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Two weeks ago, I sustained two back-to-back concussions to the frontal lobe of my brain. I took off from work to convalesce, but I don’t have much to say about that. This is is because I was unconscious nearly the entire time. Sleep, I was told by the doctors, was the most surefire way to ensure a speedy and permanent recovery. So I slept. I took melatonin gummies and fish oil capsules and slept, and then woke up and did it all again. Occasionally I’d eat. Once or twice I went on a walk. But sleep was preferable… and not only because it was the thing guaranteed to return my brain to normal as quickly as possible. But also because I was extremely bored. The thing about a concussion is that you can’t tax your brain in any way, while it’s healing. A concussion is a bruise, essentially, the result of your brain smashing into your own skull during moments of extreme impact or preposterous jostling. You can’t strain your vision, lest it slow recovery. Bright lights and focused watching will only make things work. So, no screen time, no reading, no writing… not even, the doctor told me, thinking too much. This was shocking. Never before had a doctor advocated for “not thinking.” Never before had anyone. I don’t spend my time fraternizing with chauvinistic villains from Disney movie. What would I be like without being able to think? I tried to heed these warnings as best I could, but some of them, like this last one, led to more questions. Occasionally, I’d sneak in a few glances at my computer. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I had to. And when I flipped open my laptop, the thing I wanted to do was learn about concussions. I learned from the Oxford English Dictionary Online that the word “concussion” in its meaning of “the shock of impact,” goes back at least to 1490, and the word in its meaning of “a brain injury caused by a sudden blow” goes back at least to 1541. I learned from the writer Roger von Oech, the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, that there are two kinds of thinking: soft and hard. Soft thinking is light, observational, dreamy. Hard thinking is problem-solving. If I got a lot of sleep during the first few days of my concussion, my doctor told me, I’d be able to go back to soft thinking soon enough. This was appalling. “But,” I attempted to reason with my physician. “I’m a writer.” He looked at me. “Not right now, you aren’t.” So, sleep became more enjoyable than lying awake, aware of what I was missing and yet bound from thinking about it. Duly, I slept. And now I’m back. Mostly. I still need to rest a lot. But I’ve blown through soft thinking back to hard. And the first thing I did was use my mostly-rehabilitated faculties to put together a listicle about the only topic on my mind since I walked into that scaffolding pole: head injuries. Yes, this is a list about the most intense head injuries in (crime) film. Now, I should clarify… I’m not talking about cases and after-effects of grievous head trauma like in Memento or The Bourne Identity or Regarding Henry or even The Wizard of Oz. This isn’t a list about hallucinations, amnesiac episodes, or other brain conditions brought on by hits to the head. I’m simply talking about blows or knocks to the head: on-camera instances of “getting hit in the head” that are so painful-seeming, you can’t help but wince when you watch them. Like this list, but not specifically about noses. About the whole head. I also don’t mean, like, savage beheadings or explosions. This isn’t a list where you’ll find the pane of glass thing from The Omen or ANY sequence from ANY Matthew Vaughn movie. I’m also not including moments where someone smashes their own head onto a table. No Talk to Me, no Longlegs, not *that* scene from Fight Club, no Hereditary, no The Lobster. I mean, this also clarifies what we’re doing about genre: this isn’t a list of horror movies; it’s a list of crime (or crime-adjacent) movies. I would love to include the scene from Chocolat where Lena Olin smashes Peter Stormare’s head with a frying pan when he attacks her and Juliet Binoche in a violent, alcoholic rage (“who says I can’t use a skillet?”), but it’s not a crime movie. I am permitting action-adventure movies and sci-fi adventure movies on this list, however. No boxing movies, though, unless they are very much about crime. Now… are we including head injuries that kill? If it were a crime movie, would we include Dolph Lungren’s left hook that kills Apollo Creed in Rocky IV? I don’t think so. I think people need to be able to eventually wake up and walk/limp away? This list is just moments of blunt force trauma to the skull! That’s all it is! This list is not ranked. It is not comprehensive. And if there are any gaping holes in this list… don’t get mad at me… I have a concussion. OK, here we go: Henry Cavill Smashing Liang Yang’s Face with a Laptop in Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018) He breaks the computer… but he knocks the guy out. Turns out, they needed that computer to make a MASK of the guy’s face… so Tom Cruise is pretty annoyed. John Wayne’s “What time is it?” door-breaking punch in The Quiet Man (1952) Is The Quiet Man a crime movie? No. Is it about manslaughter? Yes! So it gets a pass. Welcome to the ring, TQM. The Quiet Man is about a boxer who kills a guy in the ring, and then goes to his homeland in Ireland to buy back his family’s property and live there in peace. But things go haywire when it turns out another man has designs on the land… and John Wayne begins a romance with that guy’s sister. Anyway, there’s a scene where John Wayne clocks a guy in the jaw so hard that he goes flying through a closed wooden door, Looney-Tunes style. Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci Get Walloped By Swinging Paint Cans in Home Alone (1990) I cannot imagine the pain experienced by Harry and Marv during the whole booby trap break-in sequence, but I really, really don’t envy their getting clocked in the head by the swinging paint cans. Indiana Jones Punching the Nazi Out of the Blimp in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) You know the scene I mean: “No ticket!” A Punch Makes Michael Biehn Go Flying in The Abyss (1989) God I love The Abyss. I don’t want to spoil anything about it, so I’ll just say that there’s a part where Michael Biehn’s villain, Lt. Coffey (who is going crazy due to high-pressure nervous syndrome from being at such a lot altitude), tries to kill our hero Ed Harris, but he’s stopped by Leo Burmeister’s Catfish De Vries. And Catfish decks him in the face so hard that he goes flying through the air and lands in a puddle, his body making an enormous splash. That’s gotta hurt. Rip Torn Hits Norman Mailer on the Head with a Hammer in Maidstone (1970) Norman Mailer’s underground film Maidstone was a subversive, non-scripted fiction narrative film, captured documentary-style, about a chauvinist filmmaker named Norman T. Kingsley, who an exploitation film about a brothel, who simultaneously embarks on a presidential run and survives an assassination attempt, all on his rural New York compound. Rip Torn, who plays Kingsley’s brother, tries to kill him at the end by beating him over the head with a hammer. This was the least scripted part of an already non-scripted movie; Torn thought that Maidstone didn’t have a clear ending planned, so he thought he’d make one. He did this by literally hitting Mailer over the head with a hammer. Some sources online say it was a toy hammer, but I’ve spoken with people there, and nope… it was real, making this the only movie on the list where the head trauma sustained in a narrative is equal to that sustained by the performers. Speaking of hammers, there is an amazing corridor fight sequence in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), but there isn’t one particular clock in the head that is so bad it should go on this list. Ed Norton Ruins Jared Leto’s Face in Fight Club (2000) I certainly think that the “destroying something beautiful” scene from Fight Club counts for this list. Also most of Fight Club counts for this list. But the Leto-face-mutilation scene is definitely the worst head trauma we witness. Joe Pantoliano’s Steel Beam to the Head in The Fugitive (1993) The Fugitive normally tops all my lists, and this is no exception. There is one agonizingly painful-seeming head injury here, towards the end of the film, when good-guy U.S. Marshall Cosmo Renfro (Joe Pantoliano) is looking for a killer in a dark industrial floor of a hotel, the laundry room. The killer creeps up behind him and swings a suspended metal girder into his face, bringing him down instantly. His final words in the film speak volumes about his pain and exhaustion: “Tell Samuel Gerard I’m going home now. I’m taking my vacation.” View the full article

“Crack killed everything.” –Nas, 2012 It was a chilly spring night in 1984 and I was returning uptown from my cashier job at Miss Brooks, a fast food coffee shop located near 56th Street and 6th Avenue. Working from 3 PM to 11 PM, after closing time a few of the staff usually went out for drinks. By 2 AM, I would down one more pint of brew before walking over to 57th Street with the short order cook Xavier. We both lived on 151st Street off Broadway. Xavier was a recent transplant from the Bronx. I had dwelled in that neighborhood since boyhood. While that nether world between Harlem and Washington Heights is now named Hamilton Heights, in those days we didn’t really call it anything but home. When I moved there in 1967 (when I was 4) with mom, grandma and baby brother, the working class community was a melting pot of races, religions and cultures that included down south Blacks, like my grandmother, holdover Jewish families who hadn’t migrated to Long Island, Puerto Ricans and a few Asian families. Like an urban coming-of-age novel by Walter Dean Myers, I have fond childhood memories of the area, where I could see the Hudson River from the stoop. There are many remembrances that include the array of friends (and their parents) that lived in our building. Boys and girls together, we played stickball in the street, had Saturday afternoon trips to the Tapia movie theater where we watched Blaxploitation and kung-fu flicks, and afterwards crowded into each other’s apartments where we spun the latest soul/funk records, watched cartoons and sometimes had sleepovers. On the second floor, my friend Stanley, was into comic books and could draw Marvel characters that looked exactly like the panels of our penciling hero Jack Kirby. His younger brother Beedee, who could do Warner Brothers cartoon voices as well as Mel Blanc, was another bestie. Across the hall from my first floor apartment, Jackie shared my passion for novels and music while Darryl’s dad, who was also Jackie’s dad, once treated us to a Betty Boop film festival that changed my cartoon loving life. However, in the latter part, of the decade, our small world began to shatter when our buddy Marvin from the fourth-floor, the same dude who gave me my first sex-ed lesson when we found a stack of porn magazines in the trash, moved away. Later, Darryl and Jackie’s parents decided to relocate as well. Raised by both my mother and grandmother, in 1978 mom one day surprised us when she announced that me, her and baby brother Carlos were moving to Baltimore while grandma would be staying in New York. Homesick from the moment I got off the Amtrak in the city of spicy crabs and the ghost of Poe, for the next three years I attended Northwestern High School while plotting my inevitable return to New York City. Moving back to Manhattan in 1981, I stayed with my grandmother, between college and various girlfriends, for the next ten years, and witnessed first-hand the transformation of our community. In the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, the latest immigrants, the Dominicans, began moving uptown in search of their piece of the American Dream. With the demographic shift, there were now different stores and restaurants lining the blocks, different music blaring from parked cars and apartment windows. By 1984 the once small minority from “D.R.” had become the majority and, when the then-latest drug “crack” hit the streets that year, the uptown Dominicans found an illegal business that would make them rich, just as bootleg liquor had made Joseph Kennedy. Stepping off the subway one night with Xavier, we exited the 147th train station around 2:30 am. Standing on the corner, a young Black man eyeballed us from a few feet away and began muttering, “Yo, crack man, I got that crack.” We just shook our heads and kept on stepping. Having never heard of “crack,” I assumed it was the slang for the latest marijuana on the market, like Acapulco gold, Buddha or Sess. “I think I want to try some of that crack,” I said later, gulping from a forty-ounce in Xavier’s small bedroom. He looked at me as though I was crazy. “You don’t want to mess with that stuff,” he warned, sagely. “What are you talking about? Isn’t it just another kind of weed?” “It’s not weed. It’s some stuff they mix with cocaine, like freebase for poor folks.” The only thing I knew about “freebasing” was that comic Richard Pryor damn near burned himself to death using it. Growing-up, I had read about coke, but as far as I knew the expensive white powder was something that celebrities and other ritzy folks did in recording studios, on movie sets and in the back rooms of Studio 54 or Xenon; indeed, I believed, it had nothing to do with the people in my community. *** It can be scary when your world begins to change, but that is exactly what happened when crack usage began spreading through our community. It was as though someone dropped a lit match on a pile of old newspapers. The hellish inferno quickly spread and burned steadily for more than a decade. Never before had cocaine (and guns) been so cheap and plentiful. Of course, I knew people who smoked weed or angel dust, and had seen a few heroin nodders leaning on Amsterdam Avenue, but crack was a another story, a sadder story, a wilder story as brazen dealers stood on building stoops pretending to be Scarface while selling their product openly, as though the stuff was legal. Packaged in plastic vials with prices that ranged from five to fifty dollars, one puff, so they said, was enough to make you a junkie for life, a fiend forever trying to capture the euphoria of that first hit. The drug was smoked in a various ways with the most popular being circular glass “crack pipes.” As a former English major who read George Orwell, the year 1984 had always had cultural significance, but no one could’ve have predicted the wrath of that crack would have on NYC a mere twelve months after being introduced. A year after seeing that first coke dealing corner boy, many close friends became addicted to the “rock.” I saw my homegirl Paula from the fourth floor, a smart Black girl who had gone to Catholic school and City College, begin to lose weight rapidly and looking extremely wild; while, two stories down, Stanley no longer drew comic book characters, but was often seen zooted. However, while the stereotype of crack junkies were Black people, white kids from Jersey were coming over the George Washington Bridge nightly. In addition to the drugs, a glut of high-powered automatic weapons (nine-millimeters, Uzis) hit the streets and shoot-outs between dealers became the new symphony of the night. In many cases, those dudes didn’t know jack about aiming or control, so countless innocent bystanders were blasted by stray bullets. Through it all, the cops virtually disappeared from the scene. Although the 30th precinct, located on 151st between Amsterdam and Convent Avenues (around the corner was the Battlegrounds basketball court) was only two blocks away, the cops were usually seen in clusters after something bad already happened. Still carrying six-shooters, many of them were scared while others were being “paid in full,” taking money or drugs from dealers, and then selling their own stashes as though Serpico never existed. It took years before the “Dirty 30” was put in check. Ed Bradley did a great segment of 60 Minutes (“NYPD: The Blue Wall Of Silence”) in 1995 that told the complete story. As the lawlessness became a regular part of the landscape, loco drug dealers began shooting out the streetlights, making it easier for them to operate undetected in the darkness. Once upon a time fine girls, like my pretty friend Barbara from across the street, were sauntering down the block offering “blow jobs for five dollars.” Snarling pit bulls became the pet du jour and sometimes, for no reason, either the junkies or dealers set the corner trash bins on fire simply to watch the blaze. By the time the pop group Culture Club sang “Karma Chameleon” on Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve, ringing in 1985, the communities of Harlem, Hamilton Heights and Washington Heights had darkened as though a massive black cloud hovered over us. *** In the winter of 1985, as the neighborhood became grittier than a Rza beat, I had the first of what would become a recurring nightmare. In that dreadful dream, the apartment building where I’d been raised was on fire with the hallway engulfed in smoke and flames. Friends and strangers ran across the dirty marble floors screaming, but incapable of escaping. A few months after that first dream, my friend Barbara became the first crack causality that I knew personally. A tall, dark-skinned girl who could’ve been a model when she was a teenager, Barbara graduated from George Washington High School a few years before. When exactly she started “beamin’ up,” I had no idea, but witnessing her fall into the crack abyss made me angry. Sometimes I saw her outside, walking-up the hill to meet the man once again, and we spoke to one another. Sometimes there was a glimmer of shame in her brown eyes, but most of the time she just kept on moving. It wasn’t until one day I noticed that she was pregnant that I even bought up her problem. “I hope you not smoking that stuff while you’re pregnant,” I said, hoping to sound more like a big brother than a judgmental square. “That stuff can hurt your baby.” She smiled. “I’m not, Michael. Don’t worry, I’m not. I’m not that bad.” Whether she was smoking during those nine months, I don’t know, but a few weeks after giving birth, Barbara went on a binge and died inside a nearby crack house. Word on the street was that her lungs collapsed. Not everybody I knew from the old block became crack heads, a few became dealers instead. James Hooks (name changed), who lived on the first floor of dead Barbara’s building, was just one of them. A few years younger, we didn’t really start hanging-out until we were both in our twenties. A Pisces born elder son, James lived with his big family that included grandparents, two sisters, one brother and an under-the-influence mother. Sitting on the stoop one evening sharing a forty-ounce of malt liquor, which the billboard advertisements with Billy Dee Williams throughout the community assured us “worked every time,” and would lead to riches and beautiful women, I asked James, “How do you do it, man?” “Do what?” “You know, some of these crack fiends look so pathetic and beat down, how do you keep selling that stuff to them?” “You bugging? I don’t care nothing about them. If they want it, I’m going to sell it to them. Somebody gonna sell it to them, why let the other man get them dollars. I don’t care who I sell it to or what they look like. If you became a crack head tomorrow, I’d sell it to you. If my own mother wanted some rock, I’d sell it to her too.” Thinking to myself, that’s the coldest thing I’d ever heard, I took another swig of lukewarm beer and remained silent. *** Months later, having fallen in love with a young downtown actress who lived on 24th Street and 2nd Avenue, I began spending more time away from the hood and more hours seeing art films, dancing at trendy clubs, sipping martinis and trying to digest the unreadable Naked Lunch. Still, every few days I rode uptown to visit my grandmother, and when I did, I always made time for James. Unlike the crazed dealers depicted in urban gangster films, James wasn’t on some hyper ultra-violent power trip. I don’t even think he carried a gun, but if he did, he wasn’t into waving it around or threatening people. Every now and then, I’d go with him to the drug spot on 146th Street, so he could “re-up.” The spot was a desolate apartment on the third floor of a tenement building. Walking up the stairs, I could hear the sounds of crying babies and loud televisions. Greeted at the door by a hulking jerri-curled dude carrying an Uzi, the transactions were done in the middle of what used to be the living room. There was a drug scale, an endless supply of cocaine and plastic bags. The coke was shoveled onto the scale using playing cards. Talking in fucked-up Spanish while “Tony Montana” spoke in broken English, James bought the blow (“fish scale, poppi”) and cooked the crack at another location. One summer Sunday afternoon, he and I were standing on Broadway with when a fight broke out between a two dealers. James knew enough of the language to know this wasn’t a good look. Grabbing me by the sleeve of my shirt, James screamed, “We gotta get out of here.” “Why?” “This ain’t time for questions,” he replied as we ambled down the blocked. Seconds later, shots were fired. Turning around, I witnessed one of the Dominican dealers shoot his friend six times. As the bullet-ridden victim fell, I vomited and teared up. James looked at me and laughed. “You’re not built for these streets,” he said and we walked on Riverside Drive headed back to our own block. Later, I witnessed more dudes getting shot and killed, but it wasn’t something I would ever get used to. Sometimes I believe that part of what got me into writing crime fiction was as a way of channeling some of the negativity I saw and absorbed during that period of my life. Though most of my stories take place in, as photographer Jamel Shabazz calls “a time before crack,” I am still weighted down by the heaviness of those days. In 1986 journalist Barry Michael Cooper wrote the first article about the drug for Spin magazine. Most of his story took place in my neighborhood from Broadway and 145th Street and got worse the further east you travelled. Down those mean streets the dealers were mostly young African-Americans who had little idea how much pain and damage they were inflicting on the community. “Crack is, for many, escape, booster, stabilizer, and status quo,” Cooper wrote. “Known on the street as “the white genie in the bottle” (it is sold in vials), a rub of the crack lantern grants the wish for temporary residence in the dreamstate of your own design.” A few years later Cooper used his research to write the screenplay for New Jack City (1991), a crack origin story and crime classic. “Harlem is split into two periods: BC and AC, Before Crack and After Crack,” Cooper told Stop Smiling in 2007. “There was a profound change when that drug hit Harlem. I think crack became so widespread because it didn’t involve needles. People are scared of needles. With crack, you smoked it, and it was an immediate high.” Certainly, no amount of First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” ads or Pee-Wee Herman anti-crack commercials was going to stop the epidemic. My grandmother, who had lived in Harlem since the 1950s, compared that era to “the wild wild west,” which was quite fitting. In 1987 Harlem hip-hop pioneers Kool Moe Dee and Teddy Riley made a record with that exact name. *** In 1991, I was living back uptown with my grandmother and working at a homeless shelter on the Lower East Side called Catherine Street. One day at lunchtime I ran into my old neighbor Paula. She had cleaned-up her crack head ways and was working as a drug counselor at a local hospital. “Well, they got the right one,” I joked. Returning home one afternoon, grandma was more nervous than usual. Sitting on the side of her bed listening to 1010-WINS and literally twiddling her thumbs, she said, “Go in the living room and look at the ceiling.” Walking into the room, I looked upwards and saw a massive bullet hole. Standing behind me, grandma said, “I was sitting in here watching The Price is Right, when something told me to go into the kitchen. When I did, I heard a loud noise and saw this.” Afterwards I went across the street to James’s crib, and he introduced me to the drug dealers who lived upstairs from my grandmother in apartment 2-E. Although I knew there were a few drug apartments in our building, I had never seen these guys. “Poppi, I’m so sorry, but some asshole was playing with the nine (millimeter) and it went off. Tomorrow, I’ll send somebody to fix the hole.” “Fix the hole?” I laughed. “Fix the hole? Man, you could’ve killed my grandmother.” “We sorry, poppi. Did your grandmother call the police? Did she tell them we were drug dealers?” Getting nervous, I answered, “I’m sure she didn’t tell them you were drug dealers, because she didn’t know you were drug dealers. Hell, I didn’t even know until just now.” “OK, poppi. We’ll fix the hole tomorrow.” Two months later, with the massive hole still in the ceiling, grandma packed-up twenty-four years worth of memories and moved to Baltimore with my mom. *** Still living in New York City, but dwelling in Chelsea in the 1990s and moving to Brooklyn in ’99. I always returned to 151st Street to refresh the memory machine for future fictions, including the 2024 crack era story “Oasis,” published in Rock and a Hard Place #12. Though that maddening time made me a bit crazy and a lot paranoid, I still dig crack era related pop culture including songs (Oran Juice Jones’ “Pipe Dreams,” The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments”), books (“Crackhouse” by Terry Williams, “Iced” by Ray Shell), movies (Menace II Society, Paid In Full) and television shows (Snowfall, anything produced by 50 Cent). Meanwhile the old neighborhood, like so many in New York City, has been gentrified long time ago with skinny white women jogging along the same blocks where I had seen brutal slayings and blood stains. Cute cafes and restaurants have opened where there were once smoke shops that sold drug paraphernalia and liquor stores. Thinking about yesteryear friends, I remembered that Stanley and Marvin were dead, victims of the crack years, while others relocated to various parts of the state or on the other side of the Hudson. Still, what was most surprising was glancing across the street and seeing James sitting on his stoop. After greeting me with a brotherly hug, when shared a frosty forty and talked about those dark days as though recounting a horror movie. “See that chick over there,” James said, pointing to a beautiful Black woman walking down the hill. “She lives in your old apartment.” Sucking my teeth, I replied, “I’m sure they patched up that bullet hole in the living-room ceiling by now.” And we both laughed. View the full article

My latest mystery novel, The Silversmith’s Puzzle weaves many historical events into my fictional elements. One of those real incidents incorporated is the 1832 Bombay dog riot. India has an unfortunate history of communal riots. In 1946, Hindu-Muslim clashes resulted in approximately ten thousand deaths, with another fifteen thousand people injured. During the 1992 Babri-masjid dispute, (where an ancient mosque was destroyed because it was claimed to be built over an older temple) about two thousand people were viciously butchered. More recently, in the 2002 Gujarat riots, over a thousand people, mostly Muslims, were brutally killed by mobs. So, when I read of the 1832 Dog Riot, I expected something dire. To my astonishment it was my own peace-loving, civic-minded, law-abiding Parsi community that had rioted! In the early 1800s, Bombay was a coastal town with an airy esplanade where troops drilled each morning, soldiers paraded on British holidays, and the English were at the top of the social strata. They enjoyed a comfortable life with servants and dogs, horses and carriages, marred only by the grueling tropical heat and humidity. So, they adopted the custom of taking a nap in the hot afternoons. Shops closed down, business and government offices took a break (with only Indians on staff) while English and wealthy folk rested in darkened bed chambers, the rattan mats freshly watered over windows, and a servant assigned to stir the fans suspended above the beds and settees. However, their afternoon naps were often disturbed by the barking of stray dogs. In 1813, a municipal ordnance was issued to round up these strays during the hottest months of April and May. In 1832, a British magistrate extended this period to mid-June (when the monsoon typically arrived) and set up a bounty system for dog catchers. Since cash was paid for each dog carcass, it became a new source of income for some. The killing of dogs appalled one group in particular: Bombay’s Parsi community. The Parsis are descended from medieval Persian refugees who fled the Arab invasion (600-1000 AD) which spread Islam through the Middle East. These refugees still follow the teachings of the Prophet Zarathushtra. In India, over the centuries, they served Gujarati and Mughal kings. In the 1700s and 1800s, most Parsis adopted western manners and education. During British rule, Parsis integrity and competence led to a dominance in trade, shipping, banking and administrative roles. For Zoroastrians, Dogs are considered important the perfect creation of Ahura Mazda, since they have no wickedness, but only goodness. (A seal is also mentioned as a holy creature, but it is unlikely the writers of the Dinkard or Vendidad scriptures ever saw one). For about three millennia, dogs have had a role in Zoroastrian funerary rites, to sniff the “corpse” and suss-out a person in a deep coma. To slaughter them was anathema. On June 6, which was a holy day, a group of Parsis attacked a group of dog catchers and then marched to the high court to protest the dog culling. Two European constables patrolling the bazaar were assaulted when they tried to defend the dogcatchers. A crowd of two hundred, arms with sticks and stones gathered before the Police station and High Court in the predominantly British, Fort area, to call for an end to dog-culling. The next day the community went on strike. Hindus, Jains, and Muslims joined the Parsi-led protest. Shops in Bhendi Bazaar and Esplanade were closed. Carriages were prevented from moving through the streets. Coaches that persisted through were pelted with stones, rubbish and dead rats! The carriage of Chief Justice Sir J. W. Awdry was similarly pelted. Two to three thousand Parsis and other protesters flooded the streets. Workers unloading ships were harassed and no goods were allowed into the city. Rustomjee Cowasjee, a prominent Parsi gave the order that ships in the harbor would not be unloaded. Jesse Palsetia’s scholarly paper, Mad Docs and Parsis states that: “The daily breakfast rations as well as the billets for cooking, delivered to the troops from 6-8 a.m., were held up or confiscated and despoiled by small groups of Parsis and Hindus at the Butchers’ Bazaar, the harbour Bunder, or upon delivery.” Water carriers were not allowed to bring the troops water. If they did not comply, their carts were overturned. The strike became a grand civil protest. Not one shop remained open for business. The Parsis also organized crowds to prevent food and water and other provisions from reaching the army garrison. A group of about five hundred people surrounded the Police Office. For the British rulers, this was not to be tolerated. By noon, a regiment of “Queen’s Royals’ arrived in Colaba and read out the 1715 “Riot Act”. Leaders of the protest were arrested and the crowd dispersed. However, the next day, a number of influential Parsis and Hindus gathered at the central police office at Fort, to offer assistance in quelling the disturbances. Forty prominent business leaders presented a diplomatically written petition that pleaded for clemency for the dogs, while assuring the British of their loyalty. For the moment, the matter was tabled. In October 1832, the case against the 19 ringleaders (who had been given bail) was heard by a British judge. Palsetia’s paper states that: “Ten individuals, five of whom were Parsi, were found guilty: four for conspiracy; one for assault upon police; and five for rioting. Of the other indictments, five were found by the jury to have been baseless, and should not have been issued, while the remainder indicted were acquitted. The majority of the evidence was deemed defective, and there was no agreement among the jury for many of the charges.” The convicted were sentenced to jail time of one to eighteen months, and some were fined 2,000 rupees. However, the British had learned a valuable early lesson about the need to avoid offending native religious sentiments, one that would be brought home twenty-five years later, with awful carnage during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. Since the dog-cull protest was not for any “political” gain, and no lives were lost, most of those who’d been arrested were released. The regulation against dogs was not repealed (a massive loss of face for the Brits, I imagine). However, efforts were made to transport strays to remote areas such as Bhavnagar. In the Parsi stronghold of Poona, the dog regulation was suspended in toto. Although my book is set in 1895, this historical incident was fascinating. When my character Captain Jim needed a significant diversion at the end of the book, well, I simply couldn’t resist including the “dog riot” in my plot. *** View the full article

The weird western is nothing new. Since at least 1932, with Robert E. Howard’s “The Horror from the Mound,” writers have been combining fantasy, science-fiction, and horror with the Old West in novels, stories, comics, and films. The genre built to a crescendo in the 1980s. The last major iteration I can remember is the 2011 movie Cowboys & Aliens. In our time, well into the 21st century, the genre and the term “weird west” feel long out of fashion—though, like the western itself, it’s a fire that never completely goes out. It flares up again in such tales as the recent limited streaming series Outer Range. My agent wisely describes my new novel as “historical fantasy.” Actually, that is a more accurate term for it. It’s set in the American West of the 1880s, and while unquestionably “weird,” it combines multiple, quite different kinds of story in the way that the vastly-ranging and diverse genre of fantasy does. Some years ago, I heard the horror and fantasy author Peter Straub say, “We read and write fantasy because it’s the genre most capable of depicting the world as it really is.” I’d like to believe that The Country Under Heaven is much more than just “weird” and “a western.” How can a novel encompass fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, the ghost story, literary fiction, and the western? And perhaps more importantly, why would a book try to do that? What was the author thinking? The simplest answer—and certainly a true one—is, “That’s the world I live in.” I would argue it’s the world we all live in, whether we know it or not. We are steeped in the human journey—in tragedy, comedy, pathos, memory, horror, change, mortality. This is the life we live. We rub elbows with ghosts. Life breaks our hearts, then leaves us breathless in the face of beauty. It is supernatural. Since early childhood, I’ve loved stories of the Old West . . . and along with them, stories of monsters. The original King Kong changed me forever—an island not on any map? A colossal wall with a giant gate, and people who live in terror of what’s behind it? And . . . dinosaurs? A gargantuan gorilla?! I’m in! Whereas many kids grow up hearing sports stories from their dads, I heard about cowboys, life on the trail, with coyotes howling over lonesome canyons under the desert moon. My dad also told me all about cryptozoology—Bigfoot, the Mothman, the Loch Ness Monster . . . and UFOs, ancient mysteries, rains of frogs . . . I simply could not get enough of such things. But those notions aren’t just childish escapism. There’s a more serious side to both. Monsters in our imaginative stories give us something we can externalize and fight against—escape from or even defeat—as we deal with the real-life horrors of loss, illness, violence, human cruelty, injustice, death. We’ve been at it for as long as we’ve had a language: our oldest story first recorded in any form of English is Beowulf, written down sometime around 1,000 C.E., and likely existing in oral form a good while before that. It’s a monster story. That we study now in college literature classes. And the western. Beyond the trappings and tropes, there’s a real poignance, a pathos to the Old West. It wasn’t a long period, and it was all about rapid change. Native Americans were being forced off the lands they’d known for generations. Rails were laid, telegraph lines strung, the buffalo were being slaughtered. White people were flocking westward after minerals, occupying the land, putting up fences where fences had never been a thing. Life was harsh. There weren’t many old people, and almost no one had a Hollywood smile. Westerns are mostly elegies—sad, beautiful songs about endings. Things were vanishing that would not come again . . . and it was all happening in a dramatic and beautiful setting—a lovely land that could kill you in the blink of an eye. Where there’s very little law, personal actions make a tremendous difference. Evil gets really ugly fast. Integrity and kindness are more precious than ever. So these big, epic, stirring human stories practically tell themselves . . . and now we’re into literary fiction. “Welcome, pardner, to the Literary Territory.” One important truth I’ve learned about writing is that I always have to ask myself on at least two levels, “What is this story about?” For example, without giving spoilers, in my novel’s chapter about Hat Toynbee in Montana, the surface answer is that the main character, Ovid Vesper, has to accompany Hat Toynbee on a dangerous journey up into the Rocky Mountains to do a particular thing. But the chapter is really about something else—hence, the chapter’s title, “The Good Hour.” At such moments, good genre work becomes literary, when it uncovers truths about what it means to be human. The Country Under Heaven has fantasy threads, too—particularly elements of folk and fairy tales. In the chapter “Wind,” the character Windwagon Smith is straight out of American folklore; he’s a figure something like Paul Bunyan, and he may have been based on one or more real people. He fit right into my purposes, and I wove him in, because I think such elements give readers a sense, maybe a subconscious one, of I’ve heard this somewhere before; this is familiar. It rings true. There’s a similar thing going on in the chapter “The Sound of Bells”—again, without giving too much away, in accounts of medieval history, there are reports attested to be historical fact of two children very much like these children. Richard Decalne and the place called Woolpit are borrowed from the medieval record. In this part of the novel, passage between worlds figures large. I’ve always loved tales of Faery, which tend to be about borders and passages, about seasons and times of day when the walls between worlds grow thin. We don’t have a fairy-lore in the U.S.—we’re too young a country. But I grew up in Illinois, among the cornfields. To enter a cornfield is to plunge into a shadowy, whispering, emerald world that only exists in the summertime. Gone by the later fall, it’s a hidden, secret, ephemeral world . . . so maybe we Americans do have some inklings of Faery after all. There’s also an element of science-fiction in Ovid’s story, mainly in the otherworldly “Craither” that follows Ovid relentlessly through the book. I’m not sure the Craither is supernatural. It might be . . . or it might, like the bizarre creature in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” just be something . . . different. It might be inexplicable simply because it’s so far beyond our experience. Whatever else it is, The Country Under Heaven has been a new kind of storytelling for me. It’s the first time a story or novel has first contacted me not through a place but through a voice: a main character’s steady, gentle, confident voice, speaking to me with a story to tell. *** View the full article

This May, the psychological thrillers come from all across the globe! Along with two books written in English, both excellent, this list features four novels in translation. While fiction in translation has a heavy bias towards noir and thrillers, these days you can find plenty of thoughtful, literary suspense making its way to American audiences. Enjoy! Maud Ventura, Make Me Famous Translated by Gretchen Schmid (HarperVia) In this gripping saga of a pop star’s grueling rise to the top, fame is not for the faint-hearted. Maud Ventura blew me away with My Husband (especially that last page!) and Make Me Famous, a Highsmith-esque thriller following a singer’s brutal, callous efforts to become pop star royalty, is just as viciously delightful. Franziska Gänsler, Eternal Summer Translated by Imogen Taylor (Other Press) Climate change has destroyed the German spa town at the center of this near-future ecothriller, fires encroaching and winters vanishing, and most have fled area as the dangers grow worse and the tourists grow fewer. One hotel remains open, and that hotel is now playing refuge to a mysterious woman and child. Are they fugitives? Whatever they’re fleeing, it can’t be as dangerous as their new home…Evocative, terrifying, slow-burn suspense perfect for the start to summer (as this Texas-based editor languishes under a truly oppressive heat dome). Christina Li, The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster) Christina Lee’s debut is a lushly crafted haunted house gothic, full of family secrets and forbidden romance and grounded in Hollywood’s long history of racism & patriarchy. When the first Asian-American woman to win an Oscar dies after a lengthy estrangement from her daughters, she leaves her crumbling estate to the child of her former employees. Her own daughters refuse to accept the will’s startling stipulations without a fight, and as the families complete biltong over the manor, supernatural forces work to reveal hidden truths and enact violent revenge for past injustices. Lee has a talent for understanding the human impulses behind villainous destruction—everyone is understood,but none shall be forgiven. Added to this adage is a sincere belief in the power of love, and an emphasis on the need for honesty in bearing the weight of history. Franck Bouysse, Clay Translated by Laura Vergnaud (Other Press) Franck Bouysse has done it again! By which I mean that Bouysse has written another truly disturbing noir exploration of the depths of human behavior. In Clay, a French farmhouse in the midst of WWI, bereft of its fighting-age men and plow-pulling horses, is the claustrophobic setting for a slow-burn psychological thriller. Bouysse examines the nature of conflict and the weight of history through a limited cast of characters, featuring a struggling mother, her adolescent son, and their resentful neighbor, spared from the draft but not from his own violence, as they grow ever closer to a devastating clash of personalities, ideals, and resentments. Andrea Bartz, The Last Ferry Out (Ballantine) Andrea Bartz is at the top of her game in this moody thriller set on a remote Mexican island full of secretive vacationers. Bartz’s narrator isn’t on vacation, though—she’s there to find out more about her fiancee’s last days, and learn if there’s a wider story behind her partner’s shocking death from food allergens. Yiğit Karaahmet, Summerhouse Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury (Soho) Yigit Karaahmet’s new novel is many things: a stunning love story, a thrilling mystery, and a luscious ode to a gorgeous landscape. As Summerhouse begins, we encounter an aging queer couple who have achieved the near-impossible: 40 years together, happy and free from persecution. Their private, luxurious home on a remote island is the key to their success as a couple, but when a family moves in next door for the summer with a rebellious, and gorgeous, teenage son in tow, all bets are off and the couple will have to fight harder than ever before to secure their future. View the full article

Thrillers flirt with the absurd. Everyone knows this, except the people in thrillers, who are far too busy misplacing briefcases, dangling from cornices, falling in love with the wrong people, and being chased through cobblestoned foreign capitals to notice how ridiculous everything has gotten. The “screwball thriller” is a genre of fiction that’s been celebrated on these pages before. But in my corner of the world, which is cinema, I’ve never heard it applied to movies. That, my friends, ends today. Ernst Lubitsch may have first plated the tart, larcenous young couple in Trouble in Paradise (1932), but it was Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) that gave us the screwball thriller’s enduring recipe: Take two mismatched strangers on the run, fold in mistaken identities and a campy MacGuffin, crank the heat and sprinkle generously with crackling screwball banter. If that sounds like a good time, you’re in luck. Grab your fake passport, slip on your sexiest getaway shoes, and join me on a globe-trotting caper to bag five dazzling but lesser-known jewels of the genre. 5. Out of Time (2003, dir. Carl Franklin) “What kind of prick dies at cocktail hour on a Friday?” There’s a playful menace wiggling under every line of dialogue in Out of Time, Carl Franklin’s demented Florida noir – a reunion with Denzel Washington after their success with Devil in a Blue Dress. Washington plays a small-town police chief entangled with a troubled married woman. The first act charms, then dawdles, then slams the thrusters as Denzel finds himself implicated in a double-murder, and racing to outrun his own police force’s investigation to find out who set him up. One of the first films he made after Training Day, Out of Time is a cheeky riff on the 1948 screwball thriller The Big Clock, and features, without exaggeration, the tensest fax scene ever committed to celluloid. Where to stream for free: Tubi. 4. That Man From Rio (1964, dir. Philippe de Broca) Hot on the heels of stylish American screwball thrillers North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963), French director Philippe de Broca tried his hand with the gloriously ridiculous That Man from Rio – a film that would, improbably, inspire the creation of Indiana Jones and help define the modern blockbuster. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a French airman on leave whose girlfriend, the effervescent Françoise Dorléac, is kidnapped in Paris and whisked to Brazil by art-smuggling baddies. What follows is a frenzied chase through Rio, the Amazon, and the surreal modernist moonscape of Brasília. Belmondo, doing many of his own stunts, careens through each sequence with balletic slapstick flair – the action looks both buffoonish and genuinely dangerous. Reportedly, Steven Spielberg saw the film nine times and credited it as a key inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Every time I see That Man from Rio, it makes me smile like an idiot, and though I sang its praises recently in my film Substack Underexposed, I couldn’t resist sharing it with you here. 3. Save the Green Planet! (2003, dir. Jang Joon-hwan) Inspired by Stephen King’s Misery, but underwhelmed by Annie Wilkes as a villain (too normal), South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan hatched this feral genre mutant about a man who kidnaps his former boss after becoming convinced that he’s an alien sent to destroy Earth. Part zany sci-fi slapstick, part torture thriller, part gonzo chamber drama, Save the Green Planet! was shunned by Korean audiences upon release, but has since garnered an international cult following as a classic of New Korean Cinema, sometimes compared to Dr. Strangelove and Brazil. Ari Aster planned to remake the film, then passed it to Yorgos Lanthhimos, who teamed up with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons and retitled it Bugonia. The reboot arrives later this year. Where to stream: Kanopy. 2. Game Night (2018, dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein) Speaking of Jesse Plemons, the 2018 studio comedy Game Night slyly reintroduced audiences to the dark delights of the screwball thriller. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams play hyper-competitive suburbanites whose weekly game night turns deadly when a fake kidnapping gets hijacked by actual criminals. What begins with charades spirals into shootouts, with a surprisingly elegant one-shot action sequence involving a Fabergé egg that ranks among the best in recent memory. Macabre, manic, and far smarter than it looks, Game Night is the rare studio comedy that gets funnier the more times you play. Where to stream: The Roku Channel 1. The Hot Rock (1972, dir. Peter Yates) Fresh off Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Robert Redford slipped into the role of another affable outlaw, John Dortmunder, in The Hot Rock, a breezy caper comedy scripted by William Goldman. Adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s novel (the first in a 14-volume series), the film follows Dortmunder and his partner-in-crime, played by George Segal, as they attempt to steal the same diamond again and again and again, only to be thwarted in increasingly ridiculous ways. By taking the tired “one last job” trope and dropping it on its head repeatedly, The Hot Rock mystified audiences and critics at first, but has since found cult appreciation. In his review, Roger Ebert said the film, though far from perfect, “has two or three scenes good enough for any caper movie ever made. If you’re a pushover for caper movies, like I am, that will be enough.” Currently available on DVD. View the full article

If you’ve read books about spies and resistance fighters in World War II-era France, there’s a decent chance you’ve come across the name Rose Valland: the woman who tracked Nazi looting from the inside. But most of those accounts offer scant detail about her life or wartime activities, and others leave her out altogether. Now, with The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, Michelle Young has revealed the extent of her commitment and bravery. After laboring in various underpaid curatorial jobs as a result of being a woman, Rose was well-placed to observe Nazi interlopers at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris throughout the war. There, she meticulously documented who was looting priceless art, from Jewish families and also from the state, and collected as much information as she could about where pieces were traveling to. She risked her life—and the life of her partner, Joyce Heer—by doing this work. If the Nazis had found out about her activities, or indeed about her sexual orientation, she would have been killed (at one point, as Young writes, there was a plot to kill her that came close to being carried out). Despite her heroics, and the years she spent working to recover stolen art after the war, Valland remained an obscure figure for decades in France. In part, as Young explained to me, this was due to Rose’s own memoir, which left out many personal details in an attempt to clarify the historical record—and to be taken seriously. “So many times, she would cut out things that would actually be interesting from a narrative nonfiction perspective,” Young says, “because she was really trying to prove the case against Nazi looting.” Happily for us, Young had access to this earlier draft, and used these cut details in The Art Spy, a riveting narrative that fuses Rose’s story with the wider story of Nazi looting and the story of the Rosenbergs, a Jewish family whose art gallery, home, and family art collection were ransacked during the war. Though Young’s narrative stays firmly in the past, the totalitarian power structure she describes, and the danger that structure poses to art and artists, are eerily resonant in today’s climate. Though this is the first work of narrative nonfiction Young has authored, she’s hardly a stranger to history or research: the founder of Untapped New York, she’s also an adjunct professor of architecture at Columbia University and teaches at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. “I want to make new discoveries, and make information exciting to people,” she says, a goal that is consistent across her professional enterprises. But after the experience of diving into Valland’s life, she’s excited to continue pursuing the “detective work” of narrative nonfiction. “My whole life, I’ve been extremely dogged in whatever I’ve done, and I realized that writing narrative nonfiction is the perfect outlet for that, because you get years to do it and it pays off in terms of exhausting any possible lane of inquiry.” Her doggedness has resulted in a thrilling and valuable new addition to the long list of World War II spy tales, this one highlighting a queer woman who is finally getting her due. Morgan Leigh Davies: How did you find Rose Valland, and what made you want to tell the story? Michelle Young: I was reading practically exclusively books about female spies. Someone [said to] me the other day, I assume that’s a hyperbole. I was like, It’s not a hyperbole. I probably spent at least half a decade doing that. When I did come across Rose Valland, it was in a more academic book called Göring’s Man in Paris by Jonathan Petropoulos, about art looting and Göring’s art dealer in Paris, who was in the Jeu de Paume Museum where Rose Valland worked. Every chapter, this woman named Rose Valland would appear and I would think, How come I don’t know about this spy? I’ve read all the nonfiction spy books. I’ve read the compilation spy books about female spies, and she didn’t appear in them. How does someone become totally forgotten? Am I the person that could write a book about her to bring her to light? I started to explore it and I showed up in her hometown. For me, going into a place is extremely important. I have an architecture background and urban planning background, so I just like to get the feel. The first thing I found out when I got there was that there was a plaque, a Rose Valland Place, but it was the parking lot of the post office. That really struck me. Even in the town she’s from, this is where they’ve placed her. It was such a disconnect with how I read her life story. One of the most medaled women in World War II, did amazing, daring work in World War II—how does that happen? MLD: I was thinking reading this, and I feel like I think this so often reading books about these women who were spying in Europe at this period, that so much of the popular idea of what a spy is, is something like James Bond, which of course we know is nonsense. But especially in this case, her work is so quiet. How do you construct a narrative around a figure like that? MY: One of the things that I wanted to do is to tell this broader story of art looting and laying it out. In layman’s terms, there were just decrees and decrees and decrees [allowing looting]. That was one way to position the work she’s doing vis-à-vis what’s happening with all these Nazis, these very evil, straight out of central casting characters. That’s why I also added the secondary storyline of Alexander Rosenberg and his family. That was to tell the story of looting from a personal perspective, from a family that went through this, but also to tell the wider story of the war because Alexander is fighting. Only having her in the museum, writing down documents, impressive as that is, it’s not enough for a book like this. So there’s a lot happening at any given time. I also read her notes really carefully, and realized, for example, she wouldn’t say, I went out and I tailed this guy home and saw him put art into a truck, right? But her notes were like: and in the evening, this guy put carpets and paintings into his truck and this is his address and his apartment is on the second floor on the right side. She didn’t have someone report that to her. She obviously was there. It was reading the documents and trying to understand what went into any given dry report about something and positioning her in that. MLD: It also made me think about different kinds of resistance, especially in our current moment. It’s easy to romanticize people who shoot people or blow things up. But that just wasn’t possible in this scenario. I was very moved by the fact she’s doing all of this on the future hope that this will be worth something. MY: I got that directly from what she wrote. It was almost this optimism that the Germans would lose the war, because she says, I’m doing it for a future war tribunal, basically. She was very disturbed by the principle of art looting. So she’s being driven by this very deep-seated and greater belief that good will prevail and that she has a role to play in that, which must take an incredible fortitude of character. In a chapter that had been cut from her memoir was the episode of her escaping from Paris as Germans are coming in. In that chapter, there’s a moment where she sees a woman and her two dead children in a baby carriage on the road to the Loire Valley. She says that that’s the moment that she decides she’s going to fight back no matter what, in whatever way she can. To discover those lines, I was like, oh my god, now we know part of the origin of her motivation. It’s seeing tragedy before her. MLD: A lot of the emotional reaction I had to the book was to these horrible, horrible people coming in and just taking stuff. They created rules for what they could take, and then broke all the rules. MY: There are so many papers about all of the decrees that were sent. They were using euphemistic language to justify why they were stealing things in the first place, and then creating a set of rules that would enable them to steal. It was just one thing after another. I think the most disturbing thing was how they just slowly stripped away the rights of the Jews partially to steal their stuff. Yes, later they just took everything from them, including their lives. [But] it begins so slowly. First, you’ve got to declare anything over 100,000 francs. Next, you have to come and sign in at the local prefecture every day, or whatever. You can really sense how in any given scenario, one might not realize where it’s going. So some people dutifully followed the rules and then they used those documents later to find them and deport them to extermination camps. I felt like I had a responsibility to show this larger line in this picture, that it’s not just a bunch of people who like art stealing art for the sake of stealing art. It’s part of something much more sinister, and they’re stealing art also because it’s greed and power. I feel like it was more power even than greed. It became almost disconnected to the art itself. MLD: There’s also the progression that you show from where initially they’re taking paintings, and then as the war goes on, they’re like, let me take all of your rugs and curtains. MY: It was everything, just emptied. It’s like the minute people were deported, they went into their apartments and they emptied the whole thing down to tea sets and silverware. That last train that Rose is trying to stop from Paris, most of it is furniture and personal items. People know that train from the 1,000 paintings she’s trying to save, but that’s like five train cars. There’s like 48 others that are of this stuff that represent the lives of these people. MLD: I wanted to ask about the destruction of the paintings. This is something that Rose writes about and that was controversial in her memoir, and was not something that I had had read about elsewhere. MY: So in July, 1943, the Nazis have amassed a lot of modern art by Picasso, Dalí, Léger, the most famous people we know today. And they don’t know what to do with it because Hitler hates this stuff. So they can’t move it to Germany. It’s piling up in at the Jeu de Paume, and Rose is really worried about it; she’s been worried about it for years. What are they gonna do with this stuff? She starts to see them separate the modern paintings into several categories with a letter and she doesn’t really know what they mean. Then one day they start to destroy the paintings. They start by knifing them and kicking them, removing them from their frames, tearing up the canvases. And then they bring the tatters and the paintings to the Jeu de Paume courtyard, where they instruct the guards to set them on fire. I knew she had reported this event and I knew that there was doubt about it. I had seen several books call it into question. I needed more evidence either way. But I knew if I was telling this from Rose’s perspective, I would need to address it somehow. If I didn’t find anything, I’d have to address the fact that there’s a question about the account or decide not to talk about this event. I knew if I wanted to tell it as truth, I would need some kind of smoking gun, something that shows that it happened. So one day I was going through the documents I had photographed and in the back were these handwritten testimonials that were notarized. I was like, these are the guards in the museum. I know these names and I think they’re talking about this event. My husband woke up and I was like, Is this what I think it is?! He’s like, It is! I was so excited. To me, this is the one huge discovery of my book. Obviously not everyone knows that this account was called into question, but I really wanted to prove it one way or another. Later I found a contemporary newspaper report in a newspaper called Résistance, which talks about it. They published it a couple of months later. I felt with the four notarized testimonies, and there’s another letter from the head of security at the Louvre, which actually he wrote the day it happened, and then the newspaper report—this is definitely enough. MLD: It wasn’t unbelievable to me that the Nazis would burn these paintings. MY: They had been doing it already. They had been doing it in Germany, both paintings and books. One of the first things I did was track down, where did this doubt come from? And it was the Nazis who were in the museum who had given the orders. They came out and did an interview with Der Spiegel, the German paper, after Rose’s book comes out to say it never happened, and if it did, Rose was implicated because her handwriting is in the inventory. How can we trust that? How can we put into the record that there’s doubt based on partisan defense attempts? MLD: You write about her being almost forgotten by the time she’s dead, and obviously this book is a huge revival of that legacy. Could speak about what happens to her after the war? MY: After the war, she’s pretty celebrated. They gave her lots of medals. Nearly two decades after the war, she writes this book, which then partially gets turned into a Burt Lancaster movie called The Train. But she stayed a long time in Germany after the war, almost 10 years doing restitution work. By the time she gets back, she’s kind of missed out on some of the job opportunities she could have had with all her post-war fame. And then the world is in the Cold War and they don’t want to talk about Nazis, they don’t want to talk about Nazi art. And there are a lot of French families who are complicit during the war and they’re back in power. So she becomes really an inconvenient presence. She moved around the French museums and [was] put into far away offices. By the time she dies, almost nobody attends her funeral. I mentioned in the book this one letter that the head of culture at the time, who writes two decades later that he was appalled to discover that he had not been notified that she had died. So she dies, basically, in obscurity. And then I think in 1999, her hometown puts together a conference. At this point, some of the resistance people are still alive. They come and they talk about her and her work and the Association for Rose Valland is created. This begins this more than 20-year journey to highlight her. There have been some exhibitions in France, some books related to those exhibitions published. Finally, I think it was last year or a year and a half ago, they renamed the plaza next to the Jeu de Paume Museum for her and they did a big ceremony. There had been a plaque also against the wall, but it was on the side. For some reason, she’s always conveniently forgotten. One of the compilation books I read was a 2019 book from France about female resistance people, and she wasn’t in it. I think it’s a combination of what happened post-war to her, but also going back to this idea of cloak-and-dagger. People don’t see her, especially in France, as being in the resistance. One of the things I got, even from my in-laws: Was she really in the resistance? And I’m like, she has a Medal of Resistance, what more proof do you need? You can see in her memoir, she’s constantly trying to prove herself. There is a moment where she indicates that she’s doing this because people are questioning her role. She fought this battle in her lifetime and I feel like that battle continues. MLD: I’m curious sort of what you feel like you learned about sort of fascism and resistance by immersing yourself in this woman’s life. MY: These thoughts about the present day were very present in my mind as I was writing it, and not because I was searching for those links. It’s actually just from reading the verbiage of the Nazi documents and how they talked about art and architecture. It was impossible to ignore it. And the story of the Rosenbergs and the Jewish population in France really struck me too, because it became about: Did you escape early enough? That question was terrifying to me. At what point do you see what’s happening around you and realize that you are at risk? The people who waited too long died. As we get closer to publication date, the echoes are even stronger in terms of the attack on the arts that’s happening now. I’m not the kind of writer that even really knows how to write in a very moralizing tone, but I wanted to present it and then hope that people realize that maybe some of the things happening [in the book] might affect them at some point. MLD: These people coming in and treating France as like their personal playground really reminded me of people in the government right now. MY: Kurt von Behr, the guy in the museum with the glass eye, is purely there to take advantage of the situation, and he doesn’t hide it. He’s just like, oh, great. The best wines from like the Rothschilds? I’m going to take it and I’m going to wine and dine. He doesn’t pretend to be interested in a highfalutin way about art, which some of the higher-level Nazis tried to—like Göring tries to indicate that it’s about the art. I also thought about a lot about the collaborators because, you know, in any given situation, people make their own decisions about if they want to collude or if they even think it’s colluding or it’s dangerous. I didn’t try to be too judgmental about that, because one never knows in what scenario one might become a collaborator. But I did think about their later legacy. Some of these people picked the wrong side. View the full article

So many stories to be told, so little time to tell them. It’s a torment unique to writers—and one that has continued to motivate New York Times bestseller Wendy Corsi Staub for more than three decades in a prodigious career that has seen the publication of nearly 100 books across a variety of genres and under multiple names. But suspense has always been Staub’s sweet spot, from her early YA novels (Summer Lightening, Witch Hunt) to the series and standalone mysteries that have become her hallmark, earning accolades and awards, a loyal readership, and even comparisons to Mary Higgins Clark. Her latest, The Fourth Girl (Thomas & Mercer; April 1, 2025), is the first in a new series featuring a core group of friends haunted by the individual and shared traumas of their adolescence. Twenty-five years ago, on prom night, Caroline Winterfield vanished from the grounds of Haven Cliff in upstate New York, never to be seen again. Only her three best friends, Midge, Kelly, and Talia, know what really happened under cover of darkness. Or at least they think they do. Flash forward to present day, and Midge—now a detective with the local police department—is called to the scene of a death, apparently accidental. But when she discovers a distinctive memento clutched in the victim’s hand, she realizes that the past has returned with a vengeance. As the three women reunite on the anniversary of Caroline’s disappearance, Midge can’t help suspecting that one of her friends may be a killer—or that all of them are targets. In true Staub style, the story offers an abundance of riches, from its atmospheric setting (complete with an abandoned mansion in the woods) and authentic period details to a compelling cast of characters, all of whom have something to hide. Replete with clues, red herrings, and plot twists, the narrative alternates perspectives and timelines, effectively amplifying the suspense while fleshing out people and places—and the secrets they’ve both been keeping. Now, Wendy Corsi Staub reflects on this bold new entry in a body of work that is defined by its endless chills and thrills … John B. Valeri: The Fourth Girl marks the first book in a new series for a new publisher. What were the considerations of such an undertaking, both in terms of envisioning the story/saga itself and making it sellable to a different publishing house? Wendy Corsi Staub: For me, there’s nothing more creative and gratifying than building a world and developing characters who become as familiar to me as the places and people I know in real life. I love to explore how events and relationships past and present can propel a plot. My editor at Thomas & Mercer was enthusiastic when I proposed a dual timelines tale, and that was all I needed to hear! JBV: Twenty-five years ago, Caroline Winterfield vanished from the grounds of Haven Cliff, leaving her three best friends -– Midge, Kelly & Talia — to conceal the truth of her disappearance (as they know it). How does this event impact those left behind, both as a collective unit and individually – and why is it important that we meet these characters as both the children they were and the adults they’ve become? WCS: Thematically, I have always loved to explore friendships—how they evolve over the decades, and how our formative years relationships help to influence and shape who we eventually become. On some level, all solid friendships involve confiding secrets and the presumption of loyalty—but especially for teenagers. What happens when those secrets involve life and death? What happens when a group of confidantes can’t agree on whether to keep a dangerous secret? I wanted to delve into how much these women once meant to each other, how their differences and the pressure of their friend’s disappearance drove them apart, how they’ve found their way back to each other….and what happens next? JBV: To expand on that: the narrative structure alternates viewpoints and timeframes. What was your process like to account for the characters and circumstances in play – and how did the editorial process (and plotting collaboration with your son Brody) help to shape these arcs as the story evolved? WCS: There’s a whole lot of story here! I find that sometimes when I’m launching a new setting and characters, I don’t yet know enough about the world I’m building, but sometimes, I know too much. This was the latter. The idea had been percolating for a while, and there’s so much room to play! There’s a lot I intend to do with these multigenerational characters and past and present mysteries, going forward. For book one, I had to restrict the narrative, past and present, to hone the plot to pertinent moments. How to define them? It was incredibly helpful to sit down for hours one day with my son Brody, who took notes and tracked threads as I outlined my ideas. In the end, tens of thousands of words ended up on the cutting room floor or saved for future Haven Cliff installments. The book went through five full drafts with welcome expert guidance from my developmental editor at Thomas and Mercer, who knows the crime genre inside and out. JBV: You evoke a powerful sense of place, from Haven Cliff itself to each friend’s individual home and the town of Mulberry Bay at large. In what ways does setting enhance story – and how does the aforementioned juxtaposition of past and present allow for an exploration of change over time (or, sometimes, the lack thereof)? WCS: I’ve always felt that a worthwhile setting functions as character; that my characters should inhabit a three-dimensional and realistic community. If I’m doing my job, then the events that propel my characters, and their actions and reactions to these events, simply could not unfold the same way in any other setting. I love exploring how Mulberry Bay and Haven Cliff (the abandoned gilded age estate) have evolved over the decades; how boom years and hard times have impacted the people who live there, those who left, and newcomers. After all, so much of small-town America, particularly in upstate New York, has seen fluctuation over the last century when it comes to population, local economy, the housing market, etc. Those issues impact the people and events in ways large and small, and—importantly—they drive conflict. JBV: Let’s talk about the art of telling details. In the book’s past segments (which encompass the 90s and early 2000s), you reference everything from fashion to pop culture to world events. What is the import of such deets – and how do you endeavor to present them in a way that comes across as organic rather than forced? WCS: Memory is such a powerful device—in real life, and in fiction. How often do you hear an old song, or catch a whiff of, say, a certain brand of sunscreen—that throws you right back to a time and place in your own life? Or remember exactly where you were when some historic event unfolded? Memory and the past itself play an important role here. Sometimes I use broad strokes to evoke time and place in a flashback scene—a reference to Seinfeld, or some trendy fashion. Sometimes, the seemingly small details I’m using are far more intentional and relevant, and will later become an Aha! moment for the reader—like when the teenagers react to the news of Princess Diana’s death in 1997. A couple of pop culture details presented in The Fourth Girl will become relevant (As clues? Red herrings?) in the sequel I’m writing now. Careful readers, take note! JBV: The Fourth Girl has both a decisive ending and some unresolved questions. How do you endeavor to balance closure with continuation so that readers are left satisfied but with some degree of suspense? Also, tell us about how the approach to Book One differs from those that come after. WCS: It’s so difficult to know where/how to wrap up. The original ending to The Fourth Girl included a final scene that I absolutely loved, because it was a massive twist for the reader and opened the door to the sequel. It took everything you thought you knew about what has unfolded and undid it with a blindside. I wound up cutting it, because rather than providing a sense of closure, it was a cliffhanger that would not be resolved until the next book’s publication. Not including this scene in the first book doesn’t erase it from my mind as I’m writing the sequel. It did take place. It is important. I’ve simply opted not to show the reader….yet. JBV: You have authored nearly 100 books in 30+ years – an impressive feat of quantity and quality. How does such proliferation both ease the path and make it more challenging? Also, what continues to energize and motivate you as a storyteller despite the perils of the business? WCS: Having written and published crime fiction consistently over a long career, I’ve become proficient in certain aspects of craft that might present challenges to a newcomer. Elements like scene structure or dialogue can feel second nature when you’ve worked with them for so many years. On the other hand, I often have to check myself and ask….is this a crime, or a character, or a twist I’ve used before? It gets blurry after all these years, and I always want to keep things fresh, particularly for my loyal longtime readers. My motivation, pure and simple, is that storytelling isn’t just what I do; it’s who I am. As a true storyteller, you’re bombarded with more ideas than you’ll ever be able to write in one lifetime. But I aim to try! JBV: Leave us with a teaser: What comes next? WCS: The Lost Summer (Coming in spring, 2026), the sequel to The Fourth Girl, picks up a few months after we left off. There’s a new crime for Midge Kennedy to investigate, and she and Talia and Kelly are still working on their reconciled relationship as well as coming to terms with what they’ve uncovered about Caroline’s disappearance. And Toil and Trouble, the seventh title in my Lily Dale Mysteries series, will be out in July! View the full article

Kate Hilton, a practicing psychotherapist, and Elizabeth Renzetti, a career journalist, are the authors of the Quill & Packet mystery series. The first book, Bury the Lead, became a bestseller in Canada when it was published in early 2024. On May 1, Widows and Orphans continues the adventures of Cat Conway, a journalist for a cottage-country newspaper, as she investigates the murder of a wellness influencer and dodges attacks by misinformation-sowing locals. On the eve of publication, the authors sat down for a conversation about their writing collaboration. KH: It’s so great to be at a point where we’re launching the second book in the Quill & Packet series and writing the third one! It still feels kind of surreal to me. ER: Especially as the world catches up to our fiction. In an earlier century we might have been burned as witches, because the mystery in Widows and Orphans is so timely: We’ve got the wellness industry, anti-vaccine protests, and a disinformation dumpster fire. As a journalist I’m used to being treated like a witch, though. KH: I know what you mean. There’s some of that in the therapy room, too. One thing I love about this book is how we’ve captured some of the malign effects of living in an era of massive stress and uncertainty. People want to feel better; they want more control over their lives and more answers. It makes them vulnerable to bad actors selling snake oil – whether that’s in the form of products or “information”. ER: It’s a confusing world, and people seek comfort and autonomy. The healthcare system can be an impersonal nightmare. Also, the wellness world looks so pretty from the outside. It’s seductive. We have a lot of fun in the book gently poking fun at some of the gauzier and greedier aspects of the wellness complex. You’re very good at the psychological motivations that underpin wellness, and could make someone angry enough to murder. KH: The rise of the wellness industry is so connected to our human need to make sense of things. I think it’s really hard for people to accept the incredible specialization of knowledge that exists now. We’re asked to put our trust in systems that we don’t have the ability to understand fully, and that reality can seed mistrust, even paranoia. Wellness influencers and populist politicians both play on this basic insecurity. ER: And we do have a dodgy politician in our cast of suspects! Along with Cat’s eternally disappointed mother Marian, who’s a cross between Hillary Clinton and Arianna Huffington. It was fun writing a mother-daughter relationship that felt real, and prickly. It’s rich territory, isn’t it? KH: Is it ever! There’s an expression in therapy: Your family knows how to push your buttons so effectively because they installed them. I like the complexity of Cat’s feelings about Marian, and how Marian’s judgments about her daughter’s life choices knock around in Cat’s head. Cat’s a great journalist, but being a staff reporter at the Quill & Packet isn’t an easy gig – and not only because Cat keeps tripping over dead bodies! Marian thinks Cat could do better, and sometimes Cat thinks that, too. ER: Most people don’t know that we initially tried to write Cat as someone in her late twenties. She only came to life when we wrote her as a middle-aged woman with middle-aged problems – divorce, hostile teenager, career upheaval. In the first book, she’s incredibly disappointed that she got fired from her hotshot journalism job and has to work at a small newspaper in the sticks. KH: You have a real love of small town newspapers. You collect them whenever we’re out on the road. ER: I love small papers, everything from the ads for tractors to news about sewage system upgrades. We hear a lot of doom and gloom about the demise of small news outlets, but in many towns they’re thriving, and doing incredibly important work on the environment, politics and – yes, as Cat does in the book – vaccine denial. We’ve met a few real-life Cat Conways as they interviewed us on our first book tour. They’re superwomen in running shoes instead of capes. But I have to say, writing fiction with you is much more fun than chasing the news. KH: We’ve been so incredibly lucky in our partnership. Honestly, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had at work. I feel like we’ve hacked the writing business – all of the joy and none of the loneliness and self-doubt. Although I feel that statement should come with a caveat: Choose your partner very carefully. ER: Maybe that’s the secret to a happy marriage – communicate entirely in Google docs! KH: One of the most common things we get asked is how we manage the logistics of writing together. I always say that the outline we come up with at the beginning of the process is the foundation that holds everything up, but lately (writing book three) I’ve been noticing that it also gives us the freedom to experiment a bit. By which I mean that for me, it provides guardrails. I know where I need a particular chapter to go, but I don’t feel that I have to get there in precisely the way we imagined, so long as I don’t drive off the road. ER: We each have to have complete confidence in the other person’s vision, and ability to “see” through Cat’s eyes, since the series is written in the first person. But we each bring unique strengths to the books. I understand how newsrooms work. You’re a master of plotting and psychological insights. KH: You’re also the funniest person I know. I routinely laugh out loud when I see your chapter drafts. ER: Thank you! I’m going to have that printed on my gravestone. We also have some shared weaknesses, around continuity for example. KH: True. If it were up to us, days would last for weeks in Port Ellis. Thank goodness for editors, who ask excellent questions like, “Shouldn’t it be a new day by now?” ER: Kindness and honesty are the basis for our partnership. If we were a country, that would be our national motto. It’s funny, but I think our collaboration is reflected in Cat’s relationship with her colleagues at the Quill & Packet. In the first book, she’s not sure where she belongs. In Widows and Orphans, she’s started to fall in love with her found family in the newsroom and in town. KH: Oh, I love that comparison. Yes, it’s been great writing about that growing trust and affection that Cat has for her colleagues. Since I started writing novels, I’ve been interested in showing characters in the workplace. We see a lot of that world on television, but much less in novels. Yet those relationships can be extraordinarily deep and last longer than many marriages. ER: I’m looking forward to exploring all those relationships as we continue the Quill & Packet mystery series. For now, readers can journey back to Port Ellis in Widows and Orphans. Happy reading! *** View the full article

It was dark, and it was cold. That was all he was aware of to begin with, and both those realizations came gradually. He was drifting awake, and for a few seconds he found it hard to distinguish between reality and the unconsciousness he was emerging from. Dark and cold. What else? His body was juddering slightly, and a quiet rattling noise filled the air. Where am I? All he could tell was that he was horizontal and in motion. When he tried to move his arms and legs, they were held in place. There was something restraining him. He was strapped down on a gurney of some kind, and even his head wouldn’t turn; all he could do was flick his eyes from side to side. The darkness and the shuddering movement of the trolley beneath him made the world hard to make sense of. He caught flashes of what looked like foliage, and there was a dusting of stars above him. The night sky. So he was outside somewhere. Had there been an accident? Was he being taken to hospital? He was moving feetfirst. While he couldn’t tilt his head back to look, he was aware of a presence just behind him, pushing the trolley along. He could hear a ragged breathing sound, as though they were struggling with the effort. A doctor perhaps. “Hello?” he tried to say. And realized there was tape covering his mouth. Panic flared inside him at that, and he tried to fight against his restraints with more urgency, pushing and pulling with all his strength. But there was no give in them at all. His mumbles from behind the tape became muffled screams, which continued until he felt like he was about to vomit. If he was sick, he would choke to death. Whoever was behind him seemed oblivious to his distress. The trolley carried on at the same speed, rattling like a shopping trolley with a broken wheel that wouldn’t stop spinning and stalling. He forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose, and after what felt like an age the nausea subsided slightly. But his heart was punching hard inside his chest, as if it were trying to find a way out. Think. How had he got here? It was hard to gather his thoughts. Dim recollections drifted through his mind, the way threads of smoke in the air might—but that image brought a sharper jolt of memory. Smoke in the air. He remembered that. He had been in the outside area of a bar with a cigarette, watching the smoke he exhaled swirling in the air beneath the light of a heater and then disappearing away into the night. He remembered thinking that it was kind of beautiful to see the air made real like that. Marie wouldn’t have approved of him smoking, but he was a couple of drinks down by then, and she wouldn’t have approved of that either. He didn’t care; that was the point of being in the bar in the first place. It was a stupid habit he’d fallen into. A lot of the time when he was at home, it felt like he couldn’t do right for doing wrong, and so a couple of nights a week he’d taken to pretending he was working late, but stopped instead at whatever brightly lit bar happened to call out to him from the side of the road. Just a little me time. Marie probably thought he was cheating on her. The thing was, he never had and never would. It was like he used to tell her: even if they weren’t always great together, they were always good. But she was the jealous type, and that had got worse recently. And if he was going to end up doing the time for a crime he hadn’t committed then he figured he might as well commit one of some kind. The gurney’s spinning wheel caught a snag of undergrowth. Whoever was behind grunted softly and pushed harder to get it moving again, but the moment’s stillness gave Darren Field a chance to glance to either side and see that the world was no longer as dark as it had been. And then they were moving again. But that brief moment had been enough for him to see that there were loops of small fairy lights strung between the trees. The sight was so incongruous that, for a few half-delirious seconds, he imagined that the man had taken him out of the real world, and that the two of them were now in a different one entirely. “Do you think you were abducted from the bar?” John says. Field nods cautiously. “I left my drink inside when I went out to smoke,” he says. “Someone could have spiked it then. I don’t remember much after that.” “Why did you leave your drink?” “You don’t worry about it as a guy, do you? The place wasn’t all that busy, and I had a table out of the way round a corner that I wanted to keep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone there.” There’s a helpless expression on his face. “I just wanted to sit with my phone. That was all I ever did. Catch up on the news a bit; read a few updates on social media. Maybe play a few games of chess if I couldn’t get reception.” He spreads his hands, the question clear. Is that too much to ask? The answer, John thinks, is that it shouldn’t be, but that’s not the way things work. If you let your guard down once, the chances are that you’ll be okay. But if you do it a hundred times, the odds are going to catch up with you eventually. Which to his mind is more than enough reason to keep your guard up the whole time. “Can you remember the name of the bar?” he says. “No. I didn’t even look at the sign when I parked.” “You could drive the route. Check in a few places. You’d recognize it if you were there again.” Field shakes his head. “No.” “It could help. There might be security footage.” “It wasn’t the kind of place with CCTV.” Which is just a stupid excuse, and John feels frustration rising inside him. The familiar anger is probably only a short distance behind. On one level, he gets it: returning to the place he was taken from would be traumatic for Field, and it’s the last thing he wants to do. But the woman in the woods deserves justice, and he finds it hard to control the urge to grab Field and shake him until he sees sense. He can’t do that, of course, but how else can he persuade him? Daniel would be so much better at this than he is, John thinks. What would his son suggest? Keeping calm, probably. “Even so,” he says. “Someone there might have seen what happened?” “He’s not the kind of man other people see.” And John is about to reply—maybe even give into the frustration and reach out the way he knows he shouldn’t—but Field’s choice of words give him pause. He’s not the kind of man other people see. A beat of silence in the study. “Okay,” John says. “Let’s leave that for now.” Field looks down at the carpet. He knows what’s coming next. “Tell me about the woman,” John says. __________________________________ From The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North. Copyright (c) 2025 by the author and reprinted with permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. View the full article

Early on in the process of writing my first book about axe murder, I took a job working in an after-school program. I was twenty-six and I’d recently figured out a new answer to the hundred-year-old mystery of the murder of eight people in Villisca, Iowa. I needed a day job, and the children at the nearby elementary school I had once attended myself were a bright counterpoint to the grim work of researching true crime. Mornings spent mired in awful murders were balanced by cheerful afternoons in sunny playgrounds and colorful classrooms, mediating disputes over nothing more serious than iPad time. At Pinckney Elementary, my job working in after-school care with the Boys & Girls Club was both more and less important than my work unearthing major connections between horrific tragedies. These kindergarteners had real struggles too, but I wasn’t a teacher or their parents. Anything major was above my pay grade. I had to make sure that the kids didn’t die, but only in the two or three hours they were in my care. One day a little boy said something that struck me. The setting was the gym, a routine safety assembly. Fire was banal as a threat, routine, done to death. But in 2013, the possibility of a mass shooter was still novel and exciting enough to make the kids antsy. Especially since we were talking about school shootings like they were some forbidden R-rated movie. Barricading doors, running away, hiding, all of those things were covered—but we avoided mentioning the actual threat, the weapon, the gun. The boy, a fifth grader, raised his hand, blurting out, “WHAT IF IT WAS AN AXE MURDERER?” He accompanied the question with a mimed motion and sound effect that was somewhere between light saber and baseball bat. We just moved on without reacting—you can’t rise to the bait that way when you’re trying to get children to take something seriously. But the incident stuck with me. How did this child, born into the age of touch screens, have a reference point for “axe murderer”? It makes sense that he wouldn’t say “what about a SCHOOL SHOOTER?” since that was the source of the very tension that the joke intended to relieve. Instead, he reached into his imagination and came up with a tool. Axes are a big deal in Minecraft, so I have no doubt that he understood that their primary purpose as a tool is to cut down trees. Axe murder, though, seemed a joke too dark for such a tender age. How was the violence of an axe murderer remote enough to be funny and yet familiar enough for a ten-year-old to invoke? The boy’s antics stuck with me throughout the process of writing and promoting my book The Man from the Train. Like this book, it is a work of nonfiction. The man in question would ride the rails to a community where he had no ties, pick up an axe left outside in a woodpile, break into a house, and kill everyone inside; he especially targeted households with children. The book makes the argument that this pattern repeated dozens of times nationwide over about fifteen years and can be traced back to a man who evaded capture after murdering the family he lived with and worked for on a small farm in Massachusetts. From the beginning of my research process, the idea of the axe murderer as opposed to a murderer who used an axe was central to my understanding of these tragedies. Newspapers embraced the grabby compound phrase slowly: in 1890, the term was almost never used, but by 1920 it was used frequently. Our fiend in The Man from the Train killed perhaps as many as a hundred people beginning in 1898. He began relatively slowly, slaying one or two families a year, choosing rural communities and leaving geographic distance between his attacks. We believe that he was following work opportunities—especially the chance to use the axe to fell trees as a lumberjack. In 1909, he ramped up the bloodshed and the events became more frequent and more tightly spaced. Though the idea of serial killers wouldn’t be formalized for decades to come, awareness of them was dawning among the crime-obsessed public. After the man killed two Colorado Springs families on a September night in 1911, headlines about the “axe-murder” began to take root in newspaper pages, especially in the Midwest. The coverage of that event died out, but the phrase took hold with the trial of Clementine Barnabet. She was a young black woman in Lafayette, Louisiana, a troubled eighteen-year-old obsessed with cults and true crime who confessed to a series of murders in Louisiana and Texas—horrible crimes she (in my firm opinion) did not commit. Her vivid court statement involving voodoo rituals grabbed headlines across the country; white journalists found it easy to exploit their readers’ racism by placing exaggerated and obvious rumors into print. By the time the man from the train made his infamous trip to Villisca in June 1912, the phrase “axe murder” was a well-established part of the crime-writing lexicon, never to exit it again. It stuck to the Villisca event so firmly that when I first started research in 2012, the Wikipedia page for it was the first Google result for the phrase “axe murder.” I once believed that the emergence of this wording in newspaper headlines also mirrored a surge in the use of axes themselves as a weapon, but now, having tracked the axe over so long a period throughout human history, I don’t think that’s true. Axes are at their core utterly common, and so they have been as ubiquitous as weapons as they have been as tools. They are everywhere in our story of violence, so much a part of the texture of our conflicts that they become banal, unworthy of note. What made the phrase “axe murder” so charged in the 1910s was a clash of cutting-edge technology with ancient traditions in toolmaking over the previous sixty years. Industrialization would eventually make the axe fall out of daily use, but for a moment the new machinery made the humble axe omnipresent. Battleaxes were thoroughly outdated by the Civil War, but in military and domestic settings there were more axes than perhaps at any other point before in history. Steel tool use proliferated after 1856, when a man named Henry Bessemer devised a new method of purifying iron quickly and inexpensively by oxidizing iron with pressurized air to remove carbon and other impurities. This one-step method was discovered in the process of producing cannonballs that could be fired in the manner of a rifle. Bessemer was driven to problem-solve after the British postal service stole his fiancée Ann Allen’s idea to modify the dates on embossed postal stamps, a grudge he held even after his steel foundry made him wealthy. Steel had previously been quite precious and rare, but unlike lab-grown diamonds its new availability and cheapness did not temper demand. Skyscrapers and trains and paper clips alike flowed out of the foundries, along with a flood of hand tools: hammers, shovels, hoes, and others were suddenly much more common and inexpensive. In the 1866 Fyodor Dostoyevsky masterpiece Crime and Punishment, the antihero Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker and her sister with an axe, grabbed from the kitchen in his apartment building. In the depths of his absurd and monstrous plans, in the chaos of Saint Petersburg and his own head, he settles upon the convenience of the axe: “nothing could have been simpler.” As electricity and plumbing and cars and telephones became increasingly accessible, the axe seemed all the duller. Guns supplanted the axe as the convenient weapon of choice. Chainsaws were used for a larger and larger share of forestry applications, though they weren’t yet in use in the home. Axes were becoming an object of slight kitsch. At the 1893 World’s Fair, a small glass version of George Washington’s axe was a popular souvenir. Carrie Nation—a leader in the temperance movement of the early twentieth century who raided and destroyed bars and speakeasies—remained an object of derision long after the repeal of prohibition, her tiny hatchet no equal for the country’s thirst. One brand of tobacco in the form of a plug (a brick of compressed tobacco leaves, to be cut off and chewed or smoked in a pipe) called itself Battleaxe, recalling a now firmly extinct era of violence to flatter male customers who want to think of themselves as rugged—not unlike the logic behind Axe personal care products today. The axe was still around, but becoming antiquated. By 1922, the phrase “axe murder” appeared in U.S. newspapers hundreds of times each year, always used to describe actual crimes. But, like all grabby phrases, it became tinged with the grime of exploitative newspaper coverage through overuse. As the chainsaw took more and more of the axe’s main occupation, the axe became an anachronism. The contrast between the axe (boring) and murder (exciting) gave the phrase a darkly comic tinge. By the 1950s, “axe murder” was still a staple of newspaper headlines, yet the phrase and indeed violence with axes itself was becoming a stock joke. In Shirley Jackson’s lighthearted book of domestic essays Life Among the Savages, she writes of a sleepy domestic scene perked up by violence: “I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.” In 1955, Charles Schultz killed off unpopular character Charlotte Braun in an illustration that parodied the gentle humor of Peanuts by putting an axe in Charlotte’s head. In the 1964 hagsploitation movie Strait-Jacket, Joan Crawford campily raised the axe for B-movie thrills to theatrical success. Axe murder had primal connotations, deeply interpersonal and separate from the state violence of execution rituals and battlefields where axes have created the most bloodshed. These associations came in handy in 1976, when North Korea and the United States nearly got into a war about a tree. In the North Korean axe murder incident, Captain Arthur Bonifas and Lieutenant Mark Barrett of the U.S. Army tried to trim a poplar tree that had created a surveillance blind spot. The tree grew on the Bridge of No Return, a tense spot near the Demilitarized Zone where North Korea, South Korea, and the United States observed an uneasy truce, often taunting one another by banging on windows with axe handles. The captain and lieutenant were killed by thirty North Korean soldiers, armed not just with their own axes but with “crowbars, pipes, [and] clubs” taken from South Korean laborers. The United States responded with restraint by simply cutting down the tree (with a much more efficient chainsaw), leading to some crucial concessions from the North Korean president and transforming the tripartite relationship. Though the event was not especially well remembered, it illustrates some of the crucial associations of axes and violence in the United States. The term “axe murder” characterized the incident as a close-quarters grudge, not a military exercise with guns and helicopters but something ugly and outside of bounds. And, since this war was almost begun by trimming a tree and ended with chopping down that tree, there’s a sense of something just barely funny about it. Axe murder—or really, axe murderers—became a permanent punchline after The Shining in 1980. The moment where Jack Torrance hacks through a locked door with a fire axe is darkly funny all on its own, with its invocation of Johnny Carson’s signature catchphrase; the shot itself harkens back to a movie called The Phantom Carriage, made around the first flush of “axe murder” in 1920. When a Mike Myers movie goofily satirizing the eighties erotic thriller needed a punchier title, they went to the Shining parody set piece at the center and called it So I Married an Axe Murderer. Though the comedy wasn’t an initial hit, it’s become an enduring cult classic, permanently sealing the idea of axe murder as comic. Infinite references, parodies, homages of the axe breaking through the wood in The Simpsons or MythBusters or Super Bowl ads for Mountain Dew Zero Sugar have built a long legacy for the fire axe wielded by Jack Nicholson. But the phrase mostly disappeared from newspapers describing actual crimes. It is now too unserious. The axe in silhouette still has genuine menace when the tone is dark, and power—an axe, usually with a hyperbolically huge blade, is often a formidable weapon in violence-oriented video games. But an axe murder is also appropriate for a throwaway line in a lighthearted family comedy like Bob’s Burgers, the second of three in a list: “roller coasters, or axe murderers, or Dad’s morning breath.” An escalation from roller coasters on the way to the real punchline. The idea of an axe murderer is not so much a shock as a joke so easy a ten-year-old could make it. Axes are far from humanity’s only deadly, omnipresent instrument. Hammers and swords and knives are objects of fetishistic fear, each in many ways more iconic than the axe. Knives and hammers are an even more essential tool for the little jobs of daily life, closer at hand than an axe in most modern households. And while axe throwing has had a recent upswing in popularity, fencing is an Olympic sport. Axes can be expensive toys and objects of honor and prestige, but a hatchet will never have the pedigree, the classiness, the pretensions of the epee. Yet it is that earthbound flintiness that makes the axe so iconic. There is no tool older. The axe is the sword, it is the hammer, the planer, the scythe, khopesh, knife. As every task somehow involves your smartphone today, so everything required a hand axe when humanity began. Early people spent their lives refining their craftsmanship to make these biface tools beginning about two and a half or three million years ago, learning the qualities of different kinds of stones and perfecting the flaking and percussive techniques to make these elaborately faceted gems into teardrop shape. And then half a million years ago, the tools got a hell of a lot better. Handles were a miracle of engineering, allowing the one-piece blade to do “cutting, scraping, chopping, and piercing.” This was a transformation in hunting and in interpersonal violence. The axe gained literal power with the handle, its force physically enhanced by the new leverage, and became all the more valuable as a tool, as a weapon, as a symbol of wealth. Specialized axes spread into professions beyond woodcutting, such as coopering (barrel making), shipbuilding, and roofing, and revealed their usefulness for enforcing community disputes. The axe’s power only grew with the introduction of metals. Otzi—the naturally mummified man who lived 5,300 years ago in the Alps of Northern Italy and was discovered in 1991—held an axe. The head of the tool was fitted into the handle and lashed rather than the other way around—typical for stone axes. But this blade was copper, a sign of the man’s high social status, and his weapons were flecked with the blood of others. By the time we start to have recorded history, the axe is already loaded with the language of power. The Dresden Codex—a Mayan book that is one of the oldest in the Americas—had a specific ideographic symbol, ch’ak, defined as the “axe/comb glyph,” which possibly refers both to events of war and decapitation as well as the movement of the planets. This association is reflected in the warrior god of lightning Chahk’s great jade axe—an association between the axe and the great whacks from the sky that persist across many systems of belief from around the world: Pangu’s axe that cleaved the world in Chinese mythology, or Hephaestus hitting Zeus’s head with an axe to birth Athena. State violence invested the axe not just with power but with authority. In war, execution, and other official and sanctioned shows of power and force—the axe was always present in the chaos of battle and the awful order of ritual violence. Battleaxes were thinner than woodcutting axes, but both were present on campaigns, key to battles on land and sea. Axes were a distinctive part of many legendary military forces, even into the twentieth century in some cases—in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Songye people made elegant hatchets for ceremonial decapitation rituals that have spokes where the cheek of the blade would usually be, etched with human faces. The posture a person must assume to be beheaded is submissive. To lay your neck on the block means that you have not just been defeated but that you have stopped fighting. This is the theater of death: it is not so much about making the condemned feel their defeat, but about communicating the totality of their defeat to the people watching, who might wish to succeed where the condemned failed. This is the reason the axe was such an important part of the fasces, a symbol from Rome that has resonated with genocidal imperial empires from the United States to Germany, and the namesake of fascism. The axe tells anyone who hopes to resist that they will be not only killed but also ideologically defeated. But even as the axe can be put toward the abuse of power, so it can be put toward resistance. The commonness of the axe and its inseparability from the rank and file of labor processes lend it unexpected power in rebellion and revolution. The artist Kerry James Marshall has returned again and again to the subject of Nat Turner, who led a slave insurrection armed with axes in southern Virginia in 1831; the axe appears in two of these paintings, for woodcutting and for beheading Turner’s enslaver. In the establishment and westward expansion of the United States, the axe became pivotal. Early on, it was heavily taxed as an import, making it a scarce and valuable tool in trade. Demand only grew. This was once a heavily forested country full of unimaginably huge trees, and there were homes and farms and railroads to build. Even nonrural families like the Bordens found themselves with five different axes in their cellar. As the Bessemer method led to the explosion of steel tools in general, there were suddenly many more patterns of axes to fit different needs: roofing, woodcutting, firefighting. The Pulaski, an axe with a hoe on the back of the pole invented in 1911, endures especially as an essential firefighting tool. But by 1965 the axe was no longer the default choice for so many of the tasks it once handled. Chainsaws took its truest purpose, woodcutting. Electric heat reduced the need for firewood cut in the home. Grocery stores made it easier and easier to buy meat that was already butchered. Cars meant there were no more carriages to repair or horses to shoe. Today, you only have five axes in the basement if you really like axes. It’s not that the axe is no longer useful. Someone who is sleeping rough in the woods has great need for a hatchet to clear a place to sleep. A housed person with a fireplace or a backyard full of scrubby trees could use an axe toward those purposes; there are less work-intensive options, but the challenge and the connection to the old ways are the point. Like the cowboy or the gangster, the woodsman has turned from a laborer into a mythical beast of masculinities past, a Paul Bunyan fantasy you can buy at the hardware store. And that’s not silly; it fulfills something deep within us. But the axe doesn’t carry the connotation of practicality that it once did—it’s usually not the most efficient way to solve whatever problem is in front of you. Especially violence. Guns are easy to use, there are a lot of them, and they’re much likelier to be used to fatal effect than the axe. And yet the axe is still a common object that gets picked up in unpremeditated violence, whether in the great outdoors or the garage. Though gun purchase laws are nowhere near tough enough, it’s still much easier to buy an axe than a gun. In this book I’ve tried more than anything to look directly at the axe, both as it gets lost in a sea of other tools and technology and as it becomes a fetish or an afterthought in violent stories throughout time. I’ve reviewed true crime staples, toured three Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, hiked a Pennsylvania glen, and dug into the backstory of a throwaway sentence in Herodotus. The kind librarians at the University of Kansas sent scores of books about everything from handles to sex crimes to Vikings, right to my office at my day job (and let me renew them for years). Lost one summer on a college campus in Memphis, Tennessee, I found a huge mural of Ramses II smiting his people with a circular axe. And I’ve learned to see human-sacrifice rituals everywhere. Each story in this book is prefaced with a brief explanation of one specific kind of axe, and how each new blade reflects the axe’s evolution as a piece of technology, weapon, and cultural symbol. There are hundreds and sometimes thousands of years between many of these murders. The events in these books take place at such disparate moments in history, but they have commonalities beyond the tool central to each: revenge, guilt, entitlement, exploitation, shame, spite, war, greed, madness. And occasionally, freedom, resistance, redemption. Community, even. ___________________________________ From Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. View the full article

When that unknown assassin squeezed the first trigger back in 1889, blowing Belle Starr from her famous hand-worked leather saddle, they would have had no way of knowing they were inadvertently knocking her right into the pages of history. How could they? At that point, she was only a colorful local character with a checkered past, barely known beyond the frontier settlements of what is today eastern Oklahoma and northern Texas; someone who stirred gossip in neighborhood saloons and provoked headlines in town papers with her ribald antics and frequent brushes with the law. And it very easily could have remained that way, with her name quietly fading into the past, had it not been for one serendipitous event. Two days after her death, the editor of the Fort Smith Elevator, a minuscule Arkansas weekly from the ragged edge of Indian Territory, sent off a dispatch about the killing to a few of the large, metropolitan papers. Including, as it were, the New York Times. The timing could not have been better. With the 1880s coming to a close and with the “Wild” quickly leaking out of an increasingly tamed West, eastern urbanites held a voracious appetite for salacious true-crime drama from whatever was left of their nation’s vanishing frontier. Yes, heroes sold papers, but villains sold even more, and a villainess—particularly an unabashedly stylish one clad entirely in black velvet and flashing an elaborately plumed hat—well, that was simply too good to pass up. Just three days after her death, the rest of America received its first glimpse of Belle Starr, in the form of an obituary on the front page of the Times, titled “A Desperate Woman Killed.”1 The piece was short and contained as many exaggerations and errors as it did facts. It labeled her “the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders” (she certainly was not that), stated that she “married Cole Younger directly after the war” (she never married him at all), and also claimed that she “had been arrested for murder and robbery a score of times, but always managed to escape” (also false—she was only ever formally charged three times, for robbery, yes, but never for murder). Yet what the obituary lacked in fact-checking, it made up for in raw titillation. The slim core of truth it conveyed, that a female bandit who ran with famous outlaws had been gunned down in Indian Territory by an unknown assassin, was morsel enough to whet the general public’s appetite for more. Among those intrigued by the murder was Richard K. Fox, owner of the National Police Gazette, one of the most popular true-crime tabloids of the day—the word “true” being somewhat loosely applied. But while journalistic integrity may not have been one of the publisher’s strong points, knowing how to make a buck was. Recognizing the story’s explosive potential, Fox decided a full-length book was in order. A writer was dispatched immediately to Fort Smith, an egregious amount of creative license was taken, and by that summer, a paperback was produced, titled Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen or the Female Jesse James. Again, the book was far more invention than fact, and even contained “excerpts” from a fabricated diary. It was a work of bombastic fiction, pedaled as something closer to biography, but the audience for Fox’s lurid crime dramas didn’t much seem to care. The slim volume described her as “more amorous than Anthony’s mistress, more relentless than Pharaoh’s daughter, and braver than Joan of Arc.” It went on to claim that “Mother Nature was indulging in one of her rarest freaks, when she produced such a novel specimen of womankind.” And it sold by the thousands. From there, the legend of Belle Starr effectively—to use the parlance of our times—went viral, gaining in grandiosity with each new serialization and with each fresh telling, affixing her place among the mythological pantheon of the Wild West. In the decades to come, there would be novelizations, epic poems, historical biographies, folk songs, and when the technology arrived, even movies. Belle Starr fever may have reached its peak with the 1941 release of an eponymous film, produced by 20th Century Fox, starring the stunning Gene Tierney, who bore no physical or historical resemblance to the raw-boned middle-aged woman who gave up the ghost on the banks of the South Canadian River. Throughout the final decade of the nineteenth century and the entire first half of the twentieth, Belle Starr, the notorious “Bandit Queen,” captivated America and captured its collective imagination. Until, rather suddenly, she didn’t. In the postwar years, the name of Belle Starr faded from the national consciousness of the American West. Not entirely—there would always be historians and enthusiasts who knew her story, and her name would continue to ignite sparks of recognition here and there. But her days as a household name, if not a cultural icon, had passed. As to why this occurred, one could posit a number of theories, from the slow death of the Western as a popular American trope, to revisionist historians poking holes in the many biographical embellishments that had gained credence over the years. Perhaps the most convincing reason, however, relates directly to the cultural shifts that were taking place in the United States at that time, as a freshly suburbanized nation stomped the historical mud from its boots and leaned into a new, whitewashed era of cultural puritanism. The cinematic Westerns of the 1950s and ’60s—at least the ones made in the United States—held little room for moral ambiguity or complex sociologies. They were ritualized retellings of the creation myth of the American West, one in which brave Anglo- American settlers, pure of both heart and mind, tamed a wild land, cleansing it of materialistic outlaws and hostile Indians through righteous violence. And primary female characters, almost with- out fail, were paragons of an invented ideal of frontier femininity. Chaste, wholesome, oftentimes schoolteachers or fiancées from back east, they brought decency and lily-white “civilization” to a supposedly lawless and miscegenated land. In effect, they made the West softer, whiter, and safer. More “suburban,” one might even say. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how Belle Starr—a whiskey-drinking, horse-thieving, gunslinging double widow, who not only bedded a much younger Cherokee man but also forced him to change his surname to match hers upon marriage—might not fit that prevailing paradigm. In the gritty cynicism of a European spaghetti Western, perhaps, and there actually was one such film released in Italy in 1968, retitled in English as The Belle Starr Story. But a John Ford movie? As a love interest for Gary Cooper or John Wayne? It’s unthinkable. The censors of the era would never have allowed it, and forget about the American public at large. When it came to the pop culture depictions of Western heroines and anti-heroines in the latter half of the twentieth century, she was in effect written out of the script. Annie Oakley would receive her own Irving Berlin Broadway musical, Calamity Jane would be featured in a whole slew of movies, not to mention an HBO series, and Big Nose Kate would have cameos in everything from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to Tombstone—she would even be played once by a decidedly petite-nosed Faye Dunaway. For Belle Starr, however, there was nothing but literary tumbleweed and cinematic crickets. She was all but forgotten. As far as cultural lacunae go, this one was unfortunate. Because unlike her more celebrated frontier sistren, Belle Starr actually was an outlaw and a gunslinger and an equal partner to some of the most legendary bandits of the era. Indeed, while Annie Oakley was shooting at glass baubles in staged Wild West shows, while Calamity Jane was stumbling drunk and aimless through Deadwood, and while Big Nose Kate was peeking out from behind the curtains of her bedroom during the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Belle Starr was packing pistols and raising hell, from Texas all the way up to Missouri. Her early chroniclers may have taken some creative liberties, but certain facts are in- controvertible. Belle Starr definitely did harbor and consort with legendary outlaws like Jesse James and Cole Younger. She did marry into a clan of Cherokee warlords, operating, alongside her husband Sam Starr, one of the largest banditry and smuggling rings in the Indian Territory. She did ride sidesaddle and sport a pair of intimidating .45s that she lovingly called her “babies.” And she did face charges of horse theft and armed robbery, even serving prison time for the former, courtesy of the infamous “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker. Belle Starr may not have received national recognition during her lifetime, but her plumed hat sat squarely in the shaded, overlapping portion of a fascinating historical Venn diagram, containing both storied personas and epochal events. Encircling her own blood-drenched biography like barbed wire is the history of Appalachia, of westward expansion, of the forced removal of the Cherokee, and of the Civil War in the Border States. Her life was lived at the crossroads of all of them. However, even the dowdiest of historians can prove vulnerable to the allures of raw curiosity and human wonder. And when it comes to writing about Belle Starr’s life, even more compelling than all that dry and weedy history are the rich mysteries that still attend it. It’s true: the story of Belle Starr is rife with unknowns. Not even newspaper articles or census records of the era can be fully trusted. Dates were erased, names were changed, details were invented—sometimes out of carelessness, but often with an agenda in mind. Were one to asterisk every sentence that contained a suspect source or an iffy reference, a book about Belle would become a veritable Milky Way of stars. Practically by necessity, any researched attempt at revealing the details of her life becomes less like writing an academic treatise and more like painting an artistic portrait, shaded as truthfully as possible, while also acknowledging a bit of interpretive brushwork. The West has simply become so mythologized, so aggrandized, that teasing ironclad truths from that tangled skein of frontier yarns is often all but impossible; a little bit of legend will cling to almost any fact. And when it comes to Belle Starr, said legends are usually woven from unanswered questions. Did she really serve as a teenage spy for Con- federate guerrillas? Did she fence horses and provide a hideout for Jesse James? Which of the many armed robberies attributed to her did she actually participate in, if any? And did she ever kill anyone in the process? All of which leads to the biggest mystery of all: Why? Why did a woman who had considerable advantages in life—a good family, a decent education, solid marriage prospects, a clear path to financial security—choose to pursue a life of crime? Belle Starr very easily could have slipped into the character and mien of a Southern belle, marrying a wealthy landowner or merchant, living comfortably in the boomtown of Dallas. Instead, she chose to consort with bandits, flee from the law, live rough among the Cherokee, and stroll through the streets of one-horse towns, laden with guns. One could blame the societal damage caused by the Civil War, her family’s move from Missouri to the Texas frontier, or even the death of her older brother Bud—a trauma, most seem to agree, that scarred her for life. And one would not necessarily be wrong. There is probably some truth in each of these suppositions. The fullest answer, however, as to why Belle Starr chose the outlaw’s way may quite simply be found in her adamant refusal to be cowed by a society that held definitive ideas about how a woman should behave and what she could accomplish. Belle simply had no use for sewing circles or calico dresses; she would not be cosseted inside any farmhouse kitchen or be seen as less than equal to any man. In her own words: “So long had I been estranged from the society of women (whom I thoroughly detest) that I thought I would find it irksome to live in their midst.” The very rights and privileges that nineteenth-century America denied her because of her sex, Belle Starr decided to acquire by the gun. She chose a path different from that which was expected of her—a route that shook with thunder, that was drenched in blood. An exceedingly dangerous road, albeit one upon which she took orders from no man. And here one must also be careful. Because the temptation is certainly there, given the currents and trends of our times, to portray Belle Starr as some kind of proto-feminist Robin Hood or some form of Wild West justice warrior. It would make for some catchy storytelling, that’s true. Belle Starr, however, was neither of these things. And while she may have been bucking the same sorts of societal pressures, it’s hard to imagine that the saloon-loving, Confederacy-sympathizing Belle would have had much in common with the teetotaling Yankee matrons who served as the vanguard of the early women’s rights movement. It’s far more likely she would have threatened to smash their teapots over their heads. The truth, be it comfortable or not, is that Belle Starr was never out for social justice, nor was she an advocate of any cause—she was in it solely for herself. And in that regard, she bore far less resemblance to any Susan B. Anthony than she did to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish gangsters who would emerge half a century later in the ethnic ghettos of Eastern cities. Individuals who, just like her, knew that because of their identity in America, the life they aspired to could never be achieved through honest means. So just like them—but fifty years earlier—Belle Starr chose to achieve it through dishonest ones. She put down her sewing kit and picked up a gun. And the way of the gun did indeed bring her the very freedom she craved: to love whomever she wanted, to live however she pleased, and to take whatever she felt was rightfully hers. But in the end, as was the case with so many outlaws and gangsters, it also led to her ruin, leaving her to gasp out her last breaths face down in that Oklahoma river- bed, riddled with buckshot—and perhaps even regret. And it is that meteoric rise and vertiginous fall, in pursuit of a kind of liberty and equality that her own country refused to grant her, that makes her story so quintessentially American and as relevant today as it was a century and a half ago. But there’s one more mystery still. A smaller, more personal one, which I hoped, possibly naively, I might solve as well. Growing up, I was often told that Belle Starr was a distant relation on my mother’s side—Scots-Irish farmers who arrived in eastern Texas in covered wagons at roughly the same time Belle did, and who, if the stories are true, also had blood ties to the Cherokee Nation. As to the veracity of both claims, going into this project, I honestly could not say. As I suspect is the case with more than a few American families with deep rural roots, the alleged link to Belle Starr is just one square of trivia in an admittedly checkered past. There is no shortage of outlaws and troublemakers dangling—several by the neck—from our family tree. And while some, like my second cousin Lester, the last man to be hung in Macoupin County, Illinois, I know for a fact to be kin, others—well, it’s harder to say. I began this book with the hope that the research involved might shed some light on the matter—and that if I was very lucky, somewhere amid all the gunsmoke and betrayal, the war cries and blood spatter, the rumbling of horses and jangling of stolen gold, I might even find an answer. Excerpted from Queen of All Mayhem: The Blood-Soaked Life and Mysterious Death of Belle Starr, the Most Dangerous Woman in the West. By Dane Huckelbridge. Copyright 2025. Published by William Morrow. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

When it comes to the term puzzle novel, I’m going to cast a wide net here. There are novels with puzzles incorporated into the plot and then there are novels with very puzzling plots (but in the good head-scratching way, not the what-the-hell-was-this-author-thinking way). The novels with puzzling plots category could even include most mysteries since a mystery is, at its heart, nothing but a puzzle. So, the following unordered list contains some of each, but I may not tell you which is which. Surprise is, after all, half the fun of reading. In my opinion, these are all books for the intelligent reader, if that isn’t redundant. Coincidentally, many of these books are also debut novels. The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall Several years ago, I was taking a creative writing course and working on The Language of the Birds, when one of the instructors said that my work reminded them of The Raw Shark Texts. Clearly, I had to read it. And I loved it. Few books can tackle hefty topics such as memory, identity, and grief while doing so with such a unique storyline. A cat-and-mouse hunting expedition for a voracious memory-eating predator, this funny, emotional, page-turning thriller is equal parts Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Franz Kafka. Conceptually brilliant, The Raw Shark Texts was Steven Hall’s first novel and won the Borders Original Voices Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer While the puzzles in The Wishing Game may play a relatively minor role, it would feel remiss to exclude it from my list. Featuring a puzzling competition created by a wealthy reclusive (something you will also find in the next book on this list), Meg Shaffer’s debut is a lovely story full of imagination and hope. It is also a paean to books, and especially to those books that touch us at a young age. Some puzzles in novels (including my own) are so complex as to be virtually impossible for the reader to solve, so the reader must merely follow the logic of the brilliant protagonist and be awed by their ingenuity. I think The Wishing Game is different in that many readers should be able to solve the puzzles themselves, providing a fun reward above and beyond that of the compelling and heartwarming story itself. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline This bestseller, also made into a movie by Steven Spielberg, is a joyride of a treasure hunt through puzzles, pop culture, and gameplay. In all due deference to the author, whose pop culture knowledge vastly exceeds that of most of us mere mortals, I expect that most readers won’t be able to solve the pop-culture-packed puzzles found within, but that doesn’t take anything away from the enjoyment of this read. This story is a win-win, the opposite of the Kobayashi Maru, and if you know that reference this book is for you (rhyme neither intended nor regretted). The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton I must confess to being a little lost in the woods when this debut novel took the first of its turns. But boy was I lost in an atmospheric and utterly compelling place. And the feeling didn’t last, quickly replaced by intrigue and wonderment. This is another mind-bindingly original idea, a brilliant genre-blending twist on the classic whodunnit. I am loathe to say much more to avoid any spoilers but suffice it to say that I would be genuinely shocked if you can predict the ending of this one. Brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed, this book earned its place on too many best-of lists to name here. The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett A brilliantly clever, mind-bending mystery, The Twyford Code is a page-turning scavenger hunt chock full of puzzles, red herrings, and an endearing protagonist you will not soon forget. I must confess to holding The Twyford Code in a special place as it was one of the three comps (comparable titles) that I used when querying agents for The Language of the Birds manuscript (you won’t find my other two comps on this list). While discussing The Twyford Code, I should also mention The Appeal, Hallett’s debut novel. The Twyford Code might be considered more puzzle-oriented, whereas The Appeal is more of a puzzling twist on a classic whodunnit. But both stories are presented to the reader in strikingly original ways. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon Another book recommended to me by a creative writing instructor while I was working on The Language of the Birds, this book has so much going for it that it’s honestly hard to know where to begin. A 15-year-old boy with a very distinctive perspective investigates the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog. Filled with humor, heart, and told from an exceptionally unique perspective, this is a truly remarkable story. I think it’s fair to say that it has one of the most memorable and impressive narrative voices that I’ve ever read. A must-read and a modern classic. *** I hope you find as much delight in the pages of these books as I did. Enjoy! View the full article