being a novelist, you are also an accomplished playwright and screenwriter. While some might argue that writing is writing, each of these formats requires a distinct skillset (understanding of dialogue, direction, story structure, etc.). Tell us about the disparities and similarities of these disciplines. How can working in one area open up unexpected channels into the others? CB: I’ve written screenplays and teleplays, but I’m not an accomplished screenwriter. Of the three movies and the TV series that sprang from my novels, I wrote. . .nothing for the screen. Those plaudits belong to other writers. I have, however, had three plays that I am really proud of, including The Club, which had its world premiere at the George Street Playhouse just last month. Two of my plays were original stories and one was an adaptation of my novel, Midwives. And one thing I have learned is this: it is a hell of a lot easier to write a new play than it is to adapt an existing novel for the stage. Writing the Midwives play was much harder than writing Wingspan or The Club. The reason is pretty simple. A novel, by design, can be big and unwieldy and you have dozens of settings and scenes and characters. A play has to have a lot fewer. It is not less profound or complex than a novel, but you know your parameters (not limitations) going in. Also, a play has a cast and crew to solve a lot of problems the playwright hasn’t. I bow before all of the people in theatre who have dramatically elevated my work there. JBV: You refer to yourself as the “3rd most talented artist in a family of 3”—which includes your wife, photographer Victoria Blewer, and daughter, Grace Experience, an actor who has also narrated several of your books. What has been the importance of curiosity and creativity in your home – and how has watching your wife and daughter pursue their art emboldened your own approach to craft, assuming it has? CB: Lord, the two of them are so much more talented than I am – and in much harder fields for artists. The fact they do with their lives what they want is inspiring. I have always depended on my wife as my first reader, but now she is joined by our daughter. I depend on them and my editor, Jenny Jackson. (Jenny is also a brilliant novelist herself – Pineapple Street.) As my wife once said to me, when I was pushing back against a criticism, “Wouldn’t you rather hear it from me than the New York Times?” (Answer? Yes.) In any case, I love that as a playwright and novelist I have gotten to work with Grace Experience. And I love that – since we were eighteen years old – my lovely bride has been candid with me about almost every word I have written. View the full article

Who is a lady going to call if she’s been wronged by an insufferable rake in Victorian England? If the lady is the main character in a historical romance, a lady’s reputation—and the reader’s favorite tropes—call for the FPI. The Fictional Private Investigator. Unlike PIs in contemporary crime fiction, the FPIs of historical romance do not sit outside a cheating man’s house in a beat-up Ford peeing in a bottle. Instead, they have a backstory that leaves them flawed and brooding, usually in possession of a small fortune or at least enough money to make a good match, and with muscular forearms. (That last part is just my humble opinion.) My latest release, The Love Remedy, features such a man who is a single father and deliciously grumpy to boot. You’re welcome. One reason authors who write British-set historical romances rely on our FPIs, is that London’s Metropolitan Police Force, responsible for prevention of crime and apprehension of criminals, only came into being after the Regency; the era in which the bulk of historical romance novels take place. The police force as we know it was introduced in 1829—a mere twelve years before the events in my early-Victorian set series begin. The rank of Detective was not created until 1842, the year my first book is set. I could, of course, fudge the timeline a bit and give the Met’s detectives a little more experience, but then we confront the second reason romance authors prefer our FPIs. No one liked the cops. The idea of a city-wide police department was not a popular one in the 1830s. Many in London considered them a threat to civil liberties. This fear was justified when those first ten years the primary use of the police force was to “keep the peace” or, in other words, crowd control. The bulk of police action was against crowds who gathered to advocate for political reforms such as universal suffrage (For men. For women? Not so much.). In Regency-set historical romances, an FPI was also preferable to the Bow Street Runners. While fictional liberties can and are taken in the portrayal of this private force, the Runners were thief takers without governmental oversight; men who received a fee for each criminal at large they brought to jail. In a romance this is awfully heroic. In real life? Not so much. Over in the colonies—sorry—in America during the early- to mid-1800’s, centralized police departments were also unpopular. In many large cities, folks were spontaneously deputized, leading to justice in some corners and mayhem in others. Obviously, not all sheriffs were hero material for the author whose novels chronicle the love lives of those men called by the gold rush or women who braved all manner of danger to make a new life out West. Even if the author keeps their stories set in the East, say New York City, police still aren’t sympathetic. Ever heard of the New York City police riot? In 1857 violence broke out between two competing forces, the NY Municipal Police Force, and the Metropolitan Police Force. Not so alluring, the specter of police men coming to fisticuffs and interfering in each other’s cases. For those historical romance authors whose stories are American-set, there is an actual historical alternative to the questionable public lawman. The questionable private lawman. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, still in existence, was founded in 1850. In the beginning, Pinkerton agents were used in the same spirit as Metropolitan police in England. The oligarchs of the day hired Pinkerton agents to infiltrate unions and undermine the budding American labor movement. They have a kinder historical reputation than they deserve, however, because of the success attributed to them in protecting Lincoln from assassination. The first couple of times. Indeed, the first recorded woman detective, Kate Warne, was a Pinkerton employee and one of the agents credited with foiling the first assassination attempt on Lincoln before he reached office. Later, during the civil war, Pinkerton agents were part of the “secret service” of agents overseen by the then War Office —precursors to the US Secret Service. The USSS is charged with protection of the president as well as their original purpose, to stamp out counterfeit currency. Pinkerton agents to this day have a reputation for being anti-union. In 2022 it’s reported that a Pinkerton agent infiltrated the movement to unionize Starbucks employees. Or, maybe, they were an adolescent girl posing as a Pinkerton to justify spending an inordinate amount of time in the ubiquitous coffee shop. In other words, while most historical romance authors conduct exhaustive research into the socio-economic, political, and fashion trends in the period in which they write, they are also charged with creating sympathetic romantic heroes and heroines. This is why the FPI is so vital to any historical romance that involves a crime and the impetus of what I call “the duke conundrum.” Readers, editors, and publishers would like a historical romance with a duke in the title and on the cover, please. Never mind there were only twenty-five ducal houses in 1812, including the dukedom of Wellington, created by the King specifically for the hero who defeated Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. Slim pickings for an island full of beautiful, kind-hearted milk maids who long for men with all their teeth, were free of venereal disease, and bathed more than once a fortnight. Hence, historical romance authors are expert at presenting the outlier. We manage to find a scrap of evidence suggesting a duke might possibly be an early consumer of tooth powder. We conjure an earl, based on a murky historical figure, who’s defining characteristic is his unwillingness to profit from the sugar trade of the West Indies. Finally, for those of us who cannot contort our policemen (the first policewoman in the UK, Edith Smith, didn’t appear on the scene until 1915, and even then, was limited to arrests involving only women) into sympathetic love interests, we gift readers with the presence of an FPI to catch a killer, save the day, and marry the girl (or guy. Yes, there were same sex relationships in the 1800’s, but this is a whole ‘nother topic.) So, when it comes to historical detectives, give us romance authors a bit of grace. We walk a fine, fine line between history and romance. Lucky for us, FPI’s are there to bridge the divide. *** View the full article

In The Hunter, her ninth novel, Irish-American author Tana French takes us back to the small West Ireland village that she introduced in The Searcher. Retired detective Cal Hooper has made a home in Ardnakelty at the foot of the mountain, away from police cases and the city bustle. It’s a blazing hot summer, and while farmers worry about their crops, Cal’s life seems to have settled in a peaceful groove. His relationship with local Lena is going strong; meanwhile Cal keeps a watchful eye over teenage neighbor Trey, his now trusted carpentry assistant. But Cal’s makeshift family comes under threat when Trey’s father, Johnny, marches back into town with a scheme to find gold on local land and a sleek London millionaire in tow. Readers jonesing for the tightly plotted procedurals of French’s Dublin Murder Squad series should adjust their expectations. The Hunter, like The Searcher before it, is a slow burn. But it may be French’s best novel yet. The myriad narrative skills the author has honed in her eight previous novels are on full display here, immersing the reader into a deeply atmospheric, character-driven tale. At times poignant and others hilarious, The Hunter delivers a taut, intelligent examination of loyalty, instinct, and community. French masterfully excavates the secrets we keep for love or revenge and explores the lengths we go to to protect our family, be it blood or chosen. I had the thrill of speaking with Tana French over Zoom. We discussed her characters, her creative process, the ethics of writing the detective as hero, the joys of Irish banter, and much more. Jenny Bartoy: Where did you get the idea for The Hunter’s premise, about finding gold in Ireland? Tana French: My last book, The Searcher, was basically mystery software running on western hardware. I’d been reading westerns and thought many of the western tropes would map really well onto the west of Ireland. There’s a lot in common in setting, that sort of wild beauty that demands a lot of physical and mental toughness. And there’s a sense of place that’s so removed from the centers of power, both culturally and geographically, that anyone who wants to create a functioning cohesive society [is] going to have to make their own rules. I felt, when I finished The Searcher, that there were more Western tropes to play with in that west of Ireland setting, and the first one that sprang to mind was the “gold in them thar hills” trope. It doesn’t sound like a very Irish thing, but it’s true what Johnny says in the book: there have been a ton of ancient gold artifacts found in Ireland, and there have been many gold rushes over the centuries. So it didn’t seem like a particularly implausible thing to happen. Cal and Trey’s relationship at the end of The Searcher got left at quite an interesting point where they have built the foundation of a solid relationship but they haven’t had time for it to set firm. I thought, what would happen if something came in to disrupt this delicate balance? And the obvious thing was Trey’s absent dad, Johnny, who’s been off in London somewhere. He seemed like exactly the kind of guy who would come in with some big get-rich-quick scheme that might or might not be legit. And that just added up with the gold trope. JB: In The Hunter, instead of a single point-of-view (POV) narrative focused on Cal Hooper’s experience, this book is told in three POVs: Cal, his lover Lena, and his protégé Trey. In the Dublin Murder Squad series, you changed the single narrator in each book. How did this expansion, rather than lateral shift, in narrative perspective change things for you as a storyteller? TF: That was the scary part with this book because I had never done [multiple points of view] before. But I’ve discovered that as a writer, I’m really only happy when I’m a little bit outside my comfort zone. I like doing things where I feel like I have to learn on the fly and just pick it up as I go along. So this definitely satisfied that instinct! But also it felt like a very different kind of book, in that The Searcher was about one guy’s journey: Cal coming to this little village looking for peace and obviously not really finding it. But The Hunter is about a pseudo family relationship between Cal and Lena and this sort of semi-feral kid whom they’re trying to turn into a good human being. And because it is about this family and the ways in which it comes under threat, when Johnny and his British millionaire and his gold scheme arrive in the townland, the book needed to be from the perspectives of the whole family. It couldn’t just be one person’s POV; it had to be how the three fit into each other, how the dynamic reflected and rippled back between those three people. JB: Did you enjoy splitting up the narrative perspectives in the end? TF: It was hugely enjoyable. I had a lot of fun especially writing Trey, because she’s definitely an odd kid. She’s grown up in this village who has no time for her or any of her family. Her father is even less use when he’s there than when he isn’t. Her mother does her best, but she’s basically used up by just keeping everybody alive and functioning. And so Trey has been figuring it out for herself up until Cal and Lena came on the scene. And this has led her to have quite an odd approach to the rest of the village, to morality, to the way she goes about things she wants. And that’s a lot of fun to write. I find that characters are the most fun to write when they’re somehow in transition, when they’re moving from one stage of life to another, from one viewpoint to another. Trey at 15—that’s a hugely transitional point. You’re starting to move away from a child’s perspective where everything is quite black and white, quite single-minded, you’re consumed by one thing at a time, but you can’t really hold multiple poles and nuances and layers in your head at once, towards a more complex, more mature viewpoint. And she does go through that transition basically in the course of the book. And that was one of the most fun things to write. JB: Cal, Lena, and Trey are somewhat external to the village community. In the first book, this draws them together. But in this one, they’re each drawn out of their comfort zone and toward the village. Doing what must be done forces them out of the boundaries they’ve labored to set for themselves. Did that lead to any surprises for you as their creator? TF: Yes, along the way, very much so. The Searcher had been about an outsider, but The Hunter is exactly as you say, it’s about people who are on the periphery. They’re not exactly outsiders. They’re not exactly insiders. Lena by her own choice has cut herself off from the village to some extent, as much as she can; Trey because she’s from this family that nobody even wants to acknowledge; and Cal because he just moved there a few years ago. But they’re not really outsiders, in that they are a part of this network of relationships that’s within the village. And that’s kind of a powerful place to be, because you’re not bound by the place’s rules in the way that a full insider would be. You’re not under an obligation to it, you don’t feel the pressure in the same way. But you do have a certain amount of influence, a certain amount of power, and at different points in the book, they all choose to use that power in very different ways. But for Lena in particular, it came with surprises. My editor is a genius and started asking questions about Lena’s perspective. And I suddenly went, oh my God, Lena is going to be blown away and delighted and proud and conflicted about the fact that Trey is basically giving the finger to everything about this place in a way that Lena herself never found an opportunity to do. So that’s going to be huge for her. I went back and reshaped it all with this in mind for her. JB: You get to flex your comedy chops in this book. There’s always humor in your books but this one had some hilarious one-liners and laugh-out-loud exchanges in the pub. Is humor a natural kind of writing for you, or more technical? And what kind of research did you do to write these scenes so convincingly? TF: Oh, I had to make a huge sacrifice for this kind of prep, of going to the pub! The Irish wit and humor and quick banter—I know this is a cliché; I know that Ireland has a reputation for this, but it is true. It’s one of the major currencies. Here the ability to go quickfire back and forth with your friends shows everything from hierarchy to affection to conflict. Everything is filtered through this lens of humor. That’s how they say, “I love you, man.” The operational mode for everyone in these settings is just to slag each other and throw these lines back and forth in this fast game of squash. So it was huge fun to write, because if you’ve been down the pub a bunch of times and if you have these rhythms and this humor in your head, you can just hit “play” mentally on those characters and let them keep going. JB: It was great fun to have these humorous breaks amid heavier themes. Your novels feature complex, psychologically astute plots. They tend to rely on characters’ impulses, instincts, and empathy and involve so many twists and turns. What is your process for plotting? How do you organize your writing? TF: Organization is, anyone who knows me will tell you, my weak point. I’m not good at this stuff. But I am good, I think, at characters. I come from an acting background. So for me, the natural thing is to see characters as three-dimensional as possible and to try to bring the reader to the point where they’re seeing this world through the characters’ fears and needs and biases and objectives. So that’s where I start from. I know there are writers who don’t work like this—I have friends who have every chapter plotted out and every beat mark before they start writing. But for me all the action springs from character, so it means that I can’t really structure in advance. I need to get to know the characters a bit before I understand their interactions and their dynamics. So I start with a basic premise, a main character, and a setting. And I kind of dive in and write for a while and things sort of develop like a Polaroid as I go. And this makes for a lot of rewriting, but it is the only way that works for me. And I kind of hope that because stuff has taken me by surprise all the time—like, I’ll be two thirds of the way to a book and go, oh my God, that’s who did the murder!—I hope some of that [spontaneity] comes across to the reader, the sense of things coming out organically. JB: Yes, it definitely does! Many books, TV shows, and films that historically have glorified police work are now turning more critical or at least nuanced. Has that trend affected your approach in writing crime novels? I think the mystery genre needed to start questioning that whole viewpoint that the detective is intrinsically heroic. TF: I definitely think that it’s a good movement within the mystery genre, to acknowledge that the detective’s point of view is not the only one, and is not necessarily the crucial one, and is not necessarily the heroic one. Because that’s, of course, where the genre started to a large extent—the detective as a hero who will reimpose order on society after the chaos caused by murder, and that detective is on the side of truth and justice. And many of those books are great, they’re wonderful. But I think the mystery genre needed to start questioning that whole viewpoint that the detective is intrinsically heroic. There have always been flawed detectives, with the bottle of whiskey in the drawer and the ex-wife who hates him and the tortured past, but that’s a different thing. That’s a detective being flawed, but the role’s still being heroic. And I think it’s only recently that there’s more of a drive towards the idea that the role itself is flawed and is dangerous, and is not intrinsically heroic, and comes with dangers built in. In The Witch Elm, that was one of the things I really wanted to do, because I realized that my first six books were all from the detective’s point of view. It was all about seeing the investigation from the perspective of somebody for whom it was a source of power, and a source of triumph, and a source of reimposing order. And that is not the only or the most important viewpoint in any investigation. There are also people for whom this is not a source of power, or of reordering the world, it is the opposite. It’s having your power taken away from you, having your life overturned, having everything smashed around you in ways that you may never be able to reconstruct. In The Witch Elm, the narrator tries at one point kind of pathetically to be the detective, but he’s also the victim, the suspect, the witness, all of those other viewpoints I thought were just as important and needed a voice. In The Searcher and The Hunter, Carl is a retired detective. He’s taking early retirement from Chicago PD, for that reason. In The Searcher, he says something about having realized that one of them, either he or the job, or both, cannot be trusted. And he doesn’t know which it is. He’s left the job behind and is trying to reject the whole notion of himself as detective when that is suddenly demanded of him again, and then it becomes a kind of crisis of conscience. And it’s the same here in The Hunter where people want to position him as a detective, as not a detective, as a tool for detectives, or as a tool against detectives. Being on that side of the law has become a much more complex thing, within the mystery genre. I think this was not just good, but really necessary to examine the moral complexity not of the individual character, but of the entire concept of detecting. JB: I do feel like we’re getting more variety in literary crime fiction, which is exciting. On a related note, you’ve previously written about cops on the job, but in these latest novels, as noted, Cal is retired. What kind of challenges do you encounter in writing mysteries when the sleuth doesn’t have access to institutional resources? TF: That was actually one of the most fun things about writing both The Searcher and The Hunter. Because I was trying to reexamine, what is it morally, mentally, emotionally to be a detective? What does it mean to people? And Cal is in this position where all those trappings have been stripped away. At several points in both books he’s going, if I were still on the job, I could have somebody dump this person’s phone, I could track this, I could pull info on every single suspected witness I’ve got, I could look at the forensics, and now I have nothing. So is he still a cop? Does he even want to still be a cop without any of the accoutrements, without any of the artillery, that are in a cop’s armory? He has none of that. But he still does have whatever instincts and skills he’s built up on the job. And that isn’t actually something he wants to have, he was trying to leave all that behind. That was the most interesting part of writing it, because on a technical level, it means he just goes and talks to people, and he can do it in slightly more subtle ways, he has a little bit more experience questioning people. But what’s the relationship between the individual and his sense of himself as detective? That becomes core to it. And that was one of the reasons I wrote a retired cop, rather than one that was still on the job and having doubts, which would also have been interesting. Because, with all the physical trappings stripped away, you get to see the direct relationship between him as an individual and what’s left of the detective in him—what are the tensions between those things? JB: I noticed that you avoid digital technology in this novel. Your characters mention Netflix and TikTok in passing, and they use phones sporadically, but they’re not googling for evidence or going down Facebook rabbit holes. Tell me about this narrative choice. TF: Technology is really boring to write about! There are some writers who can make conversations via text message leap off the page and make them vivid and interesting, but I like characters being face to face. And so luckily, with the characters I’ve got, that was actually a fairly natural choice, because these are people in a milieu where they’re going to go see each other. They’re going to talk face to face. Trey in particular doesn’t have a phone yet at this stage because her mother hasn’t been able to afford to buy one. So that made it much easier to go, alright, the main form of communication is not going to be phones and email. They’re living in a place where people assume that if you want to talk to somebody, you’re probably going to meet them down the pub. And I thought that technology would have gotten in the way of the character interactions. I’m worried about this, because I know that more and more interaction is, in fact, on screen and via text. What do I do? Do I go with that and try to find a way to make it interesting, or am I going to keep dodging Snapchat for the rest of my career? I’m not sure. So far I’m just dodging Snapchat, everybody’s just going to go meet up! So much of our interactions is when you look at somebody, when you see their movements, when you listen to the tone of their voice, when you catch the tiny nuances. So much nuance lies in the face to face. And I think real-life interaction is being impoverished by the fact that less and less face-to-face interaction happens. But I’m not going to do it in my books, because it would impoverish them too. JB: Your novels make beautiful use of setting, almost as a character. In The Searcher the mountain felt alive. Here in The Hunter, it’s the weather, oppressively hot with an apocalyptic sort of overtone, but also the townland which acts and reacts as a cohesive unit. How do you approach setting and atmosphere as narrative elements? TH: The Hunter in particular, but The Searcher as well, are very different from my earlier books, because the early ones are set in cities. And these two are rural, many of the characters are farmers. So for them, the land and the heat wave in The Hunter aren’t just atmosphere, these are crucial practical things that alter their lives on a very concrete level. The heat wave isn’t just, oh my god, it’s boiling, let’s go to the park and get ice cream—it’s a threat to their livelihoods. A heat wave like that messes with your feed for the winter; it messes with next year’s lamb crop. It has a knock-on effect in farming that lasts a long time and can threaten the farm’s very existence. This puts a lot of the characters in a position where they’re willing to listen to Johnny’s get-rich-quick scheme, which normally they wouldn’t have even given him the time of day. Normally they’d have laughed him out of the pub with that nonsense. But they’re made vulnerable by this heat wave. So the weather and the land and the terrain aren’t just setting and atmosphere; they play a solid role in the plot. JB: In The Searcher, Trey longed for the brother who’d disappeared. Here in The Hunter Trey wishes her father, who’s reappeared, would go away—sort of an opposite desire. Trey’s preference for estrangement feels so realistic. Family estrangement is a reality—and a choice—for many, but it remains taboo culturally. Reconciliation is usually encouraged or expected, and this trope shows up a lot in books, movies, TV. How did you navigate these difficult family dynamics without making Trey petulant? “There are situations where the only closure is via division, via literally closing that door forever.” TF: There is this expectation that closure or a happy ending must involve reconciliation in some way with your blood family. And I think it’s ridiculous, because that’s not how the reality works. There are situations where the only closure is via division, via literally closing that door forever. And there are situations where reconciliation would do more damage than healing. I had to be very careful so it didn’t just seem like a teenager going, well, my dad went off and left us, now he can get stuffed if he thinks he’s walking back into my life — which at the beginning of the book, there is a certain element of that, to the point where Trey blames Johnny for her brother’s loss. But gradually, that sense deepens, the more she gets to know him, the more mature and in-depth and complex that need to separate herself from him becomes. And she reaches a point where she’s only willing to maintain that connection, because she needs it in order to effect another form of revenge. She comes to the realization that her real family unit doesn’t in fact include Johnny in any way. She’s constructed her own family unit with Cal and Lena, and in other ways with her mother and siblings. And I thought that was a much more realistic and nuanced take on things than just going, well, he’s blood, you must all be happy ever after, or in some way, damaged by the loss. Because frankly, I don’t think Trey is damaged by her father being out of her life. She may be traumatized by the things he did along the way, but she’s not traumatized by him being gone because she, as an individual, has made her choices and constructed her family unit. And that is what I hope saves her from being a petulant teenager going, I hate you. This is coming from strongly thought-through choices, and from sacrifices that she’s been willing to make for this new sort of family. JB: Before we sign off, I have to ask: what’s next for you? TF: Well, to my deep surprise, this seems to be turning out to be a trilogy, which is just not what I thought. I thought The Searcher was a standalone! But it doesn’t feel like either the character arcs or the thematic arcs are really complete. So it seems like I’m writing the third in a trilogy about this village, and these people, and all the layers and stories and tensions and dynamics stored up there. I didn’t expect that. I’m always worried because I don’t plan in advance—what if I dive in there and there’s no book and the threads never tie up? But fingers crossed. It’s always been okay so far. View the full article

Remember Pizzagate? In 2016, a conspiracy theory that high-ranking Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a D.C. pizzeria compelled a man to open fire inside the restaurant in an attempt to rescue the imprisoned children, who didn’t exist. The story dominated headlines for five minutes before fading into the category of “well, that happened.” The bamboozled gunman, Edgar Maddison Welch, was sent to jail and mostly forgotten, his identity blurring into an avatar for a certain set of social anxieties—that liberalism breeds perversion, that politicians lie, that modern life is emasculating. Any larger lessons which Pizzagate may have held for society were swiftly buried in the trash heap of yesterday’s news. Something that gets lost in our conversations about ‘unprecedented times’ is that many of our cultural uproars have happened before, often within our own lifetimes. I was born in 1985 during the rise of the ‘Satanic Panic,’ a phenomenon where people all over the country started to believe a conspiracy that daycare providers were committing Satanic ritual abuse on children. The hysteria can be traced back to the 1980 book Michelle Remembers by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. Pazder used the now discredited technique of ‘memory recovery therapy’ to spread a story that his patient (and later wife) Michelle Smith had been abused as a child at the hands of an underground Satanic organization. There was no evidence that any of Smith’s ‘recovered’ memories were real, but the book was a hit. Smith appeared on Oprah and stoked nation-wide fears that daycare providers were Satanic pedophiles. Looking back, it’s easy to connect the Satanic Panic to social anxieties over feminism threatening the traditional family unit. The increase of women in the workplace had increased the need for day care, shaping a community landscape in which children were being raised by strangers. This moral panic coincided with a key time in television history when the news was transitioning from the realm of sober information dissemination to that of entertainment, thanks in part to the abolishment of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. The fairness doctrine had required news outlets to present both sides of an issue for balanced coverage. Now, outlets could skip the boring bits of measured and fact-checked counterpoints in their reporting. And in a bewilderingly complex modern world, the notion of a secret, ancient conspiracy being the source of all evil held immense appeal to viewers. in a bewilderingly complex modern world, the notion of a secret, ancient conspiracy being the source of all evil held immense appeal… America’s Puritan settlers believed in a ‘world of wonders’ in which God and Satan meddled directly in everyday people’s lives like an ongoing chess game. The stakes of such a game could rapidly escalate into hysteria as people accused each other of being on the devil’s side, most famously exemplified by the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693. The lure of the moral panic is two-fold: a deep desire to purify society through scapegoating, and the irresistible drama of a witch hunt. What may begin with the earnest goal of rooting out evil becomes a grotesque and twisted form of entertainment, with very real consequences for the individuals wrapped up in it. In the case of the Satanic Panic, innocent pre-school teachers like the McMartin family in California were arrested and dragged through years of humiliating and expensive trials. The McMartins were eventually acquitted, but their business was destroyed, and their name would forever be associated with a child abuse scandal—if anyone remembered them at all. By the time I was a teenager in the late 90’s era of bubblegum pop and Beanie Babies, the dark madness of the Satanic Panic felt like a surreal, forgotten dream. When ‘fake news’ became a hot button issue during the 2016 presidential election, it was treated as a product of the internet, as if we hadn’t gone through an identical phenomenon before Facebook existed. In a culture where current events are served up as disposable entertainment, the recent past may as well be ancient history. Most of us know what it’s like to be a consumer of news-as-entertainment. It’s addictive, it’s bad for you, and it’s queasily delicious. During April and May of 2022, I gorged myself on the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation trial. Heard was a perfect target for Puritan moral panic with her bisexuality, the vixen-like roles she tended to be cast in, and the unnerving, almost supernatural quality of her beauty (Heard’s face is popularly thought to be a 91.85% match to the ‘Golden Ratio’). I watched the televised court proceedings every day as if it were a thrilling limited series. As I became swept away by the entertainment value of the trial, the truth that was supposedly being litigated seemed less and less important. The case for Heard’s victimhood was lost amid Depp’s antics, her team’s terrible legal strategy, and Heard’s own abysmal performance on the stand. The show of the trial eclipsed its function so totally I felt that watching it had left me with a worse grasp on the truth than someone who hadn’t tuned in at all. After the trial was over, more details about Depp’s alleged abuse emerged, but by then I was, frankly, over it. While this cultural practice of scapegoating-as-entertainment certainly leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, to criticize it falls into the trap of providing even more fodder for Puritanical outrage. It would be tempting, for instance, to issue a fiery sermon condemning anyone who gets any relish out of someone else’s public humiliation (the term ‘guilty pleasure’ is glaring evidence of the Puritan genetic code still present in our cultural DNA). But heaping more shame upon shame doesn’t seem like an effective way out of this trap to me. It would only continue the cycle in which we instigate witch hunts, enjoy doing it, then shame ourselves for our enjoyment. We would promise not to do it again but forget that promise as soon as the next juicy news item drops about someone doing something bad. My new novel Rainbow Black is about a young girl whose parents are targeted amid the Satanic Panic like the real life McMartins. It was important to me to center the story around a victim of hysteria, rather than a consumer of it. I wanted to explore the life-long trauma that our unlucky scapegoats carry with them long after the media machine has moved on. What happens to these people once their entertainment value has been sucked dry and we discard them like trash? As consumers, the rush of excitement over the next Satanic Panic can be enough to erase our memory that we went through all this before, and it only made us sick. The only way out of our toxic Puritan cycle is to remember that the people at the center of our moral panics aren’t representations of our sins. They are, simply and profoundly, people. *** View the full article

As a writer of narratives, I’m leery of them. Especially historical ones. I’m not skeptical of events; I’m skeptical of wording and connective tissue. Of the clean causality. Take the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. (Seven men murdered in a garage, no one was ever convicted). Because speculating on whodunits is great fun, and because politicians at the time did what they do—spun the events to their advantage—and because that advantage played into anti-gangland sentiment that eventually, indirectly resulted in a RICO case against Al Capone (who was never connected, materially, to the murders), I wasted several hours of my youth waiting for Geraldo to open an empty vault. And then I learned just enough about chaos theory for it to make problems in my brain. Eleven or twelve years ago, I asked a very bearded and studious-looking professor, an author of historical narratives, about the problem. I figured he’d taught it in introductory courses, so I asked: How do history writers wrestle with knowing they’re streamlining a millisecond’s reaction to every variable that came before it? How do they omit and create seamless causality while trying to be true? I don’t remember the response. I remember the beard and the glare off the historian’s glasses, radiating silent but distinctly violent disdain. I walked away sure of only this: Historians possess the power to obliterate you completely. Omit you from having existed. I’d stick to fiction: the warm, pillowy comfort of plausible deniability. Then I wound up writing a book that needed a historical fiction disclaimer, and here I am. Writing as nonfictionally as I can make words. Before another sentence, understand that I am a simple yahoo—a fiction writer with no postsecondary education in history. My only provenance stems from obsessively researching genealogy. I’m sure the tendency came from growing up with eleven living, blood-related grandparents (parents of parents of parents of parents). One of them, a great-grandfather, fascinated me. They all did, but he was a bit fiery, a bit strange, and he had mesmerizing taste. Great-Grandpa bred horses before I was born and had a small den with loud but somehow matching red and green leather chairs and sofa, all embroidered with lassos or horse heads, all with wood arms shaped like wagon-wheels. Plastic horses—that were not toys—stood on the end tables beneath lamps whose shades were celluloid Western landscapes. Great-Grandpa listened to Hank Williams and Jim Reeves and Bob Wills. Not long before he died, when I was in high school, he said a coyote had been visiting each night, to eat junebugs under the lamppost between his and my grandparents’ houses. Grandma, his daughter I’d lived with next door, always said that whenever the old man finally died, he’d bolt up in the coffin and scream that she’d put him in the wrong shirt. In the end, he didn’t. But he was mercurial, in that particular way a person with many secrets can be mercurial. I know only one of those secrets, and I won’t spill it because Grandma taught me not to be a snitch. So, instead, I’ll tell an innocuous but illustrative anecdote: When my mother, pregnant with me, needed a job, Great-Grandpa apparently marched her into a regionally famous Omaha, Nebraska furniture store and demanded to speak with its regionally famous owner, a woman who was a lively character, one who exuded friendliness while commanding respect and instilling fear. She was not a person to whom one issued demands. And I suppose if what I’ve been told is correct, Great-Grandpa technically didn’t. He said a terse, “This is my granddaughter. She needs a job.” No “please,” no “thank you,” no “I would really appreciate it if.” That was it. And my mother had a job. Maybe a favor was owed. Maybe a sensitive matter was known. How the store owner and Great-Grandpa had developed that rapport, I don’t know. I can’t say much for certain because he did not leave much of a paper trail. If he did, I suppose Grandma would’ve burned it. She once warned me, “Unless it deals with money, never—ever—put it in writing.” (I’m aware of the irony, yes.) From what I have since gathered, this paper trail thing was a hard-learned family lesson. The voice of Great-Grandpa’s grandpa can be read in an old Supreme Court case (he was in a little trouble), and a couple of Great-Grandpa’s uncles were widely covered in local and regional newspapers. One was an ice man who was arrested at least four times I know about, twice for manslaughter. Neither was a disproven accusation. But he never spent more than a few nights in jail, and, somehow, the state historical society doesn’t have his booking photo. Neither does the society have a booking photo of his brother Jim, but that’s easily explained. Jim demanded its return during a court case completely unrelated to the booking photo. Like his father before him, Jim frequented court. When he wasn’t there to punch a judge or appear on larceny charges, he was a truant officer or cop. He worked at the courthouse in the first decade of the 1900s, too, until he may or may not have aided in the escape of four prisoners. He ran for low-level political offices, seemingly with the intention of splitting votes. Eventually, he operated his own private investigation agency. On the whole, the record suggests Jim had a vendetta against powerful people, which may or may not have been why he was committed to the State Hospital. (The Insanity Board was comprised of two political appointees and one doctor who seems to have been a real piece of work.) Jim died in the custody of the hospital roughly two years later. His brother the manslaughterer died about three years after that, all signs suggesting he was a manslaughter victim himself, but the coroner declined to pursue an inquest. Many people, for good reason, might avoid parading a particularly gnarled branch of family tree, but against sage advice, I decided to write a novel based on Great-Grandpa’s uncles—not about them—based on them. The end result was Little Underworld. I’d been researching for years already, but the book was a new excuse. At a point, I’d reread so many newspapers, my dreams were set in 1928. I needed to come up for air. I needed to see some shape that wasn’t laser-focused on the daily creep of time. I turned to what is probably the most influential book concerning the history of Omaha, Dr. Orville D. Menard’s River City Empire: Tom Dennison’s Omaha. Menard was widely loved as a great friend and mentor. I wish I’d had the chance to know him. I’d read his book once for fun, but as often happens with fun, I’d retained little I hadn’t heard or read elsewhere. River City Empire is a resource in books and newspapers, on the website of the state historical society, and, yes, throughout Wikipedia. I say the book concerns Omaha history because it’s not a history book. Menard says that in the preface: “A history of Omaha is not provided here, for such an endeavor is beyond the intent or purpose.” Instead, Menard was a political science professor. He transposed the theory of “political bossism” onto Omaha from the period of 1900-1933. The concept is what it sounds like—somebody (usually not an elected official) controls a city’s political power. Kansas City was known for Tom Pendergast; New York for Boss Tweed; Atlantic City for Nucky Johnson. River City Empire posits that Omaha had Tom Dennison. Now, Menard didn’t concoct this notion that Dennison ran Omaha. I could, with fair confidence, point to a few people who did concoct it, but I live in a place where descendants of powerful people are still around, and I’m the relative of a manslaughterer who was almost definitely manslaughtered. I don’t have much snitch-latitude. Dennison had long been cast as a political boss (when he wasn’t suing newspapers out of existence for libel). He was a thin, tall gambler who wore a bowler and a chunky diamond pin in his necktie—he looked the part. And he was involved in politics. That’s shady. Granted, nearly everyone involved in Omaha politics during (and before and after) Dennison’s alleged reign was shady, but there seems to be ample evidence he pulled some antics—maybe registered dead voters, probably registered voters whose addresses did not exist. Where things get tricky in Menard’s narrative—and much, much darker—is the possible degree of Dennison’s involvement in a mob’s racist, brutal murder of a man named Will Brown in September 1919. Will Brown was a black man accused of raping a white woman. While he was being held in the county courthouse, the mob set fire to the building. When Brown was turned over to them, they lynched, shot, burned, and dragged him through the streets. If you read about the murder, right here, you’ll find most writers note that a source said the accusation was untrue, that Brown was physically disabled. He was incapable of attacking anyone. That’s horrifying but also immaterial. Whether he did or didn’t commit a crime, a mob, comprised of thousands of people, burning a courthouse and demanding a man be turned over to them to be lynched, shot, burned, dragged, and photographed for posterity ranks as a fucking atrocity. Menard was (and was not) careful to avoid blaming Dennison directly for the murder. He writes, “There is no firm evidence the Dennison [political] machine actually instigated the particular events.” But, Menard does strongly suggest that Tom Dennison had such far-reaching control (and omniscience, it seems) that he’d actually thrown the preceding 1918 city election to his political opponents, thereby stoking what could, apparently, end only in the horrific nightmare of a person’s brutal murder. Menard quotes a nameless newspaper editor as recalling “a statement alleged to Dennison early in the campaign: ‘I think we better let the bastards have it their way for awhile [sic]; let’s lie low this next election—they’ll be glad to see us back.’” That reads like two things to me: a game of telephone and a trick of hindsight. But where I was ripped from the page so completely that I fact-checked Menard’s sources for months was when I came across a small, uncontroversial passage about Omaha Mayor James Dahlman. As the story goes, Mayor Dahlman was controlled by criminal mastermind Tom Dennison and was therefore elected continuously from 1900-1930 (aside from 1918-1920, when an unnamed newspaper editor suggested Dennison decided to teach the city a lesson). Menard writes this: “When the mayor needed transportation, he took a taxi or rode the streetcar. He neither owned an automobile nor accepted an official one (he said the city charter made no provision for it).” This is not true. And please know that, when I say something is true or not true, I say it as someone who knows narrative is a wobbly thing. We write symbols that carry meaning only because we agree on those meanings. We omit things we deem extraneous and create streamlined causality—“a temporary stay against confusion,” Robert Frost called it. Narratives are inherently imperfect constructions. But there is an actuality in the above statement. Specifically: A mayor had a car or didn’t. Dahlman did. Unless—I always go back to this—I am living inside the dream of a single cell of maybe an antelope or a cow. Or maybe the world has conspired to falsify hundreds of newspaper articles archived on the internet. Just for me. If neither of those is the case, I know that Mayor Dahlman drove a city-provided car, because Great-Grandpa’s uncle Jim, the PI, was hired to tail it in 1916. As a result, the mayor was enjoined from using it. Then, six more lawsuits were brought against Dahlman and five city commissioners, demanding their ouster and repayment of money used to maintain the vehicle from 1912 through 1917, an amount alleged to be $13,716.67. During that 1918 campaign, the one Dennison allegedly threw to his political opponents, “$13,716.67” featured prominently in political ads. When Dahlman gave stump speeches throughout the city, at least one newspaper noted that he didn’t address the subject. In other words, Mayor Dahlman’s use of a city car very likely factored into his failure to win reelection. The car wasn’t the sole reason (chaos theory). But I’m willing to bet that car was one of them. That seems to make a bit more sense than Dennison’s omniscience to me. Voters who lived hand-to-mouth, and most did, likely felt betrayed by an elected official out joyriding on their dime. Especially a guy was supposedly so beloved that a political science professor, born three years after that mayor’s death, dedicated nearly an entire chapter of a book to cleansing the mayor’s reputation. Right after associating him with an alleged criminal whose mastermind apparently far surpassed the level of Doyle’s Moriarty. If you’ve read this far, you’re surely saying, “So? An Omaha mayor had a car, and a poli-sci professor wrote a book. Why would that matter to anyone living in the here and now, especially outside of Omaha, Nebraska?” Because a theory, one of with a piece that is patently not true, is now referenced as fact. That is what narrative can do. Dr. Menard may have never intended his book to serve as a history, but it might as well be have carved into stone tablets. The big takeaway is that a very large chunk of an American city’s history, the one that’s taught in classrooms and cited by sources we should be able to trust, has been boiled down to this: A crime lord and puppeteer of local politics fixed elections and controlled the media. Through brainwashing and payoffs and cronyism, he engineered a mob to storm a courthouse and brutally murder a person. I wish it were true. I wish that was the only rational explanation behind Will Brown’s murder. I wish I could believe a single puppeteer was pulling the strings. I wish I could know that a collective of human beings, with consciousnesses, sensations, memories, even love for others in their lives—couldn’t do what they did. But I’m fairly sure they did. And I’m fairly sure if we keep saying they didn’t, not on their own, that is not great. If you’re curious about how the narrative ends—the Omaha one—justice saved the day. Not in the death of Will Brown—no one was ever convicted. But later, in 1932, Prosecutors claimed the city’s illegal liquor, prostitution, and gambling were controlled by a “syndicate,” a conspiratorial effort, headed by Tom Dennison. The lengthy trial effectively dismantled Dennison’s political machine. (Except no one was convicted in that trial, either. No proof.) Of course, one can’t let these things stop a good story. *** View the full article

Here are some of the trickiest pitfalls to sidestep while crafting your novel. Remember, in each pitfall to be avoided is also an opportunity to be seized. Don’t set the stakes too low. Something vital has to be at risk. Anything from one person’s life to the survival of all humankind. Don’t wait. Hook your reader immediately. Maybe with a bang. My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. The beginning of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold draws you right in with a startling detail that throws you off balance. So does the iconic opening of 1984 by George Orwell: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. How can you start your thriller in a way? Don’t write one-dimensional protagonists. Jason Bourne doesn’t know where he is from nor how he became who he is. Lisbeth Salander of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is complex, enigmatic, with a troubled past. Ditto Camille Preaker in Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, Sharp Objects. And then there is Stephen King’s Carrie: humiliated, vengeful, powerful. And dozens more. Which leads to… Don’t forget to give your protagonist an “arc.” The most satisfying arc is one that brings out some positive aspect of the protagonist that he/she has suppressed. How do you do this? By making the protagonist confront obstacles and choices. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee, in his great book Story, puts it this way: “True character us revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.” Don’t have mildly dangerous villains. Yes, whatever his or her flaws, the protagonist must be powerful enough to drive the story. But the villain must be—or at least seem to be—even more powerful. Hence Hannibal Lector. Hence Karla, the Soviet spymaster in many of John LeCarre’s novels. Hence Anton Chigurth, the hitman in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. (In the name Chigurth, I hear echoes of Cthulhu, the octopus-like monster created by H.P. Lovecraft.) Hence Michael Crichton’s velociraptors. They’re really powerful. Don’t forget: A human villain is still human. Hannibal Lector is intelligent and cultured, terrifying and captivating. He is a psychopathic serial killer and cannibal and he is a man who, as a boy, witnessed the murder of his sister. His evil actions come from this trauma. But remember; To understand all is not to forgive all. Hannibal Lector must pay for his crimes. Don’t be predictable. Upset expectations. William Goldman, novelist (The Princess Bride and Marathon Man) and Oscar-winning screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men) said, “Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.” Don’t be pedestrian. Make your language pop. There is something to be said for deadpan prose, especially if your hero is a classic, hardnose stoic. But wherever possible, liven up your prose. In Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler writes, “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” What a great mental picture: the window is colorful, the blonde is colorful. Write colorful. Don’t let your story drag or sag. Advice from Chandler: “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” Keep things coming at your characters. And keep your story suspenseful, a page-turner, make the reader think “I gotta know what happens.” So how do you create suspense? In an op-ed in the New York Times on December 8, 2012, Lee Childs answers this question. I urge you to find and read the whole piece. Here is the crux of it: “How do you create suspense?” has the same interrogatory shape as “How do you bake a cake?” And we all know – in theory or practice – how to bake a cake. We need ingredients…and we are led to believe that the more thoroughly and conscientiously we combine them, the better the cake will taste…So writers are taught to focus on ingredients and their combinations…sympathetic characters… (plunged) into situations of continuing peril… But it’s really much simpler than that that. “How do you bake a cake?” has the wrong structure. It’s too indirect. The right structure and the right question is: How do you make your family hungry? And the answer is: You make them wait four hours for dinner. Don’t let the twist be obvious. But don’t let it come out of left field. The reader should say, “Wow! I didn’t see that coming!” And then, “But, yeah, now that it’s happened…of course, makes perfect sense.” Don’t reliably be reliable. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl alternates between Nick and Amy Dunne each telling the story—and each is an unreliable narrator. Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train uses a first-person narrative from Rachel Watson (the chief protagonist), Anna Boyd/Watson and Megan Hipwell. All three are unreliable. In any thriller, the only person the reader should rely on is the author…rely on him or her to deliver a satisfying story. And remember, there is no such thing as a cookie-cutter unreliable narrator. Paula Hawkins says, “Amy Dunne is a psychopath, an incredibly controlling and manipulative, smart, cunning woman. (Rachel is) just a mess who can’t do anything right.” Consider creating your unreliable narrator(s). Don’t guess what you’re writing about. Know the place and its people. Elmore Leonard knew Detroit first-hand. But for his novels Pronto and Riding the Rap, set in Harlan County, Kentucky, he did a lot of research. How accurate is the F/X series Justified, based on those novels? The series creator gave his staff wrist bands bearing the initials WWED—meaning, “What Would Elmore Do?” Meaning, in times of doubt, trust the writer. Research and write so you earn the reader’s trust. Don’t settle for an overworked setting. Find a place that you can own. This is especially true if you’re writing a series. Tony Hillerman owns the Navaho lands. James Lee Burke owns the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. George Crumley owns Montana. Elmore Leonard owns Detroit. Elmore Leonard also owns Miami…Carl Hiassen owns bizarre Florida…Tim Dorsey owns even more bizarre Florida. Robert Parker owns Boston…Dennis Lehane owns the rougher, blue-collar Boston. Ralph Dennis (admittedly less well known) owns Atlanta seen by an unlicensed PI and his hired muscle…Karin Slaughter owns Atlanta seen by an agent in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Martin Cruz Smith owns Moscow. Stieg Larsen owns Sweden. Jo Nesbo owns Norway. There are dozens more author-owned places but not every good place has been grabbed. For example, nobody yet really owns Las Vegas. Maybe you could try to? Or find a milieu that you can own. For example, within pre-World War II Europe, within the moral ambiguity of that time and place…In his Berlin Noir series, Philp Kerr owns Berlin. In his thrillers, Alan Furst owns all of pre-World War II Europe. Be ambitious. If you can’t find a place to own, create one. But base it on facts. In The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton created a secret underground laboratory to handle lethal microorganisms. He says, “A lot of Andromeda is…trying to create an imaginary world using recognizable techniques and real people.” In his Jurassic Park, Crichton created an environment based on what was known about dinosaurs a the time. In The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon created an alternate history in which there is a thriving (and threatened) Jewish territory in Alaska. Like The Andromeda Stain and Jurassic Park, what makes this fiction believable is Chabon’s skillful use of facts. Don’t forget other possible milieus. I’ve seized on biotechnology. Studying biotechnology at Columbia, I was struck by the philosophical, moral and legal questions it raised, its potential to usher in new paradigms in our lives and in society, and the life-and-death stakes it could create for characters in a novel. My first thriller, Living Proof, was about the implications of the criminalization of embryonic stem cell research. Now, in Baby X, I look at the implications of a medical breakthrough called IVG—in vitro gametogenesis—in which any two people on Earth could make a baby. What if a world-famous singer has some of his DNA stolen? From just a trace of saliva, left on a mic he sang into, could come sperm or eggs… And definitely a thriller! *** View the full article

At the turn of the twentieth century, American crime fiction was at a shallow ebb. Anna Katharine Green, who had achieved great success with The Leavenworth Case in 1887, continued to produce popular novels (and would do so until 1923), but the tastes of American readers of mystery fiction had turned to England. Certainly the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories had focused attention on British crime writing, but not until Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose first novel appeared in 1908, the popular The Circular Staircase, did American mystery writers again achieve success. It is not surprising, then, that Richard Harding Davis— the most popular American journalist of the day—set a work of crime fiction in London. In his novella, a visitor to London becomes lost in the fog at night and wanders into a house, where he finds two murder victims. Three different narrators tell of the adventure and the resulting investigation. Though one reviewer hailed it as a “decided innovation in ‘detective’ fiction,” that was hardly the case; in fact, its charm is in evoking many of the clichés and popular settings of crime writing. Ellery Queen, the great mystery author/editor, hailed the tale as the “curtain raiser” of the first golden age of detective short-storytelling, “a perfect blend of Anglo-American storytelling.” By the 1880s, fog had become a symbol of pervasive but hidden evil. Christine L. Croton, in London Fog: The Biography, observes: A metaphorical relationship between social conflict and fog became apparent—a fear that the most brutal members of the residuum could spread across London, moving from east to west, like the fog, to upset the social balance and wreak havoc and destruction. In the West End disturbances of 1886, indeed, this threat for a time became a reality, further stoking the fires of social tension and anxiety. The fogs of London had a special frisson for Victorian readers. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories were indelibly set, with few exceptions, in fog- and smog-polluted London. Vincent Starrett, in his sonnet, “221B,” penned in 1942, characterized the setting of Doyle’s tales: A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane As night descends upon this fabled street A lonely hansom splashes through the rain, The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet. Of course, Doyle was not the only writer to immerse his tales in fog. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) describes “fog everywhere. Fog up the river…fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has several scenes set in the fog, and the theme of pollution is central to the story: Jekyll’s downfall is brought about by “impurities” in the chemicals (as well as, of course, impurities in Jekyll himself). The London scenes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are immersed in smoke, amid fears of the “unclean.” Indeed, even the fog itself could be a danger. In William Hay’s 1880 The Doom of the Great City, a black fog covers London for months, bringing death and destruction. Thus Davis’s evocation of a fog-shrouded city would have immediately set the stage for a tale of shocking crimes and characters who are not what they seem. In the Fog was Davis’s first attempt at long-form crime fiction. His previous writing had achieved solid success but included only a few criminous stories. For example, his collections Gallegher, and Other Stories (1891), Van Bibber and Others (1892), and The Exiles, and Other Stories (1894) dabbled in the occasional tale of robbers or grifts. Throughout his career, Davis drew on his stints as a war correspondent in the Second Boer War (in South Africa) and the Spanish-American War, both reporting on the action and fictionalizing his experiences. (Winston Churchill and Jack London were also well-known war correspondents of the era whose other writing was informed by the stories they lived and heard.) Davis’s first great success, the novella The Princess Aline (1895), is about the adventures of a young American artist who falls in love with a picture of a European princess and travels to Europe to find her. The book was the fifth bestselling book in America in its year of publication. Davis set out to make fun of the genre of crime fiction. The Englishman Sir Andrew, the lynchpin of In the Fog, is a devotee steeped in the mysteries of the French writer Émile Gaboriau and Arthur Conan Doyle (both specifically mentioned) as well as the countless other English and French crime writers of the day. The mystery reader was by nature an addict, Davis suggests, and certainly the bookstalls of fin-de-siècle London offered much to satisfy the addict’s cravings. The quantity of pre-twentieth-century crime fiction can only be estimated. Graham Greene and Dorothy Glover, for example, were assiduous collectors of those titles and in 1966 published a catalogue of their collection, consisting of 471 titles; however, Greene freely admitted that their collection was far from complete, and he hoped that in the ten years after publication, it would double in size. Davis’s Arabian Nights–like novella of three linked tales focuses on intrigues of great popularity. The “lost explorer” and “unknown” places of Africa were still very much in the minds of English-speaking readers, who hungrily followed the reports of the journalist Henry Morton Stanley on his search of Dr. David Livingstone in the 1870s and Stanley’s continued explorations of Africa through the 1890s. Other explorers, such as John Hanning Speke and Sir Richard Francis Burton, also piqued the interest of armchair travelers around the world, and fiction such as the African novels of H. Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad was widely read. (Though controversial today, Haggard’s and Conrad’s depictions of Africa and African people were extremely popular with White English and American readers of the day.) At the same time, the activities of Russian spies and the glamor of Russia’s extensive nobility were equally appealing. M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, published in 1895, was a well-regarded series of mysterious, somewhat supernatural tales of an exiled Russian prince, and works like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina were reaching widespread English-speaking audiences (both first translated into English in 1886). Davis’s fiction often drew on his own life and experiences. For example, Davis admitted that The Princess Aline was drawn from his own infatuation with Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, who under the name Alexandra Feodorovna served as the Czarina of Russia.* “Gallegher” was at least partially autobiographical: in 1916, the editor of The Bookman stated as fact that there was a real office boy employed by the Philadelphia Press named Tommy Gallegher. Davis was assigned by the Press to cover a fight in a stable in a suburb of Philadelphia, and when the police raided, arresting everyone, Davis slipped his report of the fight to Gallegher, who was able to make his way back to the newspaper offices with the story in time for the morning edition. However, the crime in “Gallegher,” as in the case of In the Fog, is fictional. Davis himself had an adventure in the London fog in 1897, the same year in which he set this tale, and which was not unlike the events of the story. He had just finished Christmas dinner at the home of silent screen star Cecilia “Cissie” Loftus and her husband, Justin McCarthy, in the company of their mutual friend, the legendary actress Ethel Barrymore. Davis and Barrymore left the McCarthys’ around 11:00 p.m. Here is his own version: There was a light fog. I said that all sorts of things ought to happen in a fog but that no one ever did have adventures nowadays. At that we rode straight into a bank of fog that makes those on the fishing banks look like Spring sunshine. You could not see the houses, nor the street, nor the horse, not even his tail.…The cabman discovered the fact that he was lost and turned around in circles and the horse slipped on the asphalt which was thick with frost, and then we backed into lamp-posts and curbs until Ethel got so scared she bit her under lip until it bled. You could not tell whether you were going into a house or over a precipice or into a sea. The horse finally backed up a flight of steps, and rubbed the cabby against a front door, and jabbed the wheels into an area railing and fell down. That, I thought, was our cue to get out, so we slipped into a well of yellow mist and felt around for each other until a square block of light suddenly opened in mid air and four terrified women appeared in the doorway of the house through which the cabman was endeavoring to butt himself. They begged us to come in, and we did—Being Christmas and because the McCarthys always call me “King” I had put on all my decorations and the tin star and I also wore my beautiful fur coat…I took this off because the room was very hot, forgetting about the decorations and remarked in the same time to Ethel that it would be folly to try and get to Barkston Gardens, and that we must go back to the “Duchess’s” for the night. At this Ethel answered calmly, “yes, Duke,” and I became conscious of the fact that the eyes of the four women were riveted on my fur coat and decorations. At the word “Duke” delivered by a very pretty girl in an evening frock and with nothing on her hair the four women disappeared and brought back the children, the servants, and the men, who were so overcome with awe and excitement and Christmas cheer that they all but got down on their knees in a circle. So, we fled out into the night followed by minute directions as to where “Your Grace” and “Your Ladyship” should turn. For years, no doubt, on a Christmas Day the story will be told in that house, wherever it may be in the millions of other houses of London, how a beautiful Countess and a wicked Duke were pitched into their front door out of a hansom cab, and after having partaken of their Christmas supper, disappeared again into a sea of fog. Four years later, the imagination of Davis, still only thirty-seven, would spin a series of yarns that took shape from his own respite from the fog. Did Davis imagine himself as the dashing young American lieutenant? Was the Russian beauty another incarnation of his Princess Alix? These questions are intriguing but wholly irrelevant to enjoyment of this brisk tale. And so, into the fog… ______________________________ From Leslie Klinger’s introduction to IN THE FOG, by Richard Harding Davis. Copyright ©2024 by Leslie Klinger. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, British Library Crime Classics. All rights reserved. View the full article

CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Andrew Boryga, Victim (Doubleday) In Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, a young hustler on the rise learns to manipulate the currency of identity as he bends the truth about his past and establishes himself in the world of New York media and letters. The satire in this novel comes in sharp and merciless, but the friendship at the story’s center steals the show, rounding out all the complexities and contradictions of two young men on different sides of the truth. Boryga is a keen observer of culture and a storyteller with style to spare. –DM Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Ray (Bloomsbury) Jennifer Croft is the renowned translator of Olga Tokarczuk and this debut takes full advantage of her background in the best way possible. In this complex and metaphysical mystery, eight translators arrive at a sprawling home in the Polish forest, only to find their author has gone missing. Where is Irena Ray? What secrets has she been keeping from her devoted fans? And what’s with all the slime mold? –MO Joel H. Morris, All Our Yesterdays (Putnam) In this rich historical reimagining of the lead-up to Macbeth, Morris asks, what if the Lady MacBeth had a son? And what if her new relationship with the thane MacBeth after the death of her brutal first husband was predicated on equality and respect, as opposed to the beaten-down womanhood of others in 11th century Scotland? Thoughtful, eerie, and full of medieval magic, Morris’ take on the much-maligned lady will perhaps have you rooting for her and her partner, or at least, feeling some sympathy for her quest of vengeance. –MO Sophie Wan, Women of Good Fortune (Gallery) This book is so damn delightful! In Women of Good Fortune, Lulu, Rina, and Jane have come up with the perfect heist to get out of the marriage trap and fulfill their dreams: they are going to steal the gift money from Lulu’s upcoming wedding to the scion of one of Shanghai’s wealthiest families. The heist requires an elaborate plan, and it’s no wonder that the novel got a shining endorsement from Grace D. Li, author of the last great heist story I enjoyed. I cannot wait for this to become a movie. Also I really appreciate that Sophie Wan’s bio includes her interest in “staying hydrated”—may we all learn from her example. *drinks water quickly* –MO Brendan Flaherty, The Dredge (Atlantic Monthly) Two brothers with a secret and a woman with a job to do (and traumas of her own to reckon with) converge at the site of a Connecticut pond scheduled to be dredged, in this powerful new novel. Flaherty deftly conjures up an atmosphere of dread and suspense, with all roads leading to the pond, and all concerns pointing toward what lies at its bottom. This is an assured, compulsively readable debut. –DM View the full article

In a late episode of Better Call Saul, Saul Goodman beseeches his wife Kim Wexler, “What’s done can be undone.” Caught up in a web of lies and deaths, and questioning what she has become along the way, Kim has relinquished her law license, and Saul implores her to undo her decision in an act of desperation. He knows what she has worked to achieve; he knows the people she has helped. He knows that their partnership is on the line. His plea is also an interesting inversion of a line from Shakespeare’s historic play, Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, haunted by remorse to the point of bloody hallucinations, knows there is no going back from the murderous machinations she and her husband have set into motion, and laments, “What’s done cannot be undone.” At last, she acknowledges that her cruelty and her husband’s bloody deeds are about to catch up with them. Over four hundred years later, Saul says the line even as he knows it is untrue, even as he knows that his schemes—and Kim’s guilt—have brought their relationship to an end. Criminal couples have long inspired fascination in popular culture, in part thanks to our collective curiosity about their psychology. A single immoral mind we can make sense of. But an immoral romantic couple—Bonnie and Clyde, Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore, the “Lonely Hearts” murderers—unites two corrupt sensibilities working in tandem. Is it love that binds them, a connection bound between two disturbed people who have finally found their soul mates? Or is one, dominant and sociopathic, manipulating the other, who is weaker and likely to follow? This was the speculation about the crime of the (early 20th) century—the 1924 Leopold and Loeb trial—in which two young men were convicted of kidnapping and killing a 14-year-old boy, Bobby Franks. Leopold and Loeb’s relationship was itself an object of psychological speculation: the two spent seven months planning to commit the “perfect” crime. It was also the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s parlor thriller, Rope. Based on the 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton (perhaps more well-known for Gas Light, from which the word “gaslighting” is derived), it stars Jimmy Stewart stars as a former teacher, whose jovial Nietzschean/Dostoyevskian thought experiments about the “exceptional man” (the Übermensch who operates beyond common moral laws) have influenced a pair of his former students. Released in 1948, just after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials, Rope was a poignant reflection on the horrors to which such a philosophy leads. But the film’s main focus is a couple: the two young men, Brandon and Phillip, who strangle a classmate and place him in a wooden chest that will ultimately serve as both a temporary coffin and a table from which they will serve their invited guests—including the victim’s father—dinner. In fiction, the couple succeeds for a time. They are the epitome of partnership: two minds operating as one. The recent streaming series, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, highlights the development of this unified thinking. It follows two single characters—played by Maya Erskine and Donald Glover—who each apply for a job as covert agents that requires them hide in plain sight under the disguise of a marriage. Having signed up for the money, they each wonder what it would be like if their partnership were not merely a cover. Initially, the excitement of the job is not as enticing as the potential relationship. As that relationship develops, then becomes threatened, the primary tension arises not in their being caught, but in preserving the partnership. They have to be aligned, mentally as well as emotionally, and it is this facet that is tested. Killer couples are unified in their ambition, and they seldom have kids, at least in fiction. A child for the criminal couple sets a higher moral task. They can no longer (should no longer) be solely devoted to the partner and their joint ambitions. This tension is the premise of my own novel, All Our Yesterdays, which weaves The Tragedy of Macbeth together with some of the historical elements about the real couple that the Bard ignores: mainly, that they had a child. Shakespeare’s play, in emphasizing this noble couple’s ambition to become king and queen of Scotland, removes the historical fact that Lady Macbeth had a son from a previous marriage. What’s more, the actual Macbeth adopted his wife’s son as his own and later made him his heir. Shakespeare’s omission of a child living in the Macbeths’ castle plays an important thematic role in the play: it eliminates the stakes raised by heredity. The son, who features in my reimagined prelude, becomes a binding force for the couple’s humanity and the potential for their ruin. Sigmund Freud, citing his contemporary, the Austrian physician Ludwig Jekels, suggests that Shakespeare potentially saw the Macbeths as a single character, broken into two personages. They split the mental and moral ramifications of the crime: for example, Macbeth hallucinates a dagger, but that moment of madness actually transfers fully to Lady Macbeth, who suffers a complete mental breakdown along with her own hallucinations. “Together,” Freud writes, “they [Macbeth and Lady Macbeth] exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from the same prototype.” Which brings us to the inevitable: the killer couple’s relationship will fail. Justice will find them—or death. At some point their love will no longer be enough to bind them. It’s as though this intense unity—the twin minds, the divided individual—cannot possibly hold. One of them has to relent, feel the remorse they have been denying themselves, see the lack of remorse in their partner, which now makes them unideal. One goes too far; the other has to break free. We can imagine what this means for Brandon and Phillip, the two young artful murderers in Hitchcock’s Rope. I won’t spoil Better Call Saul or Mr. and Mrs. Smith except to say that, as outside observers, we are more upset by the threat to the relationship than to their lawful comeuppance. By and large, whether it is Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, or Saul and Kim, we know the criminal couple cannot get away with it—at least not both of them. It’s unnatural, that level of intimacy. To be completely united in love is romantic, but to be completely united in the mind is psychopathic. *** View the full article

Sometimes novels inadvertently reflect some aspect of the current zeitgeist, and Irish writer Claire Coughlan’s first one is this kind of story. Set in 1968 during the Christmas season, Where They Lie is a complex tale with a large cast—both living and dead—about the mysterious disappearance in 1943 of a theatre actress, Julia Bridges, and a former mid-wife, Gloria Fitzpatrick, who may or may not have played a role in that disappearance. Gloria was also a patron of the theatre where Julia performed. While never charged with a crime related to Julia’s disappearance, in 1956 Gloria was sentenced to hang for performing a backstreet abortion. Fast forward to the night before Christmas Eve 1968, and young, competitive, aspiring journalist Nicoletta Sarto is listening to the few staffers in the newsroom at the Irish Sentinel talk about the biggest Christmas Eve story in the paper’s history: “Gloria Fitzpatrick, the very last woman in the history of the state to get the death penalty, though of course it was later commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of insanity,” according to Duffy, the editor of the Sentinel. Duffy then points out that Gloria was also suspected of being involved in Julia’s disappearance. As a junior reporter, it’s Nicoletta’s job to make calls to the local Garda stations around Dublin, to ask if any newsworthy events have occurred. It’s a quiet time, but a local Inspector, David Morris, phones back the newspaper with some startling news: A body has been dug up in the yard of a prominent family and there is a wedding ring among the remains. It’s identified as belonging to Julia Bridges. “When Inspector Morris rings off, Nicoletta can feel her world flip on its axis. A flicker of static snakes up from the pit of her stomach to sit tight at the crown of her skull. This story is hers for the telling.” In an email interview, Coughlan mused about the evolution of her story, and how the writing process can take an author to unexpected places. “My story had many inspirations so it’s difficult to pinpoint one and say it’s based on a real-life occurrence. I did a lot of research around the subject of backstreet abortion in mid-century Ireland – reading contemporaneous newspaper archives, academic papers, court reports. “The character of Gloria Fitzpatrick, the abortionist in my novel, came to me first. I wanted to find out what made her tick, and I wrote lots of fragmentary pieces around the interiority of her life. I thought I was writing literary fiction. Then I revisited the character of a journalist from something I’d written for work submitted during my MA and MFA courses at UCD (University College Dublin), and I combined them, realizing that Nicoletta was my protagonist, who would follow the thread of the story, whereas Gloria worked better as the antagonist.” The journalist as detective is a popular crime fiction subgenre. I asked Coughlan if she made that choice based on her own past work as a journalist. “I felt I knew that world. Though because I’ve made my journalist-as-detective a 1960s sleuth, there was a remove from my own experience in the 2000s-2010s, and I hoped the character of Nicoletta wouldn’t be read as autobiographical.” And why crime fiction? “I had a story I wanted to tell, and crime fiction seemed to be the best vehicle for it, quite apart from being a big reader in the genre. I love the structure of crime novels; there’s freedom in being able to play with that. Anyway, I think at heart all novels are mysteries; crime fiction just goes bigger and better with the stakes.” Where They Lie, as with so many Dublin-set novels, revels in the history, speech and milieu of the city. Although Coughlan was not around during the era the story unfolds in, she didn’t see that as a problem. “I’m very familiar with Dublin as I lived in Dublin city centre for 10 years and walked everywhere – it’s a city that’s easily traversable on foot. Many of the buildings haven’t changed that much; it’s a blend of old and new, the grimy and glittering. I don’t think Ireland of the 1960s had changed that much from the 1980s I remember when I was a child, so I didn’t have to do that much research when it came to things like vernacular and food, for example.” Where They Lie is brimming with memorable characters and a labyrinthine structure. It’s as though Nicoletta is on a journey she isn’t cognizant of until very late in the story. It’s also a plot that’s impossible to summarize without revealing the life-changing stepping stones Nicoletta must navigate as she encounters one startling, revelatory twist after another. About that expansive sea of humanity populating the story…why so many? Coughlan laughs, “I agree there’s a large cast of characters in Where They Lie! To be honest, I didn’t intend to have so many, but Nicoletta speaks to so many people in the course of her investigation [of Julia’s demise] that it grew and grew. Creating characters is something I really enjoy doing, along with plotting, and once I had the main character relationships figured out, everyone else followed. I started with a deep dive into who the main characters were and the rest came in increments. “New characters would appear on the pages in the course of drafting, and then I’d have to figure out what to do with them. Usually, I’d make copious notes both on my laptop and the Notes app on my phone ‘telling’ myself the story, so I’d have some idea of the direction they were going to take.” Coughlan conveys an evocative sense of place, and offers the reader lovely, sometimes melancholy, descriptions of Dublin. After an emotional encounter with a peripheral character, she trudges home in waning light: “The sky is dark and leaden as Nicoletta wanders listlessly back in the direction of town. The windows of the grand Victorian squares and neat Edwardian terraces of Rathmines and Ranelagh are swaddled at this hour, though it’s only midafternoon. A premature dusk has already descended, hanging limply over the rust-colored brick chimneys like residual smoke after a conjurer’s final act.” In another scene, she goes to the home of a man named Gerard, who is the brother of Gloria Fitzpatrick. The power is off, and Gerard says it’s because of a storm. He’s hitting the sauce, and “…grunts and shuffles back over to his position against the wall, looking out on the brambles in the back garden, which are cast in a hallucinogenic glow. Nicoletta marvels at their sheer scale. The spikes twist and turn inward, forming a series of cavernous tombs.” When she asks Gerard a key question in her quest for truth, just before he replies, the power returns and “the room is flooded with light, bringing each shabby corner into chaotic relief.” It’s a nice touch. Is she working on the next book? “Yes! It’s a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster UK and Harper in the US, so I’ve re-immersed myself in Nicoletta’s world to meet the looming deadline for book number two, which is a sequel, set a year and a half later in the summer of 1970.” Where They Lie is a striking debut – perhaps a bit overstuffed with twists and that large cast, but in the end, Coughlan cunningly handles it all with a confident aplomb. *** View the full article

I joined my first cult when I was…just kidding. Mostly. When I was born in the early 80s, my parents were part of a church in Virginia Beach, an area influenced by the likes of Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network as well as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. These are the kinds of organizations that helped fuel the Satanic Panic, decrying games like Dungeons & Dragons and any Halloween celebration that wasn’t spent as a simple “Harvest Festival” in a church gym. My family’s Southern Baptist Church was no exception, inviting my parents to break their classic rock records in order to avoid “backmasking,” the supposed subliminal evil messages encoded in rock songs and only discernible when played backwards. Some might view what my parents were experiencing in the early 80s as a religious moment; others, as a cultish craze. My family’s church provided community, comfort, and belonging, but it also, by default, often dictated how members voted, which media they consumed, and their circle of friends. It’s all about perspective, but a decade and a half later, my parents very much regretted the fact that they’d broken some of their favorite records at the church’s behest. When I began developing the idea for my third novel, Watch It Burn, I knew that I wanted to investigate an organization declaring itself #notacult while also subtly infiltrating an entire community. I soon found that the hardest part of writing a book with a cult at the center is figuring out the appeal for potential members. How does one person or one couple or one small group of leaders assert themselves as ‘the supreme authority’ while also remaining charismatic enough to draw followers in? This question—the how and the why of cults—is one I explored as I dove into the story at the heart of Watch It Burn. The mystery seems simple at first: a sixty-five year old woman drowned in only two inches of the Guadalupe River. But as three women in the town—a journalist, a teacher, and the dead woman’s daughter-in-law—grow suspicious and begin digging deeper into the family and the self-help organization they own, the women find concerning ideology and a slow-burn takeover of their tiny Texas town. Infiltrating and exposing the cult becomes their ultimate goal. I knew I needed inspiration as I wrote Watch It Burn, so I sought out other works that could serve as mentor texts for me to study and also provide a bit of entertainment as I developed my own creepy cult. Here’s what I found and the six books I’d recommend to anyone looking for a creepy cultish read. According to Amanda Montell’s nonfiction Cultish, many of us are part of organizations that have cultish elements, some beneficial (like extending opportunities) of belonging, and some, well, less so. Montell tackles traditional cults like Jonestown and Scientology as well as groups that use common language that invite others to join. In Montell’s appraisal, MLMs, SoulCycle, marketing companies, and religious communities make the cut for cultish status. Reviews online sometimes berate her for going this far, but I thought that her reasoning was part of the appeal of the book that is aptly named for not exactly being a cult. Inspired in part by the Sarah Lawrence Sex-Cult, Ashley Winstead’s The Last Housewife explores the long-lasting effects of trauma in early adulthood just as a young woman is coming of age. The novel opens with Shay Evans, all grown up and living a quiet and privileged life in a wealthy Texas suburb when her past comes calling. Her friend Laurel, who was involved in the cult that Shay has pushed far into her past, has been found dead. With the help of a podcast creator and old friend, Shay embarks on a quest to find out what really happened to Laurel and how she can bring justice—and perhaps, revenge—to the man who has caused so much harm. When Delilah Walker returns home for the funeral of her teenage sweetheart, she suspects that there’s more to his death. The church at the heart of the rural community has grown into a mega-church, and the pastor, who espouses misogynistic teachings and ultra-conservative ideology, seems, in Del’s mind, to be the primary suspect. In Amy Suiter Clark’s Lay Your Body Down, Del sticks around to explore what’s really been going on in the cultish church that has overtaken her hometown, and more importantly, to find out what actually happened to the love of her life. The Family Upstairs is my favorite Lisa Jewell book, which is saying a lot since I’m an adoring fan. Libby Jones is aching to find out the identity of her birth parents, but when she discovers the truth on her twenty-fifth birthday, she may regret ever having wanted to know. Libby learns that she was one of the lone survivors, a baby found in a crib, in a tiny cult taking up residence in an abandoned London manor twenty-five years earlier. Now, Libby knows the truth and has inherited the manor where three adults, all dressed in black, were found dead decades ago. From the very first page of Alison Wisdom’s The Burning Season we meet charismatic Papa Jake and his ‘miracles,’ and we’re transported to a tiny Texas enclave where no one is allowed to call 911 as long as only one house at a time burns to the ground. Rosemary, in an effort to save her struggling marriage moves to the town of Dawson and joins its church, but even after trying to fit in, she is aimless in this conservative community. After meeting a new mother in need of a friend, she finally feels as if she’s found a purpose, but the fires are spreading, turning everything around her to ash and ember. In The Body Next Door by Maia Chance, Hannah is eager to keep up the façade of a happy, rich young wife and mother, but when a construction crew unearths bones next door to her family’s second home on Orcas Island, she must face the past she’s tried to bury. As a child, she was connected to a cult on the island, and she knows more than she’s saying about those troubling years and the pile of bones next door, but will she be brave enough to face her past and to confront her own secrets—and those nearest to her—in an effort to protect her and her children’s future? A speculative element at the heart of this cultish story makes this a true page turner. Chance’s novel launches this summer, so PreOrder today. *** View the full article

I don’t think of myself as a reader or writer of crime novels, and yet (knocking on my own skull to see if anyone’s inside) almost all of my novels do have a crime—or a strange disappearance or a person concealing their identity or a similar mystery. My latest novel, Discipline, involves three stolen paintings, a no-doubt-about-it-crime story, inspired (in part) by reading about a man fleeing from police who, perhaps to conceal evidence, burned two of a famous painter’s canvases by the side of the road. I realize (more knocking on my own head) that I loved Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and am a fan of Kate Atkinson’s fantastic Detective Brody series, so I am as deluded about my reading as my writing. That said, here is a list of crime books that don’t exactly read like crime books, because they take on a lot more (emotionally, culturally, historically) than the apparent crime that is (very much) at the heart of the novel. Anne Berest, The Postcard One day a mysterious postcard arrives in Anne Berest’s mother’s mailbox. On it, and in an unfamiliar hand, are the names of three of her relatives who died in the Holocaust. No signature. Who sent this and why? Though she is Jewish, Berest has not really been exposed to the faith or culture. She only investigates who sent the postcard and why years later, after an anti-Semitic incident at her daughter’s school. The result is a long book that is a quick read, ranging between past and present, as Berest describes her remarkable family’s history, up to and during the war, when some perished and others worked for the Resistance. The story is also about its own telling, so we watch Berest as she tracks down clues, interviews strangers, and finally solves the mystery of the postcard and what it means, for her at least, to be a Jew. Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao In The Family Chao, Lan Samantha Chang kills off the patriarch of a Midwestern Chinese-American family, and, in good detective-fiction style, there are plenty of suspects, given how unlikeable the man was. Fate is a suspect, too, as the death might have been an accident. The story reads less like a whodunit than a Russian novel, because it is one in disguise, a loose retelling of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The action starts after the adult Chao children return home for Christmas, just after their mother decides to leave her husband for an extended stay in a Buddhist temple. The drama focuses on family angers and hurts, as well as a community of Chinese-Americans whose lives revolve around the family restaurant that is the father’s dynasty, legacy, and weapon. Jane Pek, The Verifiers Jane Pek examines generational differences in Chinese-American families, even as she places her protagonist Claudia Lin at the Verifiers, a secretive firm for daters who wonder if their online matches are honest about their identities. When one client disappears, Lin (who adores mystery novels) decides to investigate, helping herself (without permission) to her agency’s files and tracking software. How do we understand intimacy and trust in contemporary relationships? Though Claudia’s a whiz with computers, she’s someone whose life raises this question more than answers, given she steers away from romantic attachments. The novel pokes gentle fun at the detective novel genre and Chinese stereotypes, while ringing an alarm bell about the dangers of dating (and existing) in the digital age. Margot Livesey, The Boy in the Field Three siblings, walking home from their school in a small town outside Oxford, England find a dead boy in a field. Who is he? What happened to him? The novel answers this mystery eventually but the real mystery is with the three siblings. How will they incorporate this terrible find? One sibling tries to figure out what happened, another finds herself interested in her own blossoming sexuality (even, because she assumes the boy was killed by a man, as she considers the potential darkness of any male partner), and a third (who is adopted) is prompted by the drama to search for his birth mother. The crime is solved, but the real mystery is with the evolving relationships in, and outside, the family. Constance Debré, Love Me Tender The criminal in this memoir-novel is the narrator accused (unjustly) of pedophilia by her ex, now that they are in a difficult custody battle over their son. The marital break-up had been amicable until the author decides to explore her sexuality and recast herself more broadly, quitting her job as a lawyer, downsizing her material life, while she upsizes her sexual life with women. Debré’s book is not for everyone and her rejection of the status quo seems at times the admirable, free experiment she claims it is and at times like an extended pat on her own quite muscular back, since with daily swims she strips her body, as well as her life, to the bone. Even so, the drama of her case and desire to recreate herself intrigues, as does her swift, tight writing, and the moments when her emotional life and philosophical beliefs seem at odds. Susan Perabo, The Fall of Lisa Bellow This novel tells the story of two middle-school girls forced to the floor during a robbery, one of whom is subsequently abducted. Though the novel explores the possibilities of what might have happened to the kidnapped girl, the focus in on those left behind—specifically the girl who isn’t taken and her family. How does the girl handle her survivor’s guilt, especially given she never much liked Lisa Bellow, the “popular girl” in her grade? How does her mother handle her relief and concern for her daughter? And what about her brother who has his own crisis to weather, after a traumatic baseball injury? Despite its dark subject, this book, which is so astute about parents and teens, pushes toward healing by letting the characters reckon with the imagined truth and the actual truth in a genuinely complex way. Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys The crime of murder as experienced by the near victims is the subject of this horrifying, infuriating yet compelling tale of young Black men at a juvenile reform school in 1960s Florida. The Pulitzer-Prize winning novel is based on a real place and will make you enraged, astound you with human evil, and impress you with how victims endure psychological and physical pain. It will also amaze you with the formal trick, late in the novel, that recasts the historical nightmare to underline the long reach of such tragedies. *** View the full article

“They had gold and my baby was sick.” —Mahin Qadiri About ninety-five miles northwest of the Iranian capital Tehran is the city of Qazvin. Located on the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, it has a population of more than four hundred thousand people. It’s a place rich in cultural and historical significance. It’s also a place where people are turning up dead. A man is murdered in 2006. Between February and May 2009, five women are murdered. The method used in the killings is similar, as is the method by which the bodies are disposed of. Each of the victims has been strangled and, apart from the first victim, all of them are women. Specifically, older women. Is there a serial killer on the loose in Qazvin? *** Iran isn’t the first place you think of when it comes to serial killers. Yet in the twenty-first century alone, there have been several. In the early 2000s, Saeed Hanaei (the “Spider Killer”) targeted female sex workers in Mashhad, claiming he was cleansing the city of “moral corruption”; his known victim tally was sixteen. Mohammed Bijeh (the “Tehran Desert Vampire”) was convicted of raping and murdering at least sixteen young boys, ages eight to fifteen, in 2004, and at least two adults, with some accounts listing the victim count in excess of forty. Farid Baghlani (the “Cyclist Killer”), a self-proclaimed woman hater, killed at least fifteen women and girls and one boy between 2004 and 2008 in Abadan and Khorramshahr. Omid Barak (the “Highway Killer”), targeted women who “cheated,” murdering at least ten women between 2006 and 2008 in the Karaj area. As one might expect, all these serial killers were men. Catching a Serial Killer When the body of an older male is found beneath a bridge in Qazvin, there’s nothing to indicate it’s the work of a serial killer. After all, the murder could have been committed for any number of reasons, perhaps a dispute of some kind or illegal dealings that turned violent, maybe even something to do with drugs. Despite the best efforts of police to find the culprit, the case goes cold. Nearly three years pass before another body turns up, and then another. The randomness of the murders and their frequency raise alarm bells, especially since there’s nothing to suggest that these might be “crimes of passion.” Suddenly residents of the city find themselves on edge as they wonder who among them might be next. A pattern is emerging. Discounting the earlier murder of the man, the victims are women who range in age from their mid-fifties to early seventies—and they’ve all been strangled, many with their own headscarves, and their jewelry forcibly removed from their bodies. They also appear to have been drugged. These are women who were going about their normal daily business, never to be seen alive again. Are these specifically targeted killings? The fact that the victims are older women does seem to indicate that the killer is seeking a “type.” Perhaps the theft of the jewelry is a bonus rather than a motivating factor. Police are now faced with the very real possibility that they have a serial killer in their midst. Prosecutor Mohammad Bagher Olfat assigns a team to the case. Special investigators are also brought in from Tehran. It’s becoming clear from both the evidence they have and the eyewitnesses they’ve interviewed that the victims either knew or trusted their killer. But what happened to the gold jewelry that was removed from the bodies? To sell that much gold, a purchasing invoice would be required. Police get to work, tracking the stolen gold in the markets as well as checking footage from CCTV cameras. Thanks to several eyewitness accounts, as well as a footprint found on the headscarf belonging to one of the victims, investigators are now certain that the killer drives an older-model, light-colored Renault car. And the killer is female. As is the case in crimes such as these, people begin to crawl out of the woodwork, all claiming to have important information that will help solve the crimes. Qazvin police receive several tips a day from supposed eyewitnesses, including melodramatic accounts from “victims” who say that they too, were taken by the killer, but had fought back, narrowly escaping death. Having no choice but to follow every lead, police investigate these claims, only to find that they’re bogus. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for people to invent stories or provide false evidence to police. It’s often done to gain attention or sympathy, or to frame someone, or even to avoid being suspected of a crime themselves. Not only does this hinder the investigation process, it can lead to wrongful accusations and convictions. It can even lead to a prison sentence for the storyteller. Valuable police time is wasted—time that could have been spent trying to solve a crime instead of chasing down fake leads. But finally, a credible eyewitness does come forth, and she has a harrowing tale to tell. A woman in her sixties tells investigators that on April 2, 2009, she escaped from the killer during a visit to the city’s Chahar Anbiya Shrine. A young woman approached her while she was praying and asked if she could join her in prayer. Noticing the woman’s jewelry, the younger draws her into a conversation about which is superior—yellow or white gold. Later, as they’re leaving, the older woman is offered a lift home. She gets into her new friend’s Renault, which is parked nearby on the street. She doesn’t become suspicious until she’s offered a box of juice to drink, which she repeatedly refuses. The driver becomes more and more insistent that she drink it, ignoring her passenger’s repeated pleas to stop and let her out. It’s only when the woman starts banging on the car window that the driver finally stops the car. The eyewitness works with police to create an E-fit rendering of the Renault driver. CCTV cameras are installed at the shrine, since investigators believe the perpetrator might try again. When the police captain stops by to check that the cameras are working properly, his car, which he parked nearby, gets ticketed. Suddenly this opens up a whole new line of inquiry. What if the killer’s car was ticketed for parking in the same area? Police reach out to traffic enforcement to see if any Renault cars received a fine on the day in question. They find one. The parking ticket was issued on the same day their eyewitness had accepted a ride home from a young woman driving a Renault. Coincidentally, the driver of the Renault was questioned about a previous murder—that of a man whose body was found beneath a bridge, though nothing came of it. In a further coincidence, a woman found strangled to death in her home was a relative of the Renault driver, and she was questioned in that case as well, as were other family members and friends of the victim. But again, nothing came of it. When the woman who managed to escape is shown a photograph of the Renault driver, she confirms that it’s the same individual she met at Chahar Anbiya Shrine—the young woman who gave her a ride. Finally, police have their killer. Armed police officers, accompanied by female guards, descend on the home of Mahin Qadiri in the Minoodar district of the city. She is arrested, along with her husband. Now that they have her in custody, investigators find themselves grappling with several questions: Is their suspect responsible for all the murders? Are there other murders they haven’t yet discovered or traced to her? Did she act alone? At first, Mahin denies everything and refuses to speak for forty-eight hours. Plenty of evidence is put in front of her—evidence that’s difficult to explain away. The yellow powder found in her home is the same anesthetic substance that was used on the victims. One of her shoes matches the footprint found on the headscarf of a victim. Invoices for the sale of gold have been found in her home. An object belonging to one of the victims has been found in her home. Newspaper clippings related to the crimes have been found in her home. And adhesive tape matching the tape used on one of the victims has been found in her car. There’s also the matter of blood evidence, which is even harder to explain away, though Mahin still gives it her best shot. A forensic examination with a special laser light has uncovered traces of blood on the Renault’s car seat—blood that someone attempted to wash away. Although Mahin acknowledges that it’s blood, she claims that it came from meat she purchased from the butcher. However, the tests indicate that it’s human blood, not animal. Mahin starts confessing, eventually admitting to five of the murders, though she stops short of admitting to all six. Despite the pile of evidence against her, she denies responsibility for the murder of her relative, her aunt-in-law, who was murdered in her own home. Investigators are certain she did it, but surmise that her denial could be due to concerns over who in the family will look after her two children, one of whom is disabled with cerebral palsy. The victim is the sister of Mahin’s mother-in-law, and her mother-in-law is the only person who made any attempt to help Mahin with her difficulties; therefore, her reluctance to admit guilt for this particular murder is understandable. However, once assurance is obtained that her two daughters will be cared for by her mother-in-law, Mahin confesses to this murder as well. Because authorities question whether it’s possible for Mahin to have committed all the murders on her own, they suspect she has a partner in crime, her husband being the most likely. They also wonder if a criminal band could be behind the killings and the theft of gold jewelry. Despite Mahin’s insistence that she worked alone, they don’t believe her. They’ve never come across a murder case like this, with a woman as sole perpetrator. Choosing the victims, doing the killing, getting rid of the evidence—could she have done all this by herself? Investigators decide to do reconstructions of the crime scenes with Mahin to confirm her story—from where she picked up her victims to where she took them and what she did to them. The details add up. Mahin Qadiri is their serial killer. ___________________________________ An excerpt from Women Who Murder: An International Collection of Deadly True Crime Tales. By Mitzi Szereto. Copyright 2024. Published by Mango. Reprinted with permission. All rights resesrved. View the full article