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When I first picked up Matthew D. Lassiter’s groundbreaking new text, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, I knew I had to interview him and bring the book’s essential reframing of an oft-misunderstood history to our readers. Lassiter makes a profound and necessary case against both criminalization and coercive rehabilitation, and time and time again, highlights the gap between white fears and white behavior. I was able to send Lassiter some questions over email, what follows is a lengthy and fascinating discussion that sheds light on many previously (may I say, deliberately?) ignored facets of the decades-long war on drugs. Also, we talk about how bad Traffic is. That movie is just ridiculously terrible. Why has so little attention been paid to the history of drug policy in suburbia? The American war on drugs has always been thoroughly pervaded by racial (and class) discrimination, and incarceration rates for drug-related crimes have long been much higher for nonwhite communities and especially Black residents of poor urban areas. This history of racial control through saturation policing, selective enforcement, and harsh sentencing has rightly received lots of attention from scholars, advocacy groups, and journalists. My book builds on this essential work by showing that the war on drugs has long operated in white middle-class suburban areas as well and that these stories have to be told together in order to fully understand the deeper causes and racial consequences of drug control policy. Starting in the 1950s, law enforcement began arresting significant numbers of white teenagers and young adults for drug crimes, especially marijuana. But the discretionary and discriminatory processes of the criminal and juvenile justice systems almost always diverted these white youth into rehabilitation without leaving any trace of a criminal record, if they faced consequences at all. Because millions of white youth were arrested, but very few ever ended up in prison, the familiar graphs about extreme racial disproportionality in mass incarceration actually obscure the extensive impact of drug control policy and discretionary law enforcement in white suburbia. The Suburban Crisis shows how white middle-class suburban “victims” have been as central to American drug politics and policy formation as the Black and Mexican American “villains” inevitably stigmatized as evil urban “pushers,” dangerous border traffickers, inner-city gangsters, and predatory ghetto addicts. White youth who chose to consume illegal drugs, once recast as the innocent victims of foreign and urban predators, became the primary justification for harsh and racially selective crackdowns on the supply side of the market. The drug-war prioritization of marijuana between the 1950s and the early 1980s can only be explained as a futile mission to keep this mild recreational drug away from white middle-class youth because of what it symbolized. White suburban communities have also been the primary beneficiaries of public health prevention and rehabilitation programs, with treatment in urban centers badly underfunded while there’s always plenty of money for policing and prisons. You talk about three eras of drug policies since the 1950s. What are these? What was the cause behind the drug war interregnum? The modern war on drugs really emerged in the early-to-mid 1950s when the U.S. Congress and key states including California and New York passed the first mandatory-minimum laws targeting sale and possession of both heroin and marijuana. These laws responded to grassroots pressure to protect white youth from urban and foreign “pushers,” accompanied by racist imagery from politicians and the mass media that young white females were becoming narcotics addicts and prostitutes in urban slums. This era also depicted marijuana and heroin as equally dangerous drugs based on the hype and mythology of the gateway progression syndrome, that youth who experimented with marijuana would almost inevitably become addicted to heroin. The second era, what I call the drug war interregnum, responded to a massive increase in marijuana use (a felony crime) by millions of white teenagers and young adults starting in the mid-1960s. Law enforcement prioritized suburban and college recreational marijuana markets during this era and arrested white youth at roughly their population share for the first and likely last time in American drug-war history. Arrests of white juveniles peaked at 89 percent of the juvenile total in 1973, compared to barely half after the launch of the war on crack cocaine in the 1980s. The criminal legal system devised an array of discretionary procedures to divert most of these white youth into rehab programs without leaving any trace on their official records. This was a massive government intervention against a relatively harmless recreational drug that had no real impact on demand and made the supply side more profitable. Congress nationalized these procedures in a major 1970 law that reduced first-offense possession of all illegal drugs to a misdemeanor, as leverage to divert even more users into rehabilitation, while increasing the mandatory penalties passed in the 1950s for “professional” traffickers. Mass arrests of white pot smokers led to a vibrant campaign for legalization in the 1970s, when several states led by Oregon and California decriminalized possession of marijuana. It seemed likely at the time that marijuana would soon be decriminalized nationwide, but then “parent-power” groups in affluent white suburbs began mobilizing against the threat of adolescent pot smoking as usage trickled down into the middle schools. In this third stage, suburban activists came together in the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth and pressured both the Carter and Reagan administrations to re-escalate the war on marijuana as well as cocaine, labeled the new gateway risk. Their zero-tolerance agenda profoundly shaped drug control policies in the 1980s, a bifurcated approach of public health “just say no” campaigns in white suburbia and punitive crackdowns in urban centers and foreign nations. This movement ultimately helped lead to the injustices of the racially targeted war on crack. How did marijuana use in the suburbs become the driving narrative of the war on drugs? Marijuana was the most important enforcement priority of the American war on drugs from the 1950s through the early 1980s because it was the illegal drug most likely to be sold and consumed by white middle-class youth. The vast majority of drug arrests nationwide were for marijuana possession, until the focus shifted to crack cocaine and Black urban centers in the mid-1980s, and a large majority of these marijuana arrests were of white teenagers and young adults. The obvious question is why would the United States spend so many resources in the failed effort to interdict a mild and non-addictive drug, and why would policymakers and law enforcement seek to arrest and then rehabilitate so many white middle-class youth—almost always defined as “otherwise law-abiding Americans”—to deter their recreational use of marijuana? “Marijuana smoking by white youth represented a symbolic threat to normative suburban values and capitalist ideologies.” There are plenty of specific reasons for each time period, but the overriding answer is that marijuana smoking by white youth represented a symbolic threat to normative suburban values and capitalist ideologies. The constant racial fear was that “ghetto” pathologies and behaviors were infiltrating the middle-class suburbs. In the 1950s, politics and culture portrayed marijuana experimentation by white youth as an invasion by Mexican and urban Black pushers that would lead suburban children to heroin addiction and even death in urban slums. In the 1960s, marijuana use accelerated in the context of campus protests and the counterculture, leading to fears that the drug was causing white youth to become political radicals, suburban runaways, and “hippies” in urban enclaves—that smoking grass was fueling the so-called “generation gap.” In the 1970s, politicians justified drug-war expansion by conflating marijuana and heroin to make the crisis seem universal, because only a few cities had major heroin markets but parents everywhere were worried about teens smoking pot and moving on to harder drugs. This decade also brought the unscientific diagnosis that lots of young white stoners were falling victim to the “amotivational syndrome,” causing laziness, apathy, and no desire to study hard or work productive jobs—an anxiety that again reflected racialized fears of ghetto contagion. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth also blamed marijuana for suburban family breakdown in the 1970s and 1980s—arguing that latchkey children with both parents working or divorced were smoking pot because of peer pressure and becoming insubordinate druggies and dropouts. You talk about how the seemingly opposed policies of criminalization and coercive rehabilitation were both sides of the same coin. Can you explain how those policies complemented each other and were racialized? Between the 1950s and the 1980s, liberal policymakers in Congress and in key states such as California were the main architects of the war on drugs and champions of its coercive public health framework. They argued that so-called “pushers” should be incarcerated for a long time while their alleged victims were “sick people” who should be forced into rehabilitation, if necessary through involuntary institutionalization in treatment centers and psychiatric facilities. Liberals tended to be more sympathetic than conservatives to some nonwhite drug users whom they also classified as addict-victims, but almost everyone across the political spectrum defined white Americans who broke the drug laws as the definitive victims who always deserved rehabilitation. “The genuine alternative to drug criminalization is some combination of legalization, decriminalization, regulation, and non-coercive harm reduction…” Mandatory rehabilitation depends on criminalization—the use of arrest and then diversion to channel certain illegal drug users into treatment programs and other alternatives to jail or prison. Our drug policy debate often portrays rehabilitation as the opposite of incarceration, but the genuine alternative to drug criminalization is some combination of legalization, decriminalization, regulation, and non-coercive harm reduction. Arresting people for using and selling certain drugs that government policy has arbitrarily criminalized, and then diverting a subset of those deemed “victims” and “deserving” of rehabilitation, is still a form of punishment and state coercion. The war on drugs has long operated, and still largely operates, through a consensus politics shaped by these intertwined policies of punitive law enforcement and coercive public health. Coercive rehabilitation is a discretionary policy that inevitably operates in discriminatory ways and gives law enforcement actors without medical expertise, especially police and prosecutors, the power to define drug “addiction” and “abuse” as they assess potential for rehabilitation. In the 1950s and 1960s, the criminal and juvenile justice systems designed a discretionary diversion process that explicitly used assessment factors including racial status (white youth without prior records always defined as not “real criminals”), grades and college plans, church attendance, parental income, social class standing, and geographic residence. Many recreational drug users, including plenty arrested for marijuana possession, faced coercive rehabilitation even as serious public health problems remained badly underfunded. In California during 1973-1974 alone, law enforcement arrested and diverted around 40,000 white marijuana offenders into formal rehab programs, taking up spots originally allocated for heroin addicts and others with serious drug abuse issues. Privileged white youth definitely resented being forced into any sort of drug rehab program, but they rarely faced incarceration or juvenile institutionalization, the outcomes far more likely for poor and nonwhite youth. You refuse to use the words “moral panic” to discuss white suburban opinions around drug use— why? I made a deliberate decision not to use “moral panic” as an analytical framework for a couple of reasons. First, I think there has been a lot of imprecision and oversimplification around the popularization of the moral panic concept, especially when it jumps from the careful work by sociologists into a catch-all explanation by journalists and some scholars seeking to provide popular audiences with an explanation for “irrational” and “hysterical” crusades, usually those undertaken by conservatives. Arguably the Los Angeles story in chapter one does represent a form of moral panic—the mass suburban campaign in the 1950s demanding life-without-parole sentences for the alleged invading “pushers” of heroin and marijuana, portrayed as Mexican villains. In fact, white youth drove to Mexico themselves to acquire illegal drugs and then supplied their friends and acquaintances. But even in this case, I decided to focus more on how a broad range of actors including law enforcement, politicians, media corporations, and suburban anti-drug groups strategically sought to produce a moral panic in order to justify harsh and discriminatory mandatory-minimum laws in the emerging war on drugs. The analytical framework in The Suburban Crisis relies not on the psychological frame of moral panic but on a more layered political history and state formation model of how policy formation unfolds. The book spends a lot of time critically examining how various actors with anti-drug agendas tried to generate public panic for specific policy goals, usually by deploying the “suburban crisis” framework of endangered white youth and lost white innocence. Politicians and the media exploited stories of white female victims and nonwhite villains to escalate the drug war and distract attention from its constant failure to suppress either supply or demand. The Nixon administration hyped the marijuana-to-heroin gateway to generate public support for its drug-war crackdown in the early 1970s. Drug warriors in both parties and their allies in media and law enforcement misrepresented the dangers of marijuana for decades, promoting many absurd arguments, to justify massive budget expenditures in a war on drugs that they just kept losing. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, a relatively small coalition of anti-marijuana activists from affluent suburbs, lamented the permissiveness toward teenage pot smoking of most of their neighbors while successfully pressuring the Carter and Reagan administrations to make marijuana the top priority of drug-war prevention, rehabilitation, and enforcement campaigns. Just because suburban social movements and their allies in the political-media-law enforcement nexus often emerged victorious, it does not mean that the general public was therefore caught up in a mass moral panic around youth drug use. How did housing policy intersect with drug policy in the story of American segregation? The American housing market was comprehensively segregated by race in the post-World War II decades, a product of deliberate government policy and also defensive resistance to integration by white neighborhoods in the cities and suburbs alike. The racial inequalities in the war on drugs (and the related wars on crime and delinquency) accelerated as part of this broader landscape of metropolitan segregation. White parents viewed racially segregated housing and schools in middle-class suburbia as key to protecting their children from the crime, gangs, and drug problems that they (wrongly) believed were contained in the Black and Mexican American sections of the cities. In 1956, the state of California officially instructed parents that living in a “homogeneous” neighborhood with others of “similar racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds” was the best way to ensure that “normal” youth would not be tempted by the delinquency and drugs associated with the urban centers. Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, the longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, often claimed that marijuana and heroin only appealed to “hoodlums,” whereas “normal” white youth were not at risk as long as they stayed out of urban slums and interracial settings. This strategy to protect white youth through segregated middle-class sanctuaries inevitably failed, again and again—not because the ghetto invaded the suburbs, but because suburban teenagers with cars had the freedom and autonomy to seek out illegal drugs and bring them back to their hometowns. Instead of dealing with this reality, activist parents’ groups, policymakers, and the mass media repeatedly blamed urban and foreign sources for contaminating the allegedly utopian suburbs, leading to enforcement crackdowns that as designed had racially discriminatory consequences. These outcomes—much higher incarceration rates in nonwhite areas, white drug crimes hidden from view through the arrest-and-diversion process—then reproduced the false logic that suburbs were safe havens and cities were dangerous and crime-ridden. You talk about the inherently political categories of childhood and youth—can you unpack that for us, in terms of the selective application of innocence? The politics and culture of the war on drugs has consistently portrayed white youth as innocent victims, even though these youths almost always insisted that they participated in drug markets willingly and had the right to break unjust and irrational prohibition laws. White middle-class youth have instead been depicted as victims in need of protecting from illegal drug “pushers,” victims seduced into crime and delinquency by popular culture and outside invaders, victims in need of diversion to rehabilitation whenever they break the drug laws, victims who must be shielded from the consequences of their criminalized activities, victims of overzealous law enforcement on the rare occasions they ended up in jail or prison for felony crimes. In the book I label these white youth “impossible criminals”—the phrase that appeared over and over in the historical record was “otherwise law-abiding youth,” meaning they broke laws but were not real criminals. The victimization framework removes political autonomy and responsibility from white middle-class youth and at the same time justifies extremely harsh treatment of Black and other nonwhite and poor youth… The victimization framework removes political autonomy and responsibility from white middle-class youth and at the same time justifies extremely harsh treatment of Black and other nonwhite and poor youth who are generally portrayed as villains and not victims, as possessing “real” criminality and therefore not capable of innocence. The discretionary and discriminatory processes of the criminal and juvenile justice systems then reproduce these assumptions about white innocence and nonwhite guilt, as do the political and cultural discourses of policymakers, the mainstream news media, and suburban activist groups. White youth have always been the innocent victims that matter most in every constructed crisis of the drug war—from the marijuana-to-heroin gateway of the 1950s and 1960s, to crack cocaine in the 1980s, to fentanyl today. Can you take a moment to discuss the history of racialized depictions of drug addicted white women as being sexually exploited by people of color? I’m glad you mentioned Traffic, I absolutely HATED that movie… The imagery of the white female, lured from suburban safety by the urban underworld of drug addiction and prostitution across the color line, is the most potent subset of white youth victimization and innocence in the history of the war on drugs. Law enforcement, politicians, and the news media repeatedly circulated stories of addicted white females in Black and Mexican American slums to justify harsh and selective crackdowns, from the war on heroin in the 1950s to the war on crack cocaine that the film Traffic recounts. The scene of Caroline as a “crack whore,” rescued by her father from a Black dealer’s shooting gallery, is designed to tap into the worst nightmares of white suburban parents. In the 1950s and 1960s, Commissioner Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics often justified tough mandatory-minimum laws by telling a similar story of a lost white daughter from the Midwest who ended up addicted to heroin, a prostitute in Harlem with a Black pimp, and ultimately dead. In a similar way, the mass media quickly transformed the narrative of white suburban youth who traveled to countercultural enclaves during the 1967 “Summer of Love” into a familiar tragedy narrative of runaway daughters who became heroin addict-prostitutes in San Francisco and New York City. When political and media actors seek to generate fear and anxiety about any new “epidemic” drug crisis requiring government action, this trope always resonates. You call California the bellwether state for drug policy. How does America’s most populous state compare to the nation overall in the history of drug laws and selective decriminalization? California passed its first mandatory-minimum drug law targeting marijuana and heroin in 1951, before the federal government did the same, and repeatedly escalated sentencing penalties during the next decade. The suburban grassroots movement for tougher drug laws in Los Angeles County also helped push the issue into national politics during this era, because most parts of the country outside of a few large metropolitan regions had relatively small illegal drug markets. Southern California was different than other drug centers, including New York City, because the proximity of the Mexican border created a very decentralized market where almost anyone could became a small-scale dealer or consumer of marijuana, heroin, and also illicit pharmaceuticals. The state of California, led by Los Angeles County, also arrested by far the most people for drug offenses during the 1950s and 1960s—more than half of all drug apprehensions nationwide. California had dedicated narcotics squads in operation before most other states and also a robust juvenile delinquency system that was a national model for the liberal rehabilitative philosophy of arrest and frequent diversion. California also became the cutting edge of the marijuana legalization movement in the 1970s, a grassroots mobilization against the mass arrests of white teenagers and young adults. This youth-led activism eventually resulted in the state legislature passing a decriminalization compromise in 1975, making simple possession subject to a small fine. The law maintained the tough felony penalty for selling marijuana, however, and the legislature also increased the mandatory sentences for heroin in order to target the “real criminals.” In the general pattern, the laws and policies established in California soon became models for federal legislation and then became nationalized—both the state’s get-tough measures and the loopholes designed for the white marijuana market. What was the parent power coalition? How did the feedback loop between advocacy groups and policy makers work? In the late 1970s, “parent power” groups began forming in affluent white suburbs out of alarm that increasingly younger teenagers and even preteens were experimenting with marijuana. They blamed the permissiveness of decriminalization and almost immediately succeeded in pressuring the Carter administration to reverse its initial support for that policy and to re-escalate the federal war on marijuana. They called themselves a nonpartisan “parents’ movement” and argued that marijuana use was causing “amotivational syndrome” on a mass scale, leading to a full-blown suburban family crisis. Of course they did not want their own children to go to jail or prison for breaking the drug laws, so they supported zero-tolerance educational programs and rehabilitation for suburban youth caught with illegal drugs, combined with militarized interdiction of the supply side of the market for not only marijuana but also cocaine. The Carter administration played a key behind-the-scenes role in helping these scattered parent power groups join together in 1980 as the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth. Then the Reagan administration embraced the coalition as part of Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” campaign and worked with its leaders and media outlets to publicize the message that strict parenting and anti-peer pressure messaging could overcome the marijuana crisis in the middle and high schools. This was the feedback loop in action, as federal and media support for the anti-marijuana movement ended up spawning thousands more chapters around the country, which turned mobilized white suburban parents into a formidable political force. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth denounced “responsible use” and “harm reduction” approaches to teenage drug and alcohol use—evidence-based public health programs that actually worked—and it helped shift massive amounts of federal and state funding from urban treatment programs to zero-tolerance moral crusades. You contrast the history of pharmaceutical abuse with narcotics use in fascinating ways. What is the history of the drug wars when it comes to the pill industry? This is only a secondary focus of my book, but it is definitely a major theme in the history and policy of the war on drugs. At every stage of the drug-war escalation, the combined licit and illicit market in pharmaceuticals was more deadly and dangerous in a public health sense that all illegal drugs combined. (Of course, the legal drugs of alcohol and nicotine are also major public health challenges). Every landmark federal law that intensified the war on illegal drugs was also designed by policymakers and corporate lobbies to protect and expand the market for pharmaceutical drugs, especially amphetamines and barbiturates. Criminalizing and cracking down on certain drugs, largely because of their association with stigmatized minority groups or (in the case of marijuana) with radical white youth, was always also an effort to monopolize the drug market for pharmaceutical companies in their quest for profits, in the U.S. and abroad. In the 1950s, Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics denied that prescription amphetamines and barbiturates had any addictive potential, which he knew to be false, and only promoted self-regulation for his allies in the pharmaceutical industry. Anslinger considered pharmaceutical drugs to be a “medical market” populated by white middle-class Americans, and he had no desire to criminalize even illicit use because of the race of the consumers and corporate profitability. These pills circulated illicitly in massive quantities, and American companies shipped huge amounts to Mexican border towns, aware that they would be immediately smuggled back into the U.S. Many white youth who smoked marijuana also took non-prescription “uppers” and “downers” as recreational drugs, but this never generated the same law enforcement response because of their pharmaceutical origin. When the comprehensive 1970 drug law created a new regulatory system that placed marijuana into the Schedule 1 category, alongside heroin and cocaine as very dangerous with no medical value, policymakers in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry kept even the illicit circulation of many hazardous pills in other schedules with much lower criminal penalties. Legally prescribed and illicitly circulating pills, especially barbiturates disproportionately taken by white women, caused far more overdose deaths than heroin did during the second half of the twentieth century, even before the recent exponential spike in overdoses due to the over-prescription of OxyContin. Here’s one of my favorite quotes in the book: “America’s long and never-ending war on drugs is unjust, counterproductive, and unwinnable for many reasons—but a central and underappreciated factor is that most of the white middle-class youth subjected to systems of criminalization and social control for their own safety and protection do not actually want to be saved.” Can you talk a bit about how actual suburban drug users reacted to these infantilizing efforts? I really tried throughout the book to bring suburban and white middle-class youth into the story as full political actors and historical subjects, to counter their constant portrayal as innocent and helpless victims. Teenagers and young adults often adamantly defended their right to smoke marijuana, and even to take LSD and cocaine and other criminalized drugs. When actually given a platform, they almost never blamed the “pushers” for tricking them into taking illegal drugs, but instead said that they willingly sought out the market as both users and dealers. High school students almost uniformly ridiculed the marijuana-to-heroin gateway mythology and the absurd classroom instructional films that smoking pot would ruin their lives. White youth were the driving force behind the marijuana legalization and decriminalization campaigns as well, although they had a definite blind spot when it came to recognizing the racial disparities of the war on drugs. They often argued that the government should go after the “real criminals” in urban heroin markets and leave them alone, when the logical and ethical civil liberties stance is that criminalization of drug use is wrong across the board. From the 1950s until the war on crack in the mid-1980s, the vast majority of drug-war arrests were for marijuana possession. This was a massive squandering of public resources, and a massive violation of civil liberties, in a futile mission to stop white middle-class youth from consuming a recreational drug because of its racial and symbolic associations, rather than any actual harm. I started this project with the understanding that the war on drugs has systematically criminalized and punished nonwhite communities, and I assumed that it had by design insulated white youth who broke the same laws from any consequences. Then I started digging into the arrest records and realized that the story was much bigger. There’s no question that racial discrimination is at the heart of the war on drugs, but I also came to view the entire system as a state project designed for the social control of all youth, with divergent outcomes but driven by the same overarching and unjustified policy of criminalization. View the full article

It’s spring. It’s officially spring in New York, where CrimeReads is based. Maybe you, like me, wear sunglasses year-round. But maybe you are just busting yours out for the season. There can be no denying that accessory’s association with warm weather. Nothing elevates a look like a pair of sunglasses. And there are many, many slick shades in the annals of crime film and TV. There are cool sunglasses in lots of movies (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Top Gun, Risky Business, Lolita… though Dolores wears cat-eyes, not the heart-shaped glasses, in the movie itself). But the crime genre has them in spades. So does the sci-fi genre; hey, it’s also a thing that sometimes CrimeReads covers sci-fi, so I’ve included a few sci-fi shades in here as well. We’ve rounded up some excellent ones here, but this list isn’t ranked. Leave Her to Heaven If I were ranking this list, which I’m not (whispers to self: “I’m not, I’m not”), I’d put these tortoiseshell-rimmed shades at #1. A perfect look for the psychotic cypher that is Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent. Léon: The Professional Jean Reno’s hitman Leon wears a pair of round acrylic glasses, which he pairs with a gray beanie, and stubble. The Terminator The Terminator’s Gargoyles glasses are iconic, pure and simple. This is what sunglasses look like when they’re going to murder you. The Big Lebowski John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak has one of the most extraordinarily memorable appearances in movies. Fishing vest, flat top, and a pair of yellow-lensed aviator sunglasses. Taxi Driver Randolph aviators, an army jacket, and a Mohawk… that’s how you do Travis Bickle. I mean, if looks could kill, right? La Piscine La Piscine, a thriller set poolside at a villa along the Côte d’Azur, features several pairs of very cool sunglasses. But the coolest? These enormous lenses worn by Jane Birkin. To Catch a Thief I’m going to caption this like a paparazzi shot in a tabloid: in To Catch a Thief, Grace Kelly pauses catching thieves for a moment to catch some rays along the French Riviera in a pair of these fascinating yellow sunglasses. The Matrix, etc. You knew this one had to be on here. The Thomas Crown Affair I’ve heard that Steve McQueen didn’t simply wear these Persol 714s in The Thomas Crown Affair, but in his personal life as well. Makes sense. North by Northwest Not only does North by Northwest have an ultra-suave pair of tortoiseshell Tart Arnel sunglasses, but it also has some fantastic dialogue about them. Grand Central Ticket Collector: “Something wrong with your eyes?” Thornhill: “Yes, they’re sensitive to questions.” Scarface I don’t know if the sunglasses that Al Pacino wore in Scarface are true Carreras, but they sure make his Tony Montana look like a shady character. (Get it?”) Men in Black A movie where Ray-ban Predators aren’t simply stylish, but are also an essential part of the plot. Kill Bill It’s very likely that the most famous sartorial choice of Kill Bill is the yellow leather jumpsuit, but if we had to pick the most famous accessory from that movie, it’d be… well, the sword, probably. But after that, it’s these amber, oval glasses. Shaft I mean… come on. View the full article

When Prohibition came into force in 1920, it was meant to end the production, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Instead, it was the beginning of perhaps the most infamous criminal period in US history because, very simply, most Americans liked a drink – and many didn’t care where it came from. At the time many wineries were based in downtown Los Angeles, which was surrounded by agriculture, and was the center of the wine region’s trade. There were more vineyards in the valleys just a few dozen miles away too. Barely a dozen of them made it to the end of Prohibition in 1933, and some merchants paid a higher price for their barrels and bottles than falling foul of the new law. Austrian-born Frank Baumgarteker was a successful Californian vintner who disappeared in 1929, and his mysterious disappearance hit the headlines for decades afterward, perhaps because it had all the ingredients of a murder mystery. Baumgarteker, 43, owned a winery in downtown’s Lincoln Heights, Western Grape Products in Cucamonga, some 47 miles east, as well as vineyards, several ranches, and a trucking company. A day or so before his disappearance, he cashed two checks for a total of $1,500 (nearly $27,000 today), and after lunch with an associate on November 25, he said he was driving to his trucking company to deliver the payroll – and was never seen again. Later that day, Baumngarteker’s wife Mary received a letter from Frank postmarked from San Diego, much further south than the trucking company location. It urged her not to worry, that he would write or call, and that “business was bad, as you know.” Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, UCLA Library Special Collections Mary was surprised, as this was the first time he had written to her in English, rather than their native German, and she recalled that before he left, Baumgarteker said he was “approached by six Italians from Chicago,” demanding that he sell them his operation. Baumgarteker had acquired one of special licenses that were an exception to Prohibition, and was now providing wine for “medicinal purposes,” the others being for “cosmetics,” home brewing, and sacramental use. Previous to that, Baumgarteker had been approached by a man named Zorra, who wanted to set up a still in the winery, but the vintner had refused point blank. Zorra was an associate of the Sicilian-Italian crime family who were looking to get control of bootlegging and whiskey making in the city, and Baumgarteker may have known his fate was sealed after kicking him out, as he told his secretary “I have signed my death warrant.” Some reports gasped that Al Capone himself had been one of the six, and while this was soon proved to be false, it certainly sold newspapers. Two days after Baumgarteker left LA that day in 1929, his custom-built purple Cadillac was found in a garage in San Diego with his empty wallet inside. An eyewitness had seen a man driving the car whose description did not fit that of Baumgarteker, and police found other items that did not belong to him, as well as a secret compartment containing checks and bills, but the only real clue was a splattering of distinctive red clay. Sharp-eyed detectives suspected it was from a location in Riverside County that was known as a “gangland cemetery,” but his disappearance kept hitting the headlines, as it was less than a year since the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago had shocked the country. Just a few weeks later in early 1930, the downtown winery was raided by federal agents, who seized 700,000 gallons of wine and 200,00 gallons of brandy, and arrested five employees. At the time it was the biggest haul in Southern California history, and people wondered: were the Feds showing they meant business to whoever was (now) in charge? In May, police thought they had found Baumgarteker’s body in a vat at the Cucamonga winery, but it was in fact Stiffano Botta, who had been overcome by fumes while cleaning the container. A few months after that, the rumor mill went into overdrive when an LA crime boss, Tony Buccola, who claimed to know what happened to Baumgarteker, himself went missing. More ominously, Baumgarteker’s other Western Grape partners, Joseph Neuman and Arnold Bosch, subsequently disappeared too. Less than a year after Baumgarteker’s disappearance, Neuman’s car was found with the door open and the keys inside, but no sign of him. There was suspicion that he had been playing ball with the mob, but had stepped out of line and was “taken for a ride.” Some said Baumgarteker had been cooperating with the mob and slipped up too, but his story just wouldn’t go away. Over the next few years there were “sightings” of him in places across America, Mexico and even in El Salvador. Skeletons were examined in Arizona, Mexico, and the Mojave Desert, among others, but none proved to be Baumgarteker, who had distinctive dental work and a metal plate in his shoulder. Following the plot of a good mystery, the issue of money came into play in 1937, when it was revealed that Baumgarteker had life insurance policies worth $360,000 (nearly $8m today). The insurance companies weren’t paying out of course, and instead offered a reward of $20,000 (nearly $440,000 today) for information, and Mary eventually had to go to court to fight them. She had offered her own bounty of $1,000 (nearly $22,000), also to no avail, and now some wondered whether Baumgarteker had left to start a new life. After all, he had said “business was bad, as you know,” in his last letter, and there was a case of tax fraud pending against him and several others at Western Grape. In 1940, the Swiss-born Bosch, Western Grape’s manager and resident chemist, who had repelled an advance from “Italian gangsters” in 1930 and perhaps assumed he was going to be left alone, wrote his son saying he was “leaving for the desert,” alongside a cryptic mention of “a couple of million of dollars.” He too was never seen or heard from again. Almost twenty after Baumgarteker’s disappearance and soon after Mary’s death in 1949, the LAPD got a tip, and excavated the basement of a Lincoln Heights home that once belonged to a bootlegger. Once again, nothing was found. Finally, in 1977 notorious mafia hit man Frank “Bomp” Bompensiero was murdered. He had many confirmed kills on his record, and more suspected. Baumgarteker was one of the latter, but since his body was never found, we will never know. In 2018, Angeleno Wine Company began operations in downtown Los Angeles. They were the first winery to open in the area since Prohibition, but the only dangerous decision now is whether to order red, white or rosé… View the full article

Each month, CrimeReads/me celebrates the art of the translated novel with a roundup of the best new international crime fiction releases. The list below is divided between horror, thrillers, dystopia, and satire, each driven by a moral force, for one of the most wide-ranging selections of texts I’ve ever included in this column. As the art of translation continues to be under siege, it is more important than ever to value the hard-working translators bringing international voices to new readers, and I would like to extend my utmost appreciation to these professionals. Asako Yuzuki, Butter Translated by Polly Barton (Ecco) In this sumptuous tale, a gourmand hedonist and suspected serial killer becomes the object of a journalist’s fixation, and perhaps, an inspiration. The killer is known as a woman whose unending appetites for rich cuisine have led to the deaths of multiple paramours. Did she murder them, or could they simply not keep up? Why is it always a woman’s job to enforce healthy limits, to care for men? Why is it not the man’s job to care for himself? And what can we learn from these simple, rebellious acts of indulgence? This book is best paired with a multi-course meal among friends. Niklas Natt Och Dag, 1795: The Order of the Furies Translated by Ian Giles (Atria) 1795 is the devastating conclusion to Niklas Nat och Dag’s historical trilogy of late 18th-century Stockholm, a divided city on the precipice of revolution and beset by a conspiracy of violent libertines who feel themselves to be above the law. Nat och Dag’s one-armed watchman, Jean Michael Cardell, with assistance from Emil Winge, brilliant watchmaker and former alcoholic, are hell-bent on bringing the evil mastermind of a hedonistic cabal to heel, but they face numerous set-backs in imposing justice on someone so powerful, and as well as lingering guilt over their past failures. Few historical novels are willing to plumb such depths of depravity (or include quite so many descriptions of bad smells), and I’ll be thinking about this trilogy for many years to come. Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor’s Library Translated by Sawad Hussain and Ranya Abdelrahman (Restless Books) This one reads like Fahrenheit 451 with a sense of humor. In The Book Censor’s Library, a censor is taught to read only the surface of the language when determining if a book is acceptable reading fodder for the general populace. Unfortunately for the hard-working factotum, the books have a mind of their own, and they begin to invade his thoughts until he has no choice but to begin amassing a vast collection of banned texts in his own home. Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Oracle Translated by Moshe Gilula (Tor Nightfire) Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt is the first translated writer to be awarded a Hugo for his short stories, and his horror novels are as atmospheric as they are disturbing. In Oracle, Heuvelt begins with an anomaly: an 18th century ship has appeared in the midst of a field, and a child who goes exploring on the vessel is never seen again. The greatest experts of the occult are called in to solve the mystery of the girl’s disappearance, a harbinger of an ancient terror rising from the depths. Joy Sorman, Tenderloin Translated by Lara Vergnaud (Restless Books) Another one from Restless! Joy Sorman’s Tenderloin feels a bit like Delicatessen meets Tender is the Flesh, as a butcher tenderly embraces his disturbing occupation, rarely free from thoughts of dismembering even when not on the job. The tagline is a grotesque cri de coeur, and the book is more interested in exploring this question than answering it: “Can killing be an act of love?” View the full article

Literary author and agent knows what she's talking about.

Part One: An Unkindness of Ravens It was almost three years to the day after the great quake had laid waste to so much of San Francisco’s pride that the first of the extortion letters arrived, dated April 21, 1909. This one appeared at the door of the home of Mr. James O’Brien Gunn, president of the Mechanics’ Savings Bank in San Francisco. Like the other two which followed it on April 26, the missive was menacingly signed “The Ravens.” “Dear sir,” it began: Read this letter well and weigh each word of it to its full weight, for they mean exactly what they say. We wish to tell you that on next Friday night, April 23d, you must be in front of the Van Ness Theater with $3000 dollars to deliver us in cash, if you wish to ensure the safety of those that are dear to you…. Our plans are well laid and will be performed to the letter if you do not accept our request. We do not shoot or stab, but we handle a Hindoo poison which is known by the East Indian to be the quickest and deadliest poison that can be concocted from plants of poisoned juice, a poison that knows no antidote, for it acts directly on the heart and from the time it is administered until death is no more than three minutes. Our method can be made in a crowd, in a store, or on the street, for we use injections and just the piercing of the flesh with a tiny needle syringe is all that is required and any doctor will claim heart disease unless the body is examined. We never make a second demand on anyone. That is our oath and the Hindoos that command never fail. There are twelve of us all told and we all know your family history well. So Friday night at 8 o’clock sharp be in front of the theater with a newspaper in your left hand and a package with your money in the right hand, so the transfer can be quickly made. And you will never hear from us again, for we never ask for a second amount. That you have our oath for. We are bound together with the oath of our blood. If you make one move of treachery you will be dropped in your tracks. We swear. The amount is not much to you in comparison to your dear one, so we will expect you on time, but if you are not there (and alone), then beware, for you will only invite execution. We will be there well-guarded to fight to the death any and all who try to alter our plans, so do not let us have to make an example of you, the first in the city we have asked a favor of. Do not forget your instructions. Newspaper in right and package in the other. Our words to you will “Is this the package?” Then you will hand it over and we will go about our business and you do the same. THE RAVENS P.S. The money must be in paper money and bills no larger than $50. A highly successful businessman from the gilded era of ruthless clashes between striking labor and strikebreaking capital, James O’Brien Gunn was inclined to laugh the whole thing off as a joke. (“He calls himself The Raven? Really, now! Balderdash!”). Nevertheless, Gunn turned the letter over to the police. This was despite the fact that the banker was publicity shy after that highly embarrassing business of his half-brother’s embezzlement and bigamy which had made scorching newspaper headlines just two years previously. Let me detour a bit to detail this episode, the first of the Gunn family’s which ever, as far as I am aware, touched on criminality. Part Two: The Near Fatal Love of Gertrude Fontham In his day James’ father, Canadian corn merchant Daniel Charles Gunn, had sired nine children by two successive wives. One of these children was James’ twenty-one years younger half-brother, William Ellis Gunn. William, a popular, gregarious clubman and generally esteemed “good fellow,” had appeared in New York in 1905, taking over management of the newly-built Schuyler Arms apartments on tony Riverside Drive. Within a year, the bluff, bearded, thirty-five-year-old “Captain,” as he was known, had hired twenty-one-year-old Gertrude Fontham as his stenographer. Gertrude, reputedly a dainty, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, was the belle of her little corner of Harlem—or perhaps one should say belle dame sans merci. In October 1905, two young men, William Wood and Lester Finley, roommates on the top floor of a Harlem apartment house, had fought what the press termed a “duel” over “Gert,” with Willie Wood, as he was regrettably known informally, nearly killing Dwight in the affray. Some months after that lamentable affair, Joseph O’Reilly, brother of prominent criminal attorney Daniel O’Reilly (he would defend millionaire Harry Thaw, the 1906 murderer of Stanford White, among other privileged celebrity defendants), came to believe that he himself was engaged to Gertrude, only to receive a very rude surprise indeed when the comely stenographer without warning married her boss in October 1907. William and Gertrude promptly went off to enjoy a honeymoon in Europe, leaving the owners of the Schuyler Arms to discover ruefully that William had taken $5400 out of the hotel’s cashbox to fund the couple’s happy journey. Police in various European cities were alerted to keep on the lookout for the honeymooners. Fuel was added to the fire a few days later when a San Francisco woman, Phoebe Deming Gunn, spoke to the press, informing them that she was William’s wife and the mother of his five children, meaning that William’s second marriage was bigamous. Her faithless spouse, she declared, had callously deserted his family eight years previously, when he, an officer in the naval reserve, left them to take command of the tug Vigilant in the Spanish-American War and never returned. Bitterly Phoebe insisted: “I shall never give him a divorce…. he should be punished for his treatment of us….it is a terrible stain to rest upon my children….” For his part James O’Brien Gunn refused to answer any of the questions eager San Francisco pressmen hurled at him, including even whether or not he was really William’s brother. It was the confiding Phoebe who confirmed this fact, explaining that of late years it had been he, James, and not William, who had provided her with “kind assistance” (i.e., child support). She had accepted this arrangement, but learning of her husband’s bigamy was the final straw for her. The San Francisco Examiner painted Phoebe as an object of extreme pathos, reporting that she and her children resided “out on the furthest edge of the windswept Richmond district, where the evening fog whips in chill and cold, in a ramshackle house set in the midst of a grove of gloomy eucalyptus trees.” Ten days later, when William and Gertrude returned from Europe, Jospeh O’Reilly, still pining for his “Gert,” was waiting for them at the dock. After he took Gertrude aside and informed her that William already had a wife and children, the shocked young woman departed with Joseph in a cab, alighting at the law offices of Joseph’s brother. The next day Gertrude and her mother announced to the press that Gert was seeking to annul her marriage. The lawyer handling her case was Maurice Meyer, an associate in the law firm of Daniel O’Reilly. To Meyer, William broke down and admitted that he was indeed a married man, but he insisted that at least a “satisfactory arrangement” had been made concerning the hotel funds he had misappropriated (meaning probably that his brother James had stepped up to the financial plate again). Meanwhile Willie Wood, awaiting trial for assault in the second degree (remember the “duel” he fought over Gertrude), from his prison cell piled on William by spitefully insisting to the press that the bigamist had married Gertrude simply to win a wager which he had made with Wood that he could get his secretary to wed him rather than James O’Reilly. As for Phoebe, aka wife #1, she informed the press that she did not know whether or not she would go to New York to testify in Gert’s annulment suit, explaining that she would be “guided entirely” by the advice of her kindly brother-in-law, James O’Brien Gunn. “All I have to say is this,” she added bluntly. “I hope [William] will get all that is coming to him.” Certainly, young Willie Wood got something coming to him. In August 1908 the amorous young dentist, having been found guilty of assaulting his roommate and close friend Lester Dwight, an electrical engineer and manager of the Cortlandt Telephone Exchange (they had been nicknamed Damon and Pythias in reference to the extreme closeness of their friendship), was sentenced to a term of hard labor in Sing Sing Prison for three to five years. “You might have been on trial for homicide,” the judge sternly reminded the defendant. Still brokenhearted over his loss of Gertrude, Willie told the press that it little mattered to him where he was housed, in prison or out of it, but that he still believed that he had acted in self-defense when he shot Lester three times. “It is true we had quarreled over the girl,” he explained, and things came to a head in October 1905, after Lester discovered a love poem which Willie imprudently had written to Gert on the back of some piano sheet music to a tune called “My Little Dearie.” However, Willie added, if Lester “hadn’t thumped me over the head with his umbrella as I lay in bed, I should never have drawn my pistol. Even then, he had as good a chance as I, for he was armed and I was wounded once in the head.” Soon five pistol shots, all fired by Wood, rang out in the night, bringing alarmed tenants scurrying up to the young men’s rooms. There they found Lester lying on the floor with blood gushing from his mouth, chest and thigh, and Willie standing over him with a gun. “The woman, the woman, the woman!” was all Lester could moan piteously to onlookers, as Willie admonished him to remember that he was a gentleman and refrain from naming the lady’s name. Police tumbled to the identity of the woman in question anyway, however, when they discovered a will that Willie had made out before the “duel,” in which he left $5000 to Gertrude $5000 and a mere $1000 to his mother, wardrobe mistress at the Belasco Theater, with the proviso that Gertrude not marry within a year of his death. There was also a copious amount of “very saccharine poetry written by the sentimental dentist [which he] dedicated to the young woman,” the press noted amusedly. Things like this “duel” between two supposedly sensible young professional New Yorkers, which fueled news stories for three years, were all welcome grist to the maw of the scandal mill. Did William Ellis Gunn ever get what was coming to him? Not by the lights of Phoebe, anyway. The bigamist appears never to have served any jail time and he reconciled with Gertrude, with whom he lived until his death in 1942. Between 1908 and 1914 Gertrude bore him three children to go along with the five Phoebe had given him, in the process thickening her figure, while William began to appear not merely fatherly but grandfatherly, though he served in the navy in both world wars. Theirs appears to have been a happy union, legitimate or not. Sometimes crime does pay. Part Three: The Ravens Get Their Wings Clipped Crime emphatically did not pay, however, in the case of the would-be criminal gang known as The Ravens. If James O’Brien Gunn successfully extricated his half-brother from his own difficulties a few years earlier, he proved no less able in routing The Ravens. Gunn was a wealthy man, but he was not about to turn over $3000 (about $100,000 today) to some grandiose extortionists writing fantastically of Hindoo poisons undetectable to science. When a representative of The Ravens telephoned Gunn at his home on the evening on which he had been ordered to deliver the money at the theater, he was forcefully told by Gunn himself in no uncertain terms that he had better “forget it.” Despite Gunn’s refusal to play along, San Francisco police detailed Detective Bunner to wait outside the Van Ness Theater on the 23rd, ready to pounce on anyone suspicious. No such person appeared, prompting the police to speculate that Bunner had scared off the extortionist. However, three days later almost identically worded missives from The Ravens were received by Rudolph Spreckels, youngest son of California “Sugar King” Adolph Spreckels, and his independently wealthy wife Eleanor. A less familiar detective by the name of Spalding was detailed to await outside the Spreckels mansion, along with two additional detectives by the names of Murphy and Proll, who stayed out of sight. They were all present when a young newsboy, George Demartini, rang at the mansion’s door and was given a package by the Spreckels’ butler. The policemen followed the boy and saw him board a streetcar in company with a slightly built, brown-haired man in a bowler hat, around thirty years of age. Spalding followed the pair onto the car, where he overheard them haggling over the boy’s payment for receiving the package. Becoming suspicious of Spalding’s presence, the man then loudly denied to the boy that he had ever offered him money and refused to take the package. When the man and boy alighted from the car, the cop followed them and placed both of them under arrest. Then at the police station, the San Francisco Examiner ominously noted, “the sweating began.” After holding out for several hours, the would-be master criminal collapsed and tearfully confessed to the crime of attempted extortion of James Gunn and the Spreckels. There was no gang known as The Ravens, the whole plot having been carried out by him alone: Benjamin Wellington Soule, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed cook who resided with his wife at a small Victorian row house at 3278 West 21th Street. He had turned to his criminal scheme on account, he explained, on account of his having been out of work and because, in his words: “My mind had been fired by reading cheap detective stories.” After questioning his wife, police concluded that she knew nothing about the affair, but Soule was taken to the city prison and placed in solitary confinement. Not long before his trial in the summer of 1909, Soule gave an interview to a representative of the San Francisco Examiner, in which he attempted, in an obvious bid for public sympathy, to explain why he had resorted to posting extortion letters to Gunn and the Spreckels. “Soule Blames Dime Novels For Crime,” blared the resulting headline, over a story in which the author dubbed the accused extortionist “one of the most emotional dabblers in crime that the police have had to deal with in some time,” who calculatedly was displaying himself “in the role of a sentimental sinner.” For the modern fan of crime fiction, Soule’s comments on the crime fiction of his own era, from over a century ago, are particularly fascinating. As his later prison photos show, Benjamin Soule was a slight man of 5’8” and 137 pounds with longish brown hair (before his head was shaved), long nose, large ears, big chin, cupid’s bow mouth and prominent blue eyes that were both sad and soulful—pun not attended. To my mind he bears a resemblance to former Saturday Night Live cast member and perpetual Sad Sack type Kyle Mooney. Sobbingly Soule spun out his sad story to the man from the Examiner: I never thought I’d come to this….I never thought of arrest. I had dreams of making a lot of money quick and easy, and I went ahead with my plans with no thoughts of detection. Desperation drove me to blackmail. I had been out of work for months, and I was compelled to see my wife leave home every day and work in my stead. I never could think of that without bitter feeling. I think a great deal of my wife. I married her two years ago in Minnesota, where I had gone from New York in search of work. I am a lithographer by trade and I was led to travel West because of the dull times in the East. [He is referencing the devastating Panic of 1907.] For a time I did very well in Minnesota, but shortly after my marriage I began to have another run of poor luck. I was eventually compelled to take whatever work offered itself and filled jobs as cook, waiter, dishwasher and other places around restaurants. From Minnesota my wife and I went [in 1907] to Butte, Montana, where I worked for a time as a cook. We then went to Spokane and from there to Wallace, Idaho. We came to San Francisco from Wallace last December [1908]. I was able to secure work as a cook after arriving here but I eventually lost two different places I had and found myself without a dollar. My wife then secured work in the Quaker restaurant at Polk and California streets and supported us both….[But] I wanted to see her [stay] home, wearing good clothes like other women and busying herself about the care of the house. I tramped the streets daily looking for work and applied at every possible place where I thought I could get it. In time I became very discouraged and at a loss to know what to do with myself. I felt so ashamed at seeing my wife working that I could hardly bear to look her in the face. Things became more gloomy for me all the time, and for the want of something better to do I revived an old boyish custom and began reading dime novels and other sensational books. I want to say right now that I have enough sense to know what a foolish thing reading such stuff is for a grown man. At first the thing was a mere amusement, but as I continued to read, I began to have ideas. “Why not take advantage of this sort of stuff and make money by it?” I began to say to myself. “People are easily frightened.…” While I was thinking of this, I came across a story of a secret band of poisoners who were known as “The Ravens.” The story told how they blackmailed wealthy people right and left, and I found it fascinating reading. If I am not mistaken the story is one of the “Nick Carter” series of dime novels, and it was replete with the names of queer poisons and other things that appear mysterious and threatening. I came to the conclusion that this story would make a model framework on which to build an actual system of blackmail…. I used the name of “The Ravens” in the letters I wrote to Spreckels, his wife and President Gunn of the Mechanics Bank. The letters addressed to these persons, in fact, were almost exact copies of the letters in the story I refer to. The threats to do away with the threatened persons with secret Hindu poisons if they did not pay the money requested were, of course, made simply for effect. I never had any idea of harming any of the persons I wrote and if they would have ignored my letters, they would have been perfectly safe. The best proof of this is that I engaged President Gunn in a telephone conversation after sending him one of “The Ravens” letters. He told me I had better forget about him, which I straightaway proceeded to do. It would have been the same with the members of the Spreckels family if they had paid no attention to my letters. I thought that of all the wealthy people in San Francisco I would be able to find a few who could be frightened into giving me money. I intended to leave with my wife for Minnesota, where her mother is ill. My wife’s father died recently, the old lady is very lonely, and we both wanted to be near her….I intended to keep on writing threatening letters until I got possession of several thousand dollars….I am all there is of “The Ravens.” I wish to God I had never heard of the name. Rudolph Spreckels, a well-known anti-corruption fighter in San Francisco and righteous—many people in San Francisco would have said self-righteous—scourge of bosses and crooked politicians, was proactive in the prosecution of Soule, getting personally involved in questioning him at the jail after he was arrested and helping to draw up the complaint against him, whereas James Gunn seems to have washed his hands of what he deemed the whole damn silly affair. (Let other fools pay him if they want, seemed to be his attitude.) Indeed, Soule’s defense was that the whole thing had essentially been a joke gone wrong, with no harm done; but, after the defendant had been found guilty of the felony of sending threatening letters, the judge sourly declared that he saw nothing funny about Soule’s “joke.” He pronounced Soule no better than a “footpad,” only more “genteel,” and sentenced him to a four-year term at San Quentin Prison. In the event, Benjamin served two years, during which time he was forcibly employed as a sack inspector at the prison’s jute mill, deemed a ‘hell-hole” and the institution’s “most detested industry.” Just a few months before Soule was incarcerated at San Quentin, a fire engulfed the warehouse, resulting in the death of an inmate. He was paroled in 1911, but not long after this he was arrested on a charge of obtaining $85 under false pretenses. His magnanimous victim was willing to drop the charge, but the prosecution insisted on going forth with the case, resulting in Soule being returned to prison to finish out the remaining two years of his original term (and inspect yet more sacks at the jute mill). He was discharged a year later, in 1912. What happened to Benjamin Willington Soule after he completed his term of incarceration? Was he reformed, or did he become, like so many in his regrettable circumstances, an old lag destined to be a continual repeat offender? The answer is, unfortunately, that I do not know. The penultimate record I have found of him, a draft registration card, comes from the final year of the Great War, in September 1918, when he, now thirty-nine years old, was living in Chicago and employed as a cook in the Lunch Room of the luxurious La Salle Hotel. As his nearest relative he listed not his wife but Mrs. Ida Hay of Coshocton, Ohio. Twenty-four years later, in the midst of another world war, a Benjamin Soule, age sixty-four, was interred in the cemetery at St. Peters Episcopal Church in Chelsea, Manhattan. I think, though I cannot be certain of such, that this was the earthly end of Benjamin Wellington Soule. The facts, as I have been able to determine them, seem generally to support the story of Soule’s life as he told it to the San Francisco Examiner. The man came of a perfectly respectable background, despite the fact that the Examiner had gibed at him, in its initial account of his arrest, that the prisoner possessed “the cunning of his class.” Born in the town of Richland in Oswego County, New York on December 1, 1878, Soule was the only child of Florence Bejamin Soule, a farmer’s boy, and Ada Marie Wellington. When Benjamin was a child his parents moved with him to Martinsburg, West Virginia, where Florence opened an agricultural store. In 1884, when Benjamin was a teenager, Florence, Ada having passed away, married Mary Margaret Munn of Coshocton, Ohio, where the Soules had moved some time earlier. In 1900, Benjamin, now twenty-one and still living with his father and stepmother, listed his occupation as “pressman,” which is what he meant when he told the Examiner reporter in jail that he had been trained as a lithographer. In 1907 Benjamin married Marie Elizabeth Erickson in Butte, Montana, where he was employed as a cook at an establishment known as The Grill and had a room downtown in the Morier Block. Of Scandinavian descent, Marie grew up in Minnesota, but she and Benjamin had not married there, as Benjamin claimed in the Examiner interview. Had they run off together to marry in Montana? When in 1918 Benjamin listed his nearest relative as Mrs. Ida Hay of Coshocton, this was true too, it appears. Mrs. Hay was the wealthy widow of Frank Corbin Hay, a wealthy, beloved and benevolent capitalist of Coshocton, and the younger sister of Benjamin’s stepmother Mary Margaret Soule, who passed away in 1902. (Mary Margaret had died at Ida’s home, her husband Florence by her side.) Had Benjamin been able successfully to go to the widowed Mrs. Hay for money in 1909, all of his troubles would have been avoided. (Presumably his father had died by this time.) It would seem as well that his wife, who had visited him every day in jail, according to the Examiner reporter, her eyes red-rimmed and streaming, had not been able to stick it out over the long haul and had left him. It was a sad, humiliating fate for a man who seemed intelligent and imaginative, and likely was one of the many descendants of prolific Mayflower passenger George Soule. (These include Dick Van Dyke, Richard Gere and abolitionist Silas Soule, who nobly testified against Colonel John Chivington, the contemptible man responsible for the infamous 1864 Sand Creek massacre of Arapaho and Cheyenne tribespeople in Colorado.) The industrious Soule forbear, who probably (or improbably) was of partial Jewish descent, made a great success of himself in the Plymouth colony. Before setting out for the New World, young George in Holland had worked as a printer’s helper, a pressman like Benjamin if you will, and in this capacity had helped produce Perth Assembly, a controversial book that the Puritans smuggled into Scotland in wine vats, which King James I of England deemed unpardonably subversive. Like George, Benajmin Soule seems to have had imagination and creativity, which admittedly he would have been well-advised to put to better uses. Instead of committing criminal offenses, he would have been better off writing penny-a-word crime fiction for the pulps. Just imagine: Erle Stanley Gardner, George Harmon Coxe, Carroll John Daly, Benjamin Wellington Soule…. Instead, he died forgotten and is only being recalled now because back in 1909 the crime pulps, as he saw it, induced in him a felonious inclination to write some very foolish letters. Part IV: James Edward Gunn: Deadlier Than the Male It proved to be not Benjamin Wellington Soule who would become the writer of crime fiction, but rather a grandson of Soule’s world-be victim, James O’Brien Gunn—or President Gunn as Soule respectfully called him. (He gave his nemesis Spreckels no such honorific.) When James Gunn died three years after the affair of The Ravens, at sixty-seven still shy of seventy years of age, he was eulogized as one of the great business leaders of California’s early Anglo days, having been Secretary of the California Pacific Railroad, the Union Iron Works and a “confidential man” of Leland Stanford and the brothers Charles and Edwin Crocker, three of the tycoons responsible for the building of the Trans-Continental Railroad. Back in 1874 at age twenty-nine Gunn, a man clearly on his way up to the top, wed Edwin Crocker’s pretty, precociously artistic, nineteen-year-old daughter Katie, a promising student of noted native German California painter Charles Christian Nahl. However, Katie Crocker Gunn tragically passed away from acute nephritis after only a few months of marriage. By his second wife, Laura Littig Shaffer—daughter of a Baltimore merchant, Frederick (Littig) Shaffer, who had inherited, like they do in books, a fortune in real estate from a relative after compliantly changing his surname (as an adult Laura retrieved “Littig”)—Gunn had four children, including George Alfred Gunn, who wed schoolteacher Ernestine Kraft, daughter of a factory agent, and with her had a daughter and son. These were, in order, Jane Lisette and James Edward Gunn, the latter of whom, named for his renowned grandfather, was born on August 22, 1920 in San Francisco. In those years between the first and second world wars, the era of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, the George Alfred Gunn family was well-off and socially prominent in the City by the Bay, employing a governess for the children and a succession of Filipino houseboys to cook and clean. When in 1938 daughter Jane became engaged to Noel Edmund Parker, son of the Episcopal Bishop of Sacramento (the Gunns were Episcopalians), the happy news was reported in the San Francisco Examiner by the newspaper’s hoity-toity society page editor Cholly Francisco. This match did not ultimately come off, sadly, but two years later, her father having expired in the interim, Jane eloped to Reno with mining engineer Leroy Briggs and got legally hitched. The wedding was a small-scale affair, although Jane’s mother Ernestine, who would pass away in 1943, was present and her brother James, as the sole male left in the family, was obligingly on hand to give the bride away to Briggs. After their honeymoon, the couple settled between Frisco and Reno at the onetime frontier mining town of Angels Camp, where locals still dug for gold. At the time of his sister Jane’s wedding, James Gunn was a student at Stanford University, where he majored in English and was a member of Kappa Alpha fraternity. He was six feet tall and weighed 170 pounds, was brown-haired and blue-eyed, had a great set of sparklers and an infectious grin and wore glasses, though vainly he doffed them for photos. During his senior year in the fall of 1941, when he was only twenty-one years old, young Gunn began writing a novel about mania and murder, partly, it was said as an exercise for an English class and partly to entertain his fraternity brothers. “He certainly didn’t write it for your Aunt Hepzibah,” wryly noted reviewer Reece Stuart in the Des Moines Register, adding, in a reference to Will H. Hays, the man who oversaw the Motion Picture Production Code (or Hays Code), which set out a list of moral guidelines for the censorship of American films: “Neither is he shooting at the movies while the Hays influence remains.” Despite the modest, almost offhand origins of James Gunn’s novel, the college senior, upon completing the manuscript, submitted it successively to four different publishers, the last of which, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, released it through its Bloodhound Mystery imprint (under which they published distinguished crime writers Dorothy B. Hughes and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding) in April 1942, four months before the fledgling author’s twenty-second birthday, under the title Deadlier Than the Male. The novel’s jacket, which included a photograph of the grinning, good-looking neophyte novelist, in its blurb boasted of Gunn’s youth, a tactic which paid off handsomely. Rarely did a first novel receive such critical acclaim. The Kirkus review, which succinctly summarizes the novel’s plot, was one of the many Male raves noting approvingly just how hard-boiled the young author’s book was: Tight, tough and chilling, this study in mania and homicide is as vicious and violent and brutal as you could imagine, even with a drilling in Cain and Hammett. It concerns a redheaded brute, Sam Wild, responsible for the death of a Reno whore and a man—and those who love him and tail him. Wild has married an heiress, Georgia, and her stepsister Helen, “deadlier than the male,” spots Wild for what he is. The setting is San Francisco. The characters range from the underworld to the socialites. Gunn has compelling power, though his book is certainly tabu for the tender-minded. The most notable of these newspaper raves came from the hand of John Selby, a mainstream author and syndicated book reviewer whose “Literary Guidepost” column was carried in scores of newspapers around the country. When James Gunn scored a laudatory notice in Selby’s column it meant that his novel was being nationally embraced not as a mere crime thriller, but as a piece of literature. Noting that his publisher’s blurb compared Gunn to Cain and Hammett (with many other reviewers following suit), Selby declared to the contrary that: The comparison is so unfair to Gunn as to be ludicrous. This Stanford senior writes better than Cain ever wrote to my knowledge and his humor is not that of Hammett…. Gunn’s humor is far younger than Hammett’s and, for that matter, far funnier…. “Deadlier Than the Male” is the best story of its kind by a writer of comparable age since Maritta Wolf’s “Whistle Stop” (1941), and that’s saying a good deal. It’s about a murder—several of them. It is not a mystery…. Primarily it is the study of two deadly people, a man and a woman…. And the goddess of the machine is a gorgeous old harridan named Mrs. Krantz who is drinking herself to death with gusto, first in Reno then in San Francisco…. Mr. Gunn has surrounded these principals with a bevy of really good characters, and he has made his unlikely plot seem perfectly reasonable by the simple device of not taking it too seriously. He writes well, with just pace and frequent splashes of brilliance. In other words, he is a “find.” The raves of Gunn’s novel were too numerous to give more than a brief taste, but here are some additional snippets, most of which contrast the toughness of the book with the dewiness of the author and also emphasize its unexpectedly abundant humor: The ranks of hard-hitting, he-man novelists, which includes such names as James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, has been increased by the addition of 21-year-old James Gunn…. he can write—excitingly, humorously and trenchantly…. “Deadlier Than the Male” packs a wallop that leaves the reader slightly groggy, and with something of a dark brown taste in his mouth…. It would be hard to imagine an author creating a more unpalatable crew of characters—thugs, drunks, opportunists, charlatans…. the one who really counts…is Mrs. Krantz, blowzy, drunken, ribald Mrs. Krantz, slightly reminiscent of the grandmother in [Victoria Lincoln’s mainstream novel] “February Hill.” Mrs. Krantz is designed along such Rabelaisian proportions, she’s an achievement of which the author may be proud. Many readers may object to the lightness of touch of this book. It’s rather like writing a “New Yorker” skit about Murder, Inc. [referencing an organized crime group responsible for hundreds of murders between 1929 and 1941, when it was exposed and members were prosecuted.] Personally, we found it a little easier to take than Cain’s unrelieved hard-boiled fiction. —Palm Beach Post James Gunn has barely reached the voting age. He is a handsome youngster and his first published writing is this surprising novel…. There are murders, several of them….If young Mr. Gunn had been deadly in earnest his story would have been flat. He preferred to be good humored about the whole business…. The result is one of the most sprightly, readable and entertaining stories we have happened upon in a long time. So well is the material handled that the rough spots do not seem rough at all…. Better get this one. —Greensboro News and Record The author’s youth explains the lusty vigor and uninhibited violence of his story. But it doesn’t explain the adroit ingenuity and cumulative suspense of the plot, the salty jets of dialogue or the persuasive ease with which Mr. Gunn handles a complex narrative…. The story…is squarely in the Janes Cain—Dashiell Hammett tradition, which means that it’s rough, tough and eminently readable…. Those who like murder mixed with appropriate shots of pathology and humor will enjoy it thoroughly. —Robert Barlow, “This World of Books” (syndicated newspaper column) The author of this first novel is a senior student at Stanford University and is only 21 years old. These are only two remarkable things about this novel. It is not often that so young and inexperienced an author produces a first novel that is both entertaining and horrifying. ‘Deadlier Than the Male” is not a murder story in the popular sense…. It is more of a horror story which manages to be immensely amusing…. […] James Gunn has written a novel which cannot fail to be immensely popular. He has a wickedly irreverent sense of characterization and his story which might have become fantasy, remains throughout sufficiently realistic as to be quite credible. The story is packed with tension and humor…. —John Moreland, Oakland Tribune James Gunn was 21 when he wrote “Deadlier Than the Male.” One is shocked to realize any one only 21 could come to know such people, much less write about them. For this is not a pretty book. If young Gunn gets into his stride, James M. Cain may well look to his laurels, for Gunn packs a literary wallop that calls to mind some of the saltier haymakers of Cain. […] Surely there must have lived the person of Mrs. Krantz. NOBODY could have dreamed her up completely…. There is not a character in the entire book that can be admired, but the reading about them guarantees a couple of hours of nail-biting. —Mildred Dalton (syndicated newspaper column) Occasionally, not often, does one pick up a book whose first paragraph is so electric that what was meant for a glance becomes a far-into-the-night reading session. Even more rarely is there a book whose dynamo start is sustained throughout. “Deadlier Than the Male” is such a one. This sort of magic is without explanation. It isn’t alone good writing; it isn’t alone plot suspense or exciting characterizations; it is something that comes from within the author, something vital, something super-alive and super-intense. “Deadlier Than the Male” is not a mystery…. readers of mysteries will find in it more punch, more Machiavellian machinations, and more hair-raising proclivities than in 12 months of most mysteries…. It is an incredible performance, a first novel, begun by a Leland Stanford student as a classroom project. It is incredible because first novels can’t be so expert. But this is. —Dorothy B. Hughes, Albuquerque Tribune Part V: James Edward Gunn: Queer Noir Despite all the remarkable superlatives that the novel garnered from newspaper critics and the success which it enjoyed with the book buying public, going through several paperback editions, Deadlier Than the Male is James Gunn’s only known published work of fiction. Like Cornell Woolrich, who back in the Twenties had published a critically praised first novel when he was a lad of twenty-two and a student attending Columbia University, Gunn turned from novel writing to scripting films for Hollywood, possibly dropping out of college to do so, like Woolrich had before him. However, Gunn was not involved with the scripting of the film adaptation of his own novel, which appeared, under the grim title Born to Kill, in 1947. Perhaps this was just as well for him. Proving rather more squeamish than their brethren in the book biz, appalled film critics largely panned Born to Kill, which starred Lawrence Tierney as Sam Wild and Claire Trevor as Helen Brent, as brutish melodrama and it bombed at the box office. In their notices critics seemed almost to compete with each other in assembling pejoratives with which to denounce the film. Sneered Herbert Cohn of the film in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (ironically recalling the Nick Carter crime stories which had criminally inflamed the imagination of Bejamin Wellinton Soule back in the day of James Gunn’s grandfather): “[Born to Kill is] a sordid story of jealously, selfishness, hate and murder, with all of the fixings of a tawdry dime novel.” Bosley Crowther at in New York Times echoed this sentiment, huffily dismissing the film as a “smeary tabloid fable’ filled with “ostentatious vice” that would only appeal to the “lower levels of taste.” In the “At the Movies” column for the Kansas City Star, the outraged anonymous reviewer chided of the film’s story: “Certainly this sort of stuff is not on the side of morality and is reprehensible.” Topping them all in her ostentatious outrage, Cecile Ager of PM lamented that Born to Kill was “as unsavory and untalented an exhibition of deliberate sensation-pandering as ever sullied a movie screen.” Thankfully at least one reviewer, Banks Ladd, leavened this parade of self-righteous scoldings with a dash of humor, wryly observing in the Louisville Courier-Journal: “The only likable character in the film is a small dog, who whines appealingly when abandoned in a room full of corpses [two, actually]. But the dog appears for only a few minutes, after which the audience is left to the mercies of the actors.” Professional moralist Jospeh Breen, director of the Production Code Administration, which was tasked with enforcing the Hays Code, objected at the time of the film’s making that Deadlier Than the Male was “the kind of story which ought not to be made because it is a story of gross lust and shocking brutality and ruthlessness.” In the state of Ohio, as well as the cities of Chicago and Memphis, censorship boards prohibited theaters from showing the murder flick on account of its alleged indecency. Its reputation was further damaged the next year when it was implicated in the notorious trial of Howard “Howie” Lang, a twelve-year-old adolescent who in Chicago brutally slaughtered Lonnie Fellick, a seven-year-old boy, polishing him off with a switchblade and chunk of concrete while another boy, nine-year-old Gerald Michalik, at Lang’s direction held down Fellick’s flailing legs. (According to the press, reticent concerning sexual matters, the three boys had earlier engaged mutually in “acts of perversion” as well.) Lang’s lawyers claimed that the boy had watched Born to Kill just three weeks prior to the 1947 murder, temporarily triggering in him a fit of homicidal mania. Back in 1909 Benjamin Wellington Soule had made a similar argument when he blamed a Nick Carter dime novel for inspiring him to send extortion letters to wealthy San Franciscans, but the jury did not buy it then and the jury did not buy it four decades later, in 1948. At his trial Lang was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison, but on appeal the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the decision and ordered a new trial. There the beneficent presiding judge, who was hearing the case without a jury, concluded that Lang’s poor upbringing along with his addiction to murder mysteries, crime movies and comic books had rendered him “unable to determine right from wrong.” The judge ordered that the adolescent, who was now fourteen, be given a new start in life at a Catholic school under another name. Unfortunately, Howie Lang himself was not one to let bygones be bygones. In 1951, Lang, now sixteen, was arrested for beating into insensibility with a chain Gerald Michalik, the pal who had testified against him at his trial. This time around Lang was sentenced to eleven months in prison, during which time he staged what was termed a “3-day revolt in his cell.” When Lang finally walked out of prison in 1953, telling the press that he did not want any help from anyone, Warden Frank Sain lamented of the eighteen-year-old: “He has been a very disappointing prisoner to work with.” What James Gunn made of all this brouhaha over the film version of his novel I do not know. His own first screenplay credit, a solo one, was for the more anodyne 1943 murder mystery Lady of Burlesque, which starred Barbara Stanwyck in the title role. This film was an adaptation of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1941 bestselling murder mystery The G-String Murders, a pithy and racy novel that was rather like Gunn’s, only even more commercially successful. Hunt Stromberg, the independent producer of The G-String Murders, had been immediately interested in filming Deadlier Then the Male, and presumably came into contact with the author that way. He spoke warmly of Gunn’s participation in his film, telling the press that screenwriter was “an outstanding example of the opportunities motion pictures offer a young man of 22 with imagination and writing talent today…. He looks at the world through the eyes of a young modern. He has no sympathy for a phony, for sham or theatricals. He thinks and writes in that frank, down-to-earthy, lighthearted manner that is so much needed today.” Reviewers like Philip K. Scheuer praised Gunn’s “tongue-in-cheek script” (along with director William A Wellman’s “slightly derisive direction”) for “simulating the odorous backstage atmosphere of [a burlesque theater] without actually showing anything objectionable, at least that you can put your finger on…. The girls are prettier and shapelier [than in real burlesque], the jokes innocuous and the striptease antiseptic—but the feel is still there.” One had to consider the strictures Gunn worked under in scripting this film. As Scheuer noted, “the picture was first banned and then passed, with deletions, by the Legion of Decency.” Censor Breen even complained about the use of a G-string as a murder weapon (strippers are strangled with it), complaining that the article was altogether too “intimate” a piece of feminine apparel. One thing James Gunn managed to do, like Dashiell Hammett had before him in his classic hard-boiled novel The Maltese Falcon (1930), was to slip into the Burlesque script the word gunsel, in its true meaning of catamite, defined as a young man or boy “kept by an older man for homosexual practices.” (The word actually first appeared in the serialization of Falcon in Black Mask in 1929.) Explicit references to homosexuality were frowned upon in American entertainment media and explicitly proscribed from films by the Hays Code in 1934. However, censorious editors and the like thought that gunsel meant a gun-armed henchman of a crook and, guided by this misimpression, allowed the word to remain both in Hammett’s novel and the classic film adaptation, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, which premiered in October 1941, when Gunn was writing Deadlier Than the Male. In the film Spade sneeringly refers to young thug Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook, Jr.), lackey to the obviously queer Kasper Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet), as a gunsel. Two years later in Lady of Burlesque, the word appears again, in its original meaning, when an angry stripper sneers at her boyfriend: “Big Louie the Grin! Turns gray when he sees a cop, like a gunsel.” The stripper here clearly is using the word, like Sam Spade had in The Maltese Falcon, as a synonym for pansy or fairy, words Gunn had gotten away with using, by the way, in his novel. As far as I know, Burlesque is the only film that followed Falcon in this correct usage, with other films which included the word using it to mean gunman. On the other hand, Gunn deleted the bit from Gypsy Rose Lee’s book where a lesbian cop amorously hits on her character, though in the film the actress who briefly portrays the policewoman certainly is depicted in full “dyke” battle mode, if you will. In contrast with Born to Kill, Lady of Burlesque in playing it safer with its script made a big hit at the box office. Gunn was unable to capitalize on the film’s success, however, for by the time Burlesque premiered in May 1943, he had been inducted into the army. After he returned to civilian life in 1945, he would garner only one other screenwriting credit in the Forties. This was for the film The Unfaithful (1947), a reworking of the Bette Davis murder melodrama The Letter, starring Ann Sheridan in the Davis role, which adopted a modern attitude to wifely adultery. Gunn co-wrote the screenplay with noir author David Goodis. In the 1950s Gunn worked with other writers on additional film scripts, including those for the Joan Crawford marital melodrama Harriet Craig, (1950), itself another updating of an older film; the grift film Two of a Kind (1951), starring Lizabeth Scott and Edmund O’Brien; Affair in Trinidad (1952), a mystery which reunited Gilda stars Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford; and All I Desire (1953); a Douglas Sirk period noirish melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck. Like so many other Hollywood writers in the Fifties, he then found steady work in television. During the early to mid-Fifties, he wrote thirty-five episodes for such TV anthology series as Fireside Theater, Chevron Theater, The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse and Studio 57. Perhaps his most notable television job was co-writing six episodes of the critically-praised series Checkmate, which was set and San Francisco and created by Eric Ambler. (Gunn co-scripted these episodes with Ambler.) During these years, Gunn’s sole film screenplay was for the Oscar-nominated melodrama The Young Philadelphians, a sudser starring Paul Newman which opens with a scene of a Main Line mama’s boy socialite, an evident self-hating queer played by Adam West of later Batman fame, miserably explaining to his bride on their honeymoon that he cannot consummate their wedding and then running out on her. James Gunn may have hoped that the hit flick might revive his flagging film career. At the time of the picture’s opening, it was reported that he and another writer with a very similar name, the late Lawrence, Kansas science fiction writer James Edwin Gunn, had taken out an ad in a Hollywood trade paper, explaining to the public that they were in fact different people. “He is now, and has been since the Ice Age, in Hollywood,” the text dryly explained about James Edward Gunn. This was Gunn’s last film work, however. Indeed, it is claimed in some sources that Paul Newman hated the Young Philadelphians script and brought in blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo to doctor it. Gunn’s final aired television script was for a 1965 episode of the William Faulkner inspired drama The Long, Hot Summer. He died in Los Angeles the next year, on September 20, 1966, when he was only forty-six years old. The circumstances of James Gunn’s death—and, truth be told, much of his life–remain frustratingly unclear. When Black Mask reprinted Deadlier Than the Male in a typo-ridden edition in 2009, reviewers of the novel praised it while expressing perplexity over the obscurity of the author. “Little is known of his life, and he remains a tantalizing mystery,” observed Tony D’Ambra” at FilmNoirsnet back in 2010. “Nobody seems to know anything about him,” echoed blogger Bill Chance back in 2011. Over the decade, however, nothing seems to have been done to rectify the matter. “Searching for biographical information on Gunn is a futile endeavor,” concluded author and academic Sean Carswell in 2019. James Gunn’s sister Jane preceded him in death at the old goldrush town of Nevada City, California four years before his own demise. Aged forty-six years like her brother when she expired, she left behind her husband of twenty-two years, Leroy Briggs, but no children. James, who seems never to have married, evidently was similarly childless at his death. It is completely speculative on my part, but I wonder, given his life circumstances and his fiction and film writing–which so often is dominated by strong female characters and frequently evinces, to my mind anyway, a camp sensibility–whether James Gunn was gay. It would be interesting if so, because noir, with a few exceptions like Cornell Woolrich, is so associated with the “he-man” tough school of crime writing. Yet even many critics at the time noted the queer, pun intended, juxtaposition in Deadlier Than the Male of Gunn’s humorous, surrealistic writing with sharp bursts of violence and brutality, as well as the superb portrayal of Mrs. Krantz, that indomitable avenging angel and drunken old hag—a camp gay icon type character if ever there were one. In 1950 French publisher Gallimard under its influential Serie noire imprint, which Gallimard had established five years earlier, reprinted Deadlier Than the Male, under the title Tendre femelle (Tender Female) as the fiftieth book in its series. A year after Gunn’s obscure death in 1965, Leftist French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the occasion of the publication of the thousandth novel in the series, produced an essay, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” in which he named Gunn’s book as a “marvelous work” and “my personal favorite” from the series. In “A Lure for the Devil,” an essay by Sean Carswell on Deadlier Than the Male which the LA Review of Books published in 2019, Carwell highlights the comical, surrealistic quality of Gunn’s novel, never using the word camp but depicting the book as a noir parody. Carswell frequently cites Gilles Deleuze’s 1966 essay, in which, he notes, Deleuze named Deadlier than the Male “his favorite example of what the best crime writing can do,” because its absurdist parody rejects the sense of ultimate rationality and order that one finds in the traditional crime novel–even the hard-boiled novel. To quote Deleuze: “The most beautiful works of La Serie Noire are those in which the real finds its proper parody, such that in its turn the parody shows us directions in the real which we would not have found otherwise.” Sean Carswell writes that despite the book’s title, its depiction of the femme fatale is ironically subversive of (straight male) genre tropes: Rather than describing a sexy, seductive femme fatale, Gunn creates a fabulous one. She’s far closer to Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly than she is to, say, Raymond Chandler’s Velma Valento. The third-person narrative voice reads like it comes from a gay man who wants to go clubbing with her. This voice provides a clever counterpoint to the typical characterizations of femmes fatales…. the femme fatale that readers were very accustomed to in the 1930s and 1940s [was] the woman whom the narrator or narrative gaze wants both to sleep with and to blame for all of his misdeeds. Gunn’s parodic portrayal of a femme fatale highlights the absurdity of this trope. He doesn’t want to sleep with her. God, no. He wants to help her pick out that marvelous outfit. And if that outfit should drive a man crazy, well, it was probably a short trip there. When it came to marketing the film version of Deadlier Than the Male, it is noteworthy that the change of title to Born to Kill and the tag line (The coldest killer a woman ever loved!) together place emphasis on the male character, Sam Wild, as protagonist, rather than Helen Brent. I would say to the contrary that in Deadlier Than the Male the sole protagonist clearly is Helen Brent, the film’s putative femme fatale, with Mrs. Krantz as antagonist or nemesis and Sam Wild as Helen’s would-be homme fatale, his presence in her life peeling away her layers of civility and spurring her on to worse and worse actions. In short, it is not Helen’s maleficent impact on Sam that the author is interested in so much as Sam’s maleficent impact on her. Helen’s lead status is diluted in the film, as is the role of Mrs. Krantz, although there is enough left of her part that character actress Esther Howard, who plays her in the film, is able to steal every scene in which she appears. (Howard’s name is not even included on the film’s posters.) Moreover, as Carswell urges, James Gunn’s parody goes beyond subverting the traditional depiction of hard-boiled femme fatale: “It’s not enough for Deleuze when crime novels simply parody the form or the genre, the best novels parody what we perceive as the real. Therein lies the power of Deadlier Than the Male: it takes our ideas of an orderly, just, civilized society where people act on rational motives; it eviscerates those ideas; and leaving us laughing at the rubble.” All of this is vitiated in the film version, especially with its soft-pedaled, traditionally moralistic ending (i.e., crime does not pay). Some modern reviewers have simply been left confounded, even repelled, by Gunn’s subversive novel. ‘It’s an odd, crazy book,” observed bemused blogger Bill Chance in 2011. “[T]he plot is like a big twisted knot of desperation and evil, stretching from [Reno] to Frisco…. I was able to get through the book in one day. [Now] I need to find something different [to read], maybe even something a little uplifting. After reading this one…I feel sort of dirty.” Gunn’s possession of an iconoclastic queer sensibility would help explain how this novel came to be written as it is, but perhaps Gunn simply looked back with sardonic amusement at the criminal follies which had occurred in the lives of his own grandfather and great-uncle a decade or so before he was born. What could be more absurd than his grandfather getting a letter threatening death by a deadly, undetectable Hindu poison administered by the hands of an imaginary criminal gang called The Ravens, except the San Francisco police taking the letter so seriously as to ruin an impetuous man’s life over it? What could be more surreal than the idea of Gertrude Fontham, that supposed femme fatale of Harlem, driving a pair of foolish men to a so-called duel and yet another to acts of embezzlement and bigamy, before she settled down to a bland, everyday life of domesticity and children with a man who looked like her doting grandfather? What could be more unjust than Bejamin Wellington Soule’s silly letters resulting in his losing three years of his life to hard labor in a bestial jute mill, while William Ellis Gunn a couple of years earlier walked off legally unscathed after committing embezzlement, desertion and bigamy? And, one might add, what could be more ridiculously simplistic than to blame a film-noir for one boy’s horrific murder of another, rather than societal ills or individual psychosis? Perhaps James Gunn could only look back and laugh in the face of such cosmic injustices and absurdities, rather than piously don black and shed traditional tears. After all, as another noir film, produced by Gunn’s cinematic impresario friend Hunt Stromberg, warned in 1949, it was too late for tears. View the full article

The CrimeReads editors make their choices for the best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) Vasilyuk’s powerful debut tells the story of Yefim Shulman, moving between his death in Ukraine in 2007 and his experiences during World War II and its aftermath, when Shulman fought Germany for the USSR but soon ended up ensnared in the KGB plots, hiding his secrets from his family. Vasilyuk manages to capture both the story’s intimate drama and its epic qualities, telling the story of a double life and its reverberations across borders and generations. –DM Sara Koffi, While We Were Burning (Putnam) In this well-plotted cat-and-mouse thriller, a surburban white woman still reeling from the death of her best friend hires a Black personal assistant to help her with day-to-day tasks. Little does she suspect that her new employee only took the gig so she can keep investigating the circumstances surrounding her son’s death, and figure out which “concerned citizen” was the person who called the cops and put her beloved child in their cross-hairs. The looming, inevitable confrontation between the two is forceful and stunning. Koffi has used the thriller genre with great effect for a prescient critique on the petty resentments and deliberate ignorance that underpin our racist power structure. –MO K.T. Nguyen, You Know What You Did (Dutton) In this propulsive psychological thriller, artist Annie “Anh Le” Shaw is sent spiraling when her mother dies suddenly, and long-repressed memories begin to crowd their way to the surface to destabilize her further. When a local art patron disappears, and Annie finds herself waking up in a hotel room next to a dead body with no idea how she got there, things really get unhinged. Although this is Nguyen’s debut, her voice is already self-assured and powerful, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. –MO L.K. Bowen, For Worse (Blackstone) In this twisty, suspenseful debut, a woman losing her sight grows determined to leave her abusive relationship, and turns to an online group for support, but soon discovers a more dangerous proposition on offer. Bowen raises the stakes with precision and takes readers on a journey through a complex moral maze. –DM Matt Riordan, The North Line (Hyperion Avenue) In Riordan’s debut novel, a young man signs on to a season of fishing the dangerous waters around Alaska, then soon finds himself embroiled in a clash of bigger social forces. Riordan writes about both labor and the natural world with an equally keen eye, bringing out the inner torment of a complex character coming to terms with his place in the world. –DM View the full article

Prague in the 1990s was a magical place. Communism had fallen, a seat at the opera cost a few bucks, the city’s magnificence had yet to be sullied by hordes of tourists or chain restaurants. Playwright and former dissident Václav Havel was at the helm, transforming and privatizing and chain-smoking. NATO had opened its arms. In 1994, President Clinton played saxophone at the Reduta black-light theater, where absinthe was served. Statues of Soviet dictators were vanishing. A promise of something was in the air, rising from the city like káva turk steam. To outsiders, Prague was irresistible precisely for its halfway quality. The feeling that all you had to do was dust off a bit of grime to reveal majesty. That down every alley was something undiscovered, a café or rococo church, whose first arresting view you could claim as your own. Each cranny spawned revelations. The next great thing was just around the corner. You could be the next great thing. It’s no wonder expats flocked to this new Left Bank. Modern-day beatniks were eager to pan the fertile avant-garde soil; to get a hit of hedonism and a deprivation buzz; above all, to strike literary riches. If you didn’t have a manuscript in progress (or paint, play in a band, smoke, sip brightly colored cocktails into the night), you didn’t belong. Literary salons were de rigueur. The Globe bookstore was perpetually packed, its bulletin board a veritable collage of hopes and dreams. Full confession: I was one of the flocks. Fresh out of college in 1998, with pots and pans and all my worldly possessions clanging in my suitcase (who knew what would be available in stores?), I headed to Prague on a one-way ticket to try my hand at becoming a writer. The great expat novel, I felt sure, was just waiting for my pen. In a cheap room above a seedy nightclub called The Roxy, I lived with two Irish roommates. The bathroom was down the hall; the trashcan, wedged between the girls’ beds, served as their vomit bucket; all night long, drunk revelers stumbled past our door, bass from the subterranean bands shaking the linoleum floor. Lucky for me, the dot-com boom was in full swing—thriving in untapped Eastern Europe—and I found work at a startup, the European Internet Network. I edited newswire pieces on emerging economies and nascent stock markets, becoming an expert in transition countries. Quality newspapers were proliferating in the free-press-starved landscape (Prague Post, originally run by famed journalist Alan Levy, is still around), and I felt I was contributing to the country’s budding fourth estate, gaining valuable editorial experience. My career as an author was surely underway. While my peers imbibed and pontificated into the wee hours, I hunkered down to write. Eventually, after saving money, I moved to my own flat at Nerudova 47—a cozy attic in the “House of Two Suns”—where, serendipitously, the Czech writer Jan Neruda had lived. (His Tales of the Little Quarter is a whimsical celebration of the Mála Strana neighborhood.) Now, I thought, everything was in place. Living in an attic, tracking news leads by day, watching evening snow settle on a dormer. If this wasn’t the secret sauce to becoming a writer, what was? And every night, I’d open my journal, waiting for the stories and inspiration to come. From the corner pawnshop, the cellar bar in Žižkov. From my colleagues and their lives and aspirations. From the precise hue when fading sunlight hits centuries-old yellow paint. Images I’d collected were just waiting to be used as literary flats, love nests, hideouts, safehouses. From this city’s rough slab of clay, surely, like Rabbi Loew, I could bring my Golem to life. It never happened. Those of us who participated in the great migration now know that Prague in the nineties was notorious for having produced absolutely no notable works of expat literature. (Prague, published in 2003 by Arthur Phillips, is probably the closest approximation—but, despite the title, is actually set in Budapest.) After less than a year, my infatuation with Prague ended. The bohemian culture was too bohemian. I wasn’t into drinking or drugs, or living in hovels and on leftovers. I wasn’t particularly anti-establishment or angst-ridden. Above all, no story had materialized. Prague had broken its promise to me. So late one night, when the Cold-War-era radio phone in my Nerudova flat rang, I knew my answer before I’d picked up. Yes, I shouted into the clunky handset. I’d love to work as an intelligence analyst. The connection was bad, but the woman on the other end got the gist. Great, she said. We need someone with knowledge of transition countries. I’ll arrange to have your household goods shipped to England. A few weeks later, I entered the American embassy on Trźište, just down the street from my flat, where a Foreign Service officer handed me my paperwork. I was headed to Cambridge, England to work as a Balkans intelligence analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense. The move would be easy: just a few pots and pans. My worldly possessions barely filled a suitcase. Nearly six years later, I would again pack my bags, this time with different items—navigation beads, cargo pants, a compass watch. I was headed to wartime Baghdad for my first assignment as a CIA spy. It would be a harrowing tour, filled with failure, danger, confusion, and heartbreak. In 2012, I would return to the Middle East, spending two years in Bahrain during the Arab Spring—a movement also filled with disappointment and broken promises. By the time I returned from Bahrain, my suitcase was finally full. I had a story to tell. Last year, my debut novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow, was published. It’s a tale of an aging spy stationed in the Persian Gulf who becomes embroiled in murder, consuming love, and a violent revolution. It’s about expats and their foibles, indulgences, and delusions. It’s the culmination of my years abroad. Two-and-a-half decades later, Prague had finally worked its magic. Stories, I’ve learned, need more than time and place, more than physicality. They need substance, lived experience, depth. And sometimes you don’t find the story; it finds you. *** Version 1.0.0 View the full article

“The city is strong in the memory, no matter how much it decays and gives way to the sea.” –Elaine Perry, 1990 Since I’ve started writing about out-of-print and “lost” Black authors, I occasionally get suggestions from writer-friends who turn me on to their favorite neglected authors. When I was writing The Blacklist column for Catapult, journalist Ericka Blount Danois schooled me on the Harlem/Brooklyn teen novels of Rosa Guy while respected Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe taught me much about the literary life and brutal death of surreal fictionist Henry Dumas. Most recently I received a note from respected memoirist Bridgett M. Davis (The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers, 2019) inquiring if I’d ever read Another Present Era (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Elaine Perry. Published in 1990 when Perry was 30-years-old, I had never heard of the book or its writer. “It’s beautiful,” Davis’ note read. “It’s dystopian and futuristic at the same time.” As a fan of “dystopian, futuristic” fiction, I thought it was odd that I’d never come across Perry’s book. While I was a reader of Octavia Butler’s writings, it was cool to find out that she, contrary to the beliefs of many, wasn’t the only Black woman writing speculative fiction during that era. Another Present Era touches on many of the same subjects (global warming, corporate greed, racism and disease) as Butler’s more well-known Parable of Sower, but that book wasn’t published until three years later. After ordering the book from eBay, I did an internet search on Perry, but surprisingly I couldn’t find any of her work online. I did see a cranky novel review of Another Present Era from Kirkus and a smiling photograph of Perry, alongside a short bio, on the book’s Goodreads page. “Elaine Perry is an American author. Her first novel, Another Present Era, was…a 1990 Booklist Editors’ Choice: Adult Books, Arts & Literature. She also writes poetry and short stories and has taught poetry and fiction at the Oberlin College Creative Writing Program.” There was also a New York magazine profile written by Kelli Pryor from the August 13, 1990 issue titled “Apocalypse Now” that gave a bit of background on the Lima, Ohio native who was born and raised on “the Black side of town.” Pryor wrote that the author had been “a timid child who was often teased about being brainy and overweight, Perry spent hours in her room, reading encyclopedias and dictionaries. And when she ended up at a predominantly white school she used her abstract paintings as a buffer against other people.” Perry moved to New York in 1981 two days after graduating from college. 1980s NYC, with its high crime rate, urban bleakness and the introduction of crack, was just as rough as it was in the 1970s. However it was still an exciting city that was creatively stimulating for aspiring visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers. Three years after arriving, she got a job at Ogilvy & Mather (where writer Don DeLillo once worked) answering phones for “eight stereotypical yuppies.” It was while working for the advertising, marketing, and public relations agency that she switched from writing poetry to prose. “It was easier to write fiction in that environment,” Perry stated in 1990. I assume that Another Present Era began there and, by the end of the decade, was finished. Though I’m not certain what the title means, Another Present Era shares a name with a 1972 prog rock-jazz fusion-folk album by Oregon. The cover of Another Present Era is classically designed and features a vintage drawing by futurist illustrator and architect Hugh Ferris. Taken from Ferris’ 1929 classic The Metropolis of Tomorrow the image is a charcoal drawing of a painter standing on a rooftop in Manhattan capturing skyscrapers on canvas. Ferris’ work for that project was influenced by the cityscapes in Fritz Lang’s masterwork Metropolis (1927) and both men’s work inspired production designers Syd Mead (Blade Runner, 1982) and Anton Furst (Batman, 1989) as well as generations of artists, filmmakers and writers. The picture has a noir sci-fi weirdness that is both retro and ultramodern. However, the strangest thing about the cover was its absence of blurbs from other writers telling us how “exciting, brilliant and outstanding” the text is; instead we get a few graphs from the first chapter which introduces us to “blond, beautiful, brilliant architect Wanda Higgins Du Bois,” the bi-racial protagonist whose complex life, loves, career, obsessions and family fuels the narrative. “The fog in New York Harbor casts a nebula around the dying city,” reads the jacket copy which is also the opening lines of the book. “Wanda is alone on the fifty-eighth floor of the Savings of America Tower, listening to footsteps. But everyone left hours ago and no ghost could haunt a skyscraper like this, ninety stories of smoke-gray glass and steel. It’s past midnight, she should be alarmed, the financial district isn’t safe after hours.” Calling Another Present Era experimental or postmodern fiction might be a stretch, but the text is not as invested in plot as it is in the characters and their various dilemmas. There’s no specific A to Z story line as Perry’s moody people navigate through existential angst (both past and present) in various bleak, near death cities that wouldn’t be out of place in a New Wave Science Fiction novel imagined by Samuel R. Delany, J.G. Ballard or Thomas M. Disch. There are also elements of noir, melodrama and tragic romanticism as well as the author’s obvious affection for art, classical symphonies, bohemian lifestyles and urban planning. Race and racism, color and colorism are prominent in the novel, but we are told early on that Wanda, instead of trying to pass for white, applies the “one drop rule” to herself. A concept developed during slavery when masters often raped their slaves who birthed lighter skinned babies, the rule declared that one drop of Black blood made the offspring just that. “It still astounded and saddened her that she looked nothing like her mother,” Perry writes. “She frowned at her pale hands…” Further into the book Perry states, “Wanda’s been following the story of a coalition of civil rights and other progressive organizations which is trying to have the concept of race declared unconstitutional.” To distance herself further from the white side of her family, Wanda refuses to use her father’s last name Stoller, choosing instead her mom’s maiden name Du Bois. Wanda’s pro-Black stance reminds me of the Larry Neal quote, “Without a strong sense of nationalism black people would not survive America. There was no way to survive America fragmented and in general confusion about who we were, and what we wanted.” Of course it doesn’t help that from the time Wanda was a child her father Charles seemed to show nothing but hatred towards her mother Francine, telling co-workers that his wife was dead and beating Wanda if she contradicted him. Daddy Dearest was in the military and had a rocket scientist father who also might’ve been a Nazi. Charles’ family never accepted “the coloreds,” except his younger sister Tyler (“an environmental lobbyist and the only Stoller whom Wanda has been able to befriend”) is very present in their lives. While all the characters are quite serious, one of the funniest sections involves both race and Tyler, who “has told her (Wanda) stories about these whites researching their roots in the National Archives and finding they’ve got an African-American or two in the family, some becoming so hysterical they have to be carried out by paramedics.” Wanda, a Harvard graduate, while successful in her architectural career (“She thinks about an arts and cultural center for a site on the Toronto harbor. It’s an international design competition and she dreams of winning…”) and making lots of money at the Architects Consortium (“She and everyone else at the Consortium were too busy with corporate parks and planned communities to pursue visions.”), she numbs herself with excessive drinking that often leads to bad decisions and blackouts. Considering the small number of Black women architects in New York at any time in history, with Harlem born Norma Merrick Sklarek being the first to get her license in 1954, Perry made a radical decision giving Wanda that profession. Unfortunately, Wanda’s success at work doesn’t spill over into her private life. Wanda’s crazy boyfriend Bradley is another one dropper who “is so light-complexioned that he is often perceived as white, and they are united by their mutual alienation, never completely accepted by either whites or blacks.” However, Bradley remains passing for white and, though he claims to he wants to out himself as Black to friends and co-workers, he doesn’t. Instead of being truthful, Bradley, who lives on a houseboat docked on 79th Street, is slowly going mad. From the moment we meet him at Wanda’s office, where one minute he’s talking about having her dream house built and the next he sticks a gun in his mouth, he is just not right. While it’s obvious that the race issue is making Bradley batty, suicidal, paranoid and violent, he is also extremely jealous of Wanda’s rich art speculator “roommate” Werner Schmidt, who is really Sterling Cronheim, a famous Modernist painter who disappeared in Paris when it was occupied by Nazis in 1940. Sterling is an American born in Wisconsin, but having spent so much time in Germany as a young artist, in his old age he reminds me of one of the long-suffering men in Otto Dix paintings or the loner in “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich. Cronheim’s haunting story of life as an artist, photographer, Bauhaus instructor and married bisexual wed to a scientist named Lenore, is a parallel narrative to Wanda’s story. Lenore, much like Bradley, is a nerve wreaking character that demands perfection from her partner, but then cheats on him with various lovers including real-life painter Wassily Kandinsky, a good friend of Cronheim. There is also her longtime best friend, whom Lenore loves more than anyone. “She will never be without Kally,” Perry writes. “Sterling will understand this, too. It’s not too much to ask of an artist, a fellow freethinker.” While Lenore loves Kally like a sister and (perhaps) as a lover, her relationship/marriage to Sterling always seems on the verge of exploding. As with all the characters, the desire to love is strong, but the will is fragile. Perry’s adoration for city life (Berlin, Paris, Philadelphia) shines through in the prose, but her real devotion is directed towards New York City. Though the metropolis is falling apart with its blackouts, flooding and marauding gangs, Wanda still loves it. As Kelli Pryor noted, “The New York in her novel seems an unthinkable place to live. Steadily falling acid rain eats away at rotting skyscrapers. Civil-defense Klaxons wail through the night while putrid water engulfs the island. And New Yorkers don’t notice.” Though Wanda, like other wealthy people, has the option of living on a faraway planet (“Leave the planet for good, buy an L-5 condo, her academic adviser told her…But outer space is for the rich, the military, and the global corporations. Just another form of escape.”) she stays on earth. Pryor believes that the main theme of Another Present Era’s is alienation. “The main character…is mired in her sense of not belonging anywhere,” she writes. But, in my opinion, an equally important theme, as corny as it might sound, is family—both blood relatives and the family we create. Wanda’s connection with her boyfriend might be broken, but she still has a close relationship with her mother and aunties. Perry is a wonderful stylist, a vivid writer whose prose unspools like a European art film inspired by American pulp fiction with a soundtrack by Tricky working with the Berliner Philharmoniker. The respected Poets & Writers journal called the book “tragic and haunting…exceptional (and) daring,” Another Present Era is also one of more ambitious novels of that decade. Perry writes in a maximalist style that hasn’t been in vogue in years. I enjoy texts that are overflowing with ideas on culture and sex, angst filled meditations and doomed people trying to escape the dark cloud that looms over their heads until their last breath. After reading Another Present Era, which by today’s standards would be labeled Afrofuturism (standing proudly next to Dhalgren and Kindred) I wanted more of Elaine Perry’s words, but there wasn’t any. “It was Perry’s only novel, which is a bit of a mystery, given her talent,” Bridgett Davis wrote in her note. Indeed, it was mysterious, but a few of my favorite creative visionaries created singular works of greatness (Ephraim Lewis/Skin, Charles Laughton/The Night of the Hunter) that will be remembered by a small group of people for years to come. Though I questioned “why” Elaine Perry stopped publishing, I know all too well that every writer has their reasons for not doing the expected or simply declining to share their writings with the public. While I was hoping to interview Perry as I’ve done with a few of my subjects, she politely declined. “It is my preference to allow the book to speak for itself,” Perry wrote me in March, 2024. Thankfully Another Present Era has so much to say. ___________________________________ For more on Gonzales’ rediscovered books listen to the On Themes podcast Literary Detectives: https://www.ontheme.show/episodes/literary-detectives View the full article

At the beginning of my new novel The Hollow Tree, a man stands on the roof of a Scottish hotel. It is night, and the distant mountains are hidden. It is rural Argyll, and the stars above are clear in their spiralling array. The nearby sea murmurs, but in the dark it is invisible. The man is naked, and his toes grip the stony edge of the battlements of the baronial tower. Behind him is safety. Before him is a sheer drop into darkness. He is not alone. He turns around to face Shona Sandison, a journalist, who is staying at the hotel for a wedding. To her surprise, she can see his chest is adorned with a complex tattoo. But it is not a picture or decoration on his exposed flesh; instead, there are the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0 to 9. On his right shoulder is Yes, and on his left shoulder, No. It is a depiction of a Ouija board. He speaks to her, intoning phrases she cannot understand or recognise. Then he throws himself from the roof, to his death. So begins The Hollow Tree, my second novel with the investigative reporting of Shona at its heart. Determined to find out why the man—Daniel Merrygill, a school friend of the bride—killed himself in such a way, she pursues a series of clues, tips and remembrances to a small rural town in the north of England. It is here, in Ullathorne, where poor Daniel and a small group of friends once toyed with Ouija boards in the early 1990s. What they did there, and then, reverberates into the present. I have long planned to write a book based around the curious, contested movements of the Ouija board. They hold an eerie fascination. I have noticed in others they elicit a shudder, or perhaps, at the least, a shivery curiosity. Maybe, even, a roll of the eyes. Personally, I have not touched one since I was also a teenager growing up in a remote rural town in the north of England. But the Ouija board sessions were product of a deep boredom. If you were a teenager in the early 1990s, especially in a small rural northern town with no cinema or rapid links to a city, there wasn’t much to do. There was sport, of course, but I was a duffer. There was, mercifully, alcohol, and the odd sniff of drugs. There was no internet, no mobile phones, and no multi-channel TVs. There was no music to download. There were books, of course, but no YouTube. You could buy CDs, but I was skint. New music, desperately read about in Melody Maker and New Musical Express, had to largely be imagined, apart from one or two late night shows on Radio 1. So, as in my own experience, Dan and his friends, on the painful edge of leaving school, on that painful edge of impending adulthood, turn inwards and, perhaps, downwards. A board is easy to set up. All you need to do is write. There is not a grand magical ceremony—no need for obscure substances or candles. No need to draw a pentagram or wait for the right phase of the moon. And so it was for us. Of course, the movement of the glass over the letters triggered questions all such users of the board have asked. Are we moving this? If I am not, who amongst my group is? Is this real? Why does the glass move so fast? Is someone trying to say something? What is trying to say something? Again, in my case, the movements spelled both gibberish, and disconnected, disordered, words. When a word or a fragment of a message was spelled out, it was unnerving. We held our breaths. Our voices became heightened or inaudible. It became addictive. What was happening? I figured enough was happening. I vowed, after a time, not to touch them again. Perhaps my long hours I had spent in the church in my youth had its effect. Perhaps that was a blessing. After all, the messages are assumed to be coming from the dead, from the afterlife. What if the board is “working” but cannot contact the dead? Then who was contacting us? Ouija boards and their use exist at the edges of conventional society. They have been damned, condemned, celebrated, and featured in movies. They were even advertised, back in the day, as a fun thing to do on a date. Artists and writers have been fascinated by them, and even consulted them. WB Yeats, no stranger to the eldritch and arcane, used them, and so, of course, did Crowley. Regan’s Captain Howdy was summoned with a board. The poet James Merrill’s long Ouija-inspired poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) won major prizes. Their history is a little murky, appropriately. They appear to have come from the US, emerging after the massive death toll and social disruption of the Civil War. Spiritualism tends to rise after large traumas, and interest in the afterlife later rose again after the First World War. The name for the talking-board was apparently coined by Helen Peters, a medium who was using the board with her brother-in-law Elijah Bond one night 1890 in Baltimore. More interesting to me was the story was the fate of William Fuld, the American entrepreneur who marketed the board, especially in national catalogues like Sears. I first read about him in an edition of the Fortean Times, but his story can also be read here, in this article in The Guardian. To summarise: the board told him to expect a heady expansion in business. Then, one day, he was supervising the replacement of a flag pole on top of his Baltimore factory. He fell. As The Guardian relays: “He broke several ribs, but was expected to survive, until a bump in the road on the way to the hospital sent one of the fractured bones through his heart and he died.” Ouija boards are a fascinating tool for a mystery novel. Besides the issue of whether the messages are real or not, there is the core of their appeal: words. Phrases. Sense or nonsense. Do they mean anything or not? Are there multiple meanings? Everyone around a board can sense or understand the words differently. In The Hollow Tree, a group of friends in the 1990s receives messages on a Ouija Board. The messages, spelling out by a glass over letters and numbers, are the same and repeated endlessly. Each member of that group takes the messages to heart. And all in different and personal ways. Thirty years later, it leads to the terrible tragedy at the hotel, and, through the investigations of the journalist Shona Sandison, a path is beaten back to the past. Whether the messages on a Oujia board are “real” or not is not really the main question in The Hollow Tree. It is the power of the words they appear to generate which is the nub. In The Hollow Tree, these words, these messages, these gnomic utterances, have the power to change and direct lives. And beyond that, in The Hollow Tree, underlaying it like a black cloth, there is the question of time, and of where our personal deaths are within time. Some see time as a line, stretching back from the path to the present and then on, to the future. Others have said time is a circle. Maybe it is both: a line that circles, like a spiral. Like the DNA within us. Or all the galaxies beyond us. This is a spiral we are all climbing—and maybe, sometimes, we get a peek of the levels above and below. And maybe the people there can see us and contact us in the only way they know how: through words. Or: maybe—and this is an idea I also pursue and investigate in The Hollow Tree—time is more like the course of flowing water. You, me, we, are living in its cycle. Moving always from the deep churn of the water in the sea, to the moving landscapes of the clouds, down to the high streams and becks, falling into the beautiful rivers, and back to the roiling sea. And, again, if you survive death in some way, you are freed from this cycle. So, you can sit or stand or lie on the banks of the course of time. You can see its entire course. Maybe you can move along it and see time future, or time past, or time present, whenever you want. Maybe you can temporarily dive into the water of time, and see the living, speak to them, and then leave again. And if someone calls to you, you can answer. But what else is there, along the path of the water? Is it just the dead of humanity? What else could there be, apart from our dead? Maybe it is safer to never find out. *** View the full article

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exponential growth in both creative writing programs and the true crime storytelling industry, so perhaps it should come as no surprise to find so much beautiful writing about terrible events. Just so, as true crime has matured, those who tell such stories have learned essential lessons in how to avoid exploitation and bring in appropriate context and empathy (the anthropologists in the list below are especially notable in their sensitivities). The works on this list are about complicated situations, torn individuals, delayed or denied justice, and a world in which those who bear the most responsibility for harm are not the ones who face the most consequences. They are about the criminalized, the victimized, and the systems that perpetuate the circumstances that enable and encourage violence. True crime is, at best, a depiction of the nexus between worlds, a disrupted moment in which incongruous threads collide with brutal symmetry. There is a before, and an after, and a long after. The after does not end. Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, by Jason de León (Viking, March 19) Jason de León is an anthropologist who uses the concept of “radical hanging out”, or embedding himself in communities for long periods of time, to tell the stories of those smugglers who eke out a bare bones living bringing people over dangerous, ever-changing routes towards relative safety. De León is kind, empathetic, and context-savvy when it comes to depicting those who lesser journalists might have rendered as one-dimensional exploitative boogeymen; the real story of exploitation is that of the United States’ impact on Latin American lives. The people in Soldiers and Kings may walk a gritty path of extra-legality, but they were not forced there in a vacuum. The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, by Angela Garcia (FSG, April 30) Angela Garcia is the second anthropologist on this list, also interested in extralegal acts by those who are forced into unconventional solutions. Here, she portrays the informal rehab system of Mexico City’s anexos, established as makeshift community responses to the need for affordable and accessible treatment centers (and to a lesser degree, assisted living and hideout spaces). In these cramped and crowded rooms, powerful work is done—not always helpful to the individuals in question, but always aimed at fulfilling a need shared by an enormous amount of underserved people. Angela Garcia has crafted a moody, thought-provoking, and fascinating work that will make you consider the ethics of stop-gap measures in a nuanced and hopeful way. Shadow Men: The Tangled Story of Murder, Media, and Privilege That Scandalized Jazz Age America, by James Polchin (Counterpoint, June 11) James Polchin uses the murder of a blackmailer by his wealthy target as a jumping off point to examine power, privilege, gender, and sex in Jazz Age America. Polchin is previously the author of the much-launded Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall, and Shadow Men cements his place in the new true crime canon. Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable, by Sarah Gerard (Zando, July 9) Sarah Gerard’s skills in both creative writing and private investigation are on full display in this disturbing account of her friend Carolyn Bush’s murder by a roommate, and the many iniquities that enabled the crime. She also examines a wider culture of male privilege and entitlement at her alma mater of Bard College, the same school attended by both Carolyn and her killer, drawing a convincing through-line between the university’s abysmal record on sexual assault and mental health treatment and the shocking crime at the heart of her book. Gerard also connects the case into a wider discussion of privilege and power in the New York literary scene, and shows the devastating impact of Carolyn’s loss on an entire community. The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant L.A., by Jesse Katz (Astra, July 16) In this stranger-than-fiction story, Jesse Katz unpacks the context of a botched hit and its long-lasting consequences. L.A. is home to numerous street vendors, caught in a gray market economy in which both authorities and criminals add to immigrant families’ financial burdens. A teenager. bent on joining a gang is told to take out a vendor who refuses to pay rent on his small patch of concrete; the target survives, but an infant is killed by a stray bullet. The shooter then is subjected to an assassination attempt, itself botched, and the subsequent long-drawn-out legal consequences reverberate across the Los Angeles underworld. Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida, by Mikita Brottman (Atria, July 23) Mikita Brottman’s latest psychoanalytical approach to true crime looks at purity culture and Christian morality, grappling with the story of a murder committed by two married lovers because it seemed to them less shameful than a divorce. There is never a shortage when it comes to crimes in Florida, but Brottman has captured one of the strangest, and saddest, to ever occur in the Sunshine State. View the full article

The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda has chosen 12 of the best weird tales ever written for a new collection from The Folio Society titled, appropriately enough, Weird Tales. Our editor Olivia Rutigliano spoke to Dirda. a longtime aficionado of the “weird,” about his selections. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. OR: You’ve done such wonderful research in the history of “weird tales”—the magazine of that name, and MAM/pulp publications and sci-fi and horror stories, in general. MD: Let me start by underscoring that The Folio Society collection Weird Tales only draws one story from the self-appointed “unique magazine” of that name. That would be Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” Instead, the book is, more broadly, both a sampler and survey of weird short fiction from the mid 19th-century to the beginning of the 21st. Let me point out, too, that I’ve been an editor and reviewer, written introductions to all sorts of books, and published a half dozen collections of essays, as well as a memoir, but Weird Tales was my first foray into compiling an anthology. For this opportunity, I am grateful to Tom Walker, editor of the Folio Society, who invited me to assemble a companion volume to the society’s excellent anthologies of ghost stories and horror stories. It was also my good luck to have his colleague, Mandy Kirby, for advice and guidance through the whole production process. In truth, Mandy did much of the nuts-and-bolts work, assisted by the accomplished Folio staff and artist Henry Campbell, to make this handsome book a reality. I can’t thank them enough. OR: Harry Campbell did the gorgeous illustrations in this edition– how was it to see his renderings compared to the visuals that have been in your mind’s eye when you’ve read the tales? MD: Whether it was a decision by Campbell himself or the Folio Society, the use of the colors black and green throughout gives his illustrations a deliciously unnatural air that is slightly head-spinning. The particular shade of the latter color always reminds me of Captain Hook’s line, in the musical version of “Peter Pan,” about baking a cake with poison until it turns a tempting green. Campbell’s art is, moreover, varied, ranging from tentacled horrors to the witchy beauty of Medea da Carpi in “Amour Dure.” Appropriately, the touches of purple on the book’s cover add to the jarring weirdness of Weird Tales. OR: I’d love to hear more about the selection process of stories for this edition, namely about the toil of whittling down this canon. Were there any stories that you really wanted to include but didn’t get to? MD: Given the huge number of stories dealing with the supernatural, spectral, and occult, I began by setting some limits for myself. With some regret, I decided to restrict the book to works written in English, which meant leaving out such favorites as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and Maupassant’s “The Horla.” From here, I adopted the following rules: 1) Because the Folio Society publishes books for the general reader, I decided to focus on the genre’s short-fiction classics. I wanted Weird Tales to serve as an introduction to some wonderful reading for people, young and old, who were relatively unfamiliar with the genre. 2) The Folio Society recently issued excellent anthologies devoted to ghost stories (introduced by Kathryn Hughes) and horror stories (introduced by Ramsey Campbell) and there seemed no point in duplicating anything from those volumes. Otherwise, Weird Tales would have included Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Arthur Machen’s tour-de-force “The White People.” Machen, however, is represented by his only slightly more conventional but comparably unsettling, “Novel of the Black Seal.” 3) Besides choosing classics, I wanted the book to reflect the genre’s variousness. Some stories are viscerally shocking, others simply emphasize the uncanny, a couple mix eros with horror, one or two are deeply enigmatic, and two–Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” and Mark Samuel’s “The White Hands”–even carry a post-modernist vibe, deliberately playing variations on familiar tropes. 4) While all the stories in Weird Tales are personal favorites, I did consult with knowledgeable friends for suggestions. Those friends included Stefan Dziemianowicz, who has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies of genre fiction; Robert Knowlton, whose familiarity with horror and dark fantasy is unrivalled; and members of an online discussion group called Fictionmags, a hive-mind possessing immense knowledge of popular fiction. In short, I performed due diligence to be sure I hadn’t overlooked an essential story. 5) At this point, I made several longlists. Here’s one of them: Sheridan Le Fanu, “Schalken the Painter” (1839) Rhoda Broughton, “The Man With the Nose” (1872) Margaret Oliphant, “The Library Window” (1879) Vernon Lee (aka Violet Paget), “Amour Dure” (1887) Madeline Yale Wynne, “The Little Room” (1895) H.G. Wells, “The Door in the Wall” (1906) Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows” (1907) M.R. James, “Casting the Runes” (1911) Oliver Onions, “The Beckoning Fair One” (1911) William Hope Hodgson, “The Derelict” (1912) E.F. Benson, “The Room in the Tower” (1912) Max Beerbohm, “Enoch Soames” (1916) Lord Dunsany, “The Three Sailors’ Gambit” (1916) Marjorie Bowen, “The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes” (1917) Walter de la Mare, “Seaton’s Aunt” (1921) H. F. Arnold, “The Night Wire” (1926) Cynthia Asquith, “The Corner Shop” (1926) H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) Ann Bridge, “The Buick Saloon” (1936) E.B. White, “The Door” (1939) Gerald Kersh, “Men without Bones” (1955) Jack Finney, “Of Missing Persons” (1956) J. G. Ballard, “The Voices of Time” (1960) Karl Edward Wagner, “Sticks” (1974) Robert Aickman, “The Hospice” (1975) Fred Chappell, “The Adder” (1989) Joyce Carol Oates, “The Ruins of Contracoeur” (1999) Mark Samuels, “The White Hands” (2006) 6) Space is the final frontier. Many of the greatest weird tales are quite long, but I needed to keep this anthology to a reasonable number of pages, so several major works–such as Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One,” Marjorie Bowen’s “Julia Roseingrave” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Ruins of Contraceur”–were set aside simply because of their length. Perhaps some day there will be a Weird Tales II. Other stories, such as Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” and Lord Dunsany’s “The Three Sailors’ Gambit” didn’t carry enough weirdness in their overall atmospheres, being essentially comic. In the end, I did include one living author–Mark Samuels–but sad to say he died unexpectedly while Weird Tales was in production. Let me take this space to urge readers to check out his eerie and wonderful fiction. A good sampler is The Age of Decayed Futurity: The Best of Mark Samuels (Hippocampus Press). For that matter, I hope readers intrigued by, say, Vernon Lee’s “Amour Dure” Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Hall Bedroom,” or Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice,” will want to seek out their other stories. OR: We are fortunate that characters like Cthulhu have finally found their way to mainstream culture, after spending decades being known by only a small population of readers. What’s another character or story or author from this group that you wish more people knew about or widely read. MD: Well, there aren’t too many characters like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu–fortunately for us. As his worshippers say, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”, i.e., “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” did loosely inspire Jacques Tourneur’s cult film “Night of the Demon” and Blackwood’s “The Willows” was Lovecraft’s own favorite supernatural tale. But let me stress again that my hope is that readers will enjoy all these stories while also discovering a few authors whose work they will want to explore further. If there’s one thing reading weird tales teaches us, the past is never really past. Like Cthulhu, it is only waiting for the right time to return. __________________________________ The Folio Society edition of Weird Tales, selected and introduced by Michael Dirda and illustrated by Harry Campbell, is exclusively available from foliosociety.com View the full article

The Reaper Follows arrives out in the world this week, and I’m certainly hoping that it’s a suspenseful novel readers will enjoy! It’s the last in my ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ series—which, naturally, includes four books. Each book stands on its own, of course, a case that must be investigated, that brings danger and mystery, a beginning, a middle, and an end!” But working on this has been intriguing for me! I have always been fascinated by ancient texts of any kind, words that can be—and are—interrupted differently by different people through time. And the Four Horsemen . . . We’ve recently lived through a period in which all signs of the ‘horsemen’ might be seen—we’ve encountered war (not sure what decade, century, or millennium we haven’t) pestilence, famine, and disease. I can certainly say that as I was raising my children, I didn’t think to warn them that we might be facing a pandemic in their future, so that one was . . . far from impossible, of course, but for me, at least unexpected. Again, though, we see different things in the words that are left to us by wise men and women of days gone by! But! Here is the point of words, their effect on us—and how they can be twisted and turned and used by others, sometimes for the most nefarious of purposes! The series started with Danger in Numbers, continued with Crimson Summer, then Shadow of Death, and now, The Reaper Follows. Again, each novel stands entirely on it’s on, but it’s been a lot of fun to develop the overall arc with the four books. Just as we may all interpret many things differently, we’re all capable of seeing and believing different things. That’s part of the beauty of what our American forefathers fought and died for—our rights to our own opinions. But what forms those opinions? Many truly terrible things have occurred in history because of the things we set and believe in our minds—often for good reasons. But good things can be twisted, too. I remember once when a very wise man told me that there was nothing wrong with the world’s major religions, what could be terribly wrong was what mankind sometimes chose to do with them. I remember my disbelief and horror when I learned about the massacre at Jonestown. By the time it occurred, of course, there were those beginning to doubt the words of their venerated leaders. And it was too late for them. But knowing how many little children, so innocent, died that day, I was appalled, and I couldn’t begin to understand how such a thing could have happened! The human mind is one of the greatest mysteries that will ever exist, right along with the human heart, which is, perhaps, along with the great part of us that allows us to feel kindness, compassion, and empathy, even for strangers, the soul. Besides Jonestown, of course, we’ve seen many other instances of people believing . . . often, again, in goodness, but then discovering that maybe, all that they’ve been told, isn’t true. Back to our freedoms of thoughts, opinions, and words! My mom came from Ireland at a time when things were rough—Catholics were killing Protestants and vise-versa. I was taught to go everywhere, study everything, find out what worked for me. I was also taught that religious wars were usually based on something else as well—such as property, rule, and of course, our age-old need, money. And, studying history, that does appear to be true. If you’re suffering horribly in abject poverty and someone promises you an after-life filled with plenty for you and those you love, you might well be willing to sacrifice your own life in the pursuit of vengeance against those who have caused the pain and misery. Things aren’t always that radical, of course. But that’s one of my favorite things about one of my protagonists in these novels—Hunter Forest. That wasn’t the name he was given at birth! Hunter’s mom, horrified by her rich father’s refusal to show generosity and kindness to others, fell into a cult. But, luckily for the family, Hunter discovered what was going on when some others who were doubting the words of the elders suddenly disappeared. And then a beloved friend turned up dead. They were helped by a hunter. In a forest. And thus, the name the young hero would take on for the rest of his life. I’ve also made use of places I know and love. Sounds strange, perhaps, but I love the Everglades. That said, I’d never want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere within our great “river of grass.” There are some terrifying things out there, too. But the birds are exquisite, the landscape is unique, and there are places where you can enjoy it all without worrying about alligators, the crocodiles who seem to be moving up along the coast, or the pythons and boas now taking over like wildfire—probably let loose originally by some well-meaning people who realized they couldn’t keep them but didn’t want to kill them. Florida is home these days to the Seminole and Miccosuki tribes of Native Americans. There’s a great museum at Big Cypress with a boardwalk that allows a wonderful look at so very much. The museum offers a great deal of history. Some of this is history that the ‘white’ or European settlers should not be proud of—‘settling’ and seizing what was wanted and killing those who were there already. But I’m a big believer in the words of the philosopher George Santayana—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (There are even different theories on the origin of the quote, but I’m going with Santayana.) So, I love history and always hope we learn from it! And I am fascinated by the strength, fortitude, and survival of our tribes. Those who remained, hiding and fighting from the Everglades, are the only “Undefeated.” They never signed peace treaties. It’s estimated that only three to six-hundred people remained alive, but those were “The Undefeated!” Now, of course, the Seminole Hardrock restaurants and casinos are doing great. They just had a pow-wow at the Broward location, bringing in tribes with cultural events and wonderful shops from indigenous tribes across the country! Neither the Miccosuki nor the Seminole were recognized by the government until the 1950s! And that’s, of course, why I also have a character who is a Native America working in these books! He loved his home, his ancestry—and forensic science and computers. I have loved working on these books, with “The Reaper Follows” now out, and, as I said earlier, a stand-alone as well as the final Four Horsemen book. I hope that if you read Reaper of any or all of the others, you’ll enjoy my take on fictional events that have a whisper of reality within them! Thank you! *** View the full article

Anthony Horowitz is missing. Not the real Anthony Horowitz, of course. He’s exactly where you’d expect him to be—hunkered down at his desk, toiling away at the next novel even as his newest is hitting bookshelves around the world. But more than sixty pages into Close to Death (April 16, 2024; Harper) and the author’s literary alter ego—the Watson to ex-Detective Danielle Hawthorne’s Holmes—has yet to make an appearance. It’s a strange case indeed. “I think all my life I’ve had a fear of formula,” Horowitz—whose prolific output includes the Alex Rider saga for young adults, Magpie Murders, and original works featuring James Bond and Sherlock Holmes—confesses. “I just don’t want to write the same book over and over again. So, in other words, within the narrow confines of a writer’s life, I try to be as varied as possible.” Consequently, the fifth book in the Hawthorne/Horowitz series takes some creative liberties—the risks of which are also the rewards. “Having done four novels in which I had dutifully followed Hawthorne, five paces behind him, making inane remarks and getting myself injured, I decided that it was time to do something a little different,” Horowitz says. The earlier books were all narrated in first-person by the Horowitz character and chronicled contemporary investigations that he and Hawthorne, a brilliant if maddeningly eccentric PI, worked on together. Close to Death, however, utilizes the third-person (omnipresent) POV predominantly and reexamines a cold case that predates the duo’s collaboration. “It allowed me to exercise my writing muscles,” Horowitz offers. It’s a humble assessment for somebody whose credits also include television (Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, Poirot), film (The Gathering, Stormbreaker), plays, and even occasional journalism. The novel’s premise goes something like this: Riverview Close—a peaceful, tight-knit community comprised of six homes occupied by longtime friends—is set on edge with the arrival of hotshot financier Giles Kenworthy and his family, whose disrespectful antics create an atmosphere of hostility and resentment. Then, Kenworthy is dispatched under cover of darkness by an unknown assailant with a crossbow. Nobody is sorry. Everybody is suspect. And there goes the neighborhood … “This is a Close that exists. It’s actually ten minutes away from where I am now,” Horowitz—speaking from his Richmond office in south-west London on the River Thames—notes. “So the characters had to be realistic.” Much like a Golden Age Agatha Christie novel, the book’s opening chapters introduce the ensemble cast (i.e., the suspects) one by one. Each is distinctly defined yet all share the same motive for Kenworthy’s demise. (It’s a bit like Murder on the Orient Express, minus the train.) “The most important challenge of the book was to get those characters right,” Horowitz says, declaring his intent to eschew classic tropes for more multidimensional renderings and modern sensibilities. “This is a 21st Century novel.” Meet the suspects: Master chess player Adam Strauss and his wife, Teri (who is a cousin to Strauss’s first wife); Doctor Tom Beresford and his wife, Gemma (who fashions jewelry in the likeness of poisonous animals); widowed barrister Andrew Pennington; friends May Winslow and Phyllis Moore (who own The Tea Cosy bookshop with café); “dentist to the stars” Roderick Browne and his wife, Felicity (who is mostly homebound due to a neurological disorder). “I suppose what I was looking for was something realistic but at the same time interesting and a little unusual,” Horowitz recalls. “So what I was trying to do was mix the two together, ordinary professionals with extraordinary aspects to make characters who would be fun to follow and to suspect, any one of whom might have committed the murder …” The readers’ suspicions reflect the characters’ own misgivings. Rather than quelling the discontent, Kenworthy’s death further exacerbates the fissures that have been growing within Riverview Close. Because as much as the residents would like to believe an outsider is responsible, the reality is that it was far more likely an inside job. “It’s the ground zero of the murder mystery novel,” Horowitz says, likening the collective implosion to a bomb having been detonated. “It’s the moment when … it becomes impossible for that community to continue to function.” Enter Danielle Hawthorne. Dismissed as a detective after a (thoroughly reprehensible) suspect landed at the bottom of a flight of stairs while in his company, he now works as a private investigator and is reluctantly called upon when the local authorities fail to make an arrest. Hawthorne’s methods may be questionable, but they get results. “He is the man with no name. The man with no history. The man with no connections,” Horowitz says, likening Hawthorne’s appearance to Clint Eastwood’s arrival in a Malpaso action movie. “He is the only person in the story who does not connect to the community and who is the great first disruptor.” In the traditional scenario, said disruptor further upsets the equilibrium only to restore order in the end. Or as Horowitz puts it: “The one whereby the detective is effectively the healer.” That doesn’t happen in Riverview Close, however—as Horowitz discovers when he arrives on the scene to retrace Hawthorne’s steps (at the behest of his agent, who expects another book despite the fact that they haven’t worked a case since the events depicted in 2022’s The Twist of a Knife). “In the case of Riverview Close, it’s impossible … the forces of destruction are just overwhelming,” notes Horowitz. “And that, I think, is what makes this book quite different from the other ones.” While the set-up would seem to relegate Horowitz to a passive participant, this is but another of the story’s admirably deceptive qualities. “In the course of the book I am actually quite active,” Horowitz says of his fictional self. “I am, in fact, doing more on my own than I normally do. Because I’m alone, I get to travel, to meet people, to ask my own questions …” This newfound autonomy empowers Horowitz to take the initiative, even when doing so is against the advisement of Hawthorne and others. An especially impactful moment comes when he meets with Hawthorne’s former partner, who helped to bring clarity to what transpired at Riverview Close, if not closure. “I very much enjoyed writing the character John Delaney because he is everything I want to be,” Horowitz says. “Essentially, he’s professional, he’s smart, he knows Hawthorne really well. He is part of the investigation rather than an outsider.” And while that makes Horowitz—who is prone to self-doubts about his perceived investigative shortcomings—a bit circumspect, their eventual encounter is an amiable one. Affectionate, even, in its way. “I couldn’t wait for that moment to happen in the book,” the author enthuses. “I can’t help liking [Delaney] because I think he is a likeable and slightly sad character, also a character who is inadvertently damaged by me.” This rumination leads Horowitz to a surprising declaration: “I think that Dudley is a much better sidekick than I ever was. Argh!” Readers might disagree. Horowitz, for all his foibles, is quite endearing—and his absence throughout large segments of the book makes his eventual presence, peripheral as it may appear, all the more pivotal. “I would guess I have a bigger role in the other books even though I am less involved,” Horowitz muses. “It’s a paradox, is it not?” This seeming contradiction is entirely fitting of the meta-aspect of the books, which celebrate the anomalous nature of the writer’s life with a wink and a nod. “It’s an opportunity for me to have a quiet laugh at what I do and the way I inhabit my life,” Horowitz acknowledges, noting that the publishing industry is a “peculiar one” populated by rarified individuals. “I mean, there aren’t many people who spend as many hours sitting in one place as I do … There is a world outside that window, which is sort of away from me.” And yet the sacrifice is one he’ll gladly make for the privilege of, and genuine desire to, tell stories that his readers devour for entertainment and escape. “I love writing with every fiber of my being and I love the world I inhabit,” he says. “I’m very, very fortunate and there’s not a day that I wake up and don’t recognize that fact,” Which is why the real Anthony Horowitz always shows up. Just don’t tell him that sounds suspiciously like a formula—albeit one for success. View the full article

By the 1950s, Wheaties had gained massive popularity as the “Breakfast of Champions.” Packaged in a bright orange box with famous sports figures on the cover, the iconic breakfast cereal was marketed to consumers as a healthy way to nourish a fit and active lifestyle. According to a tip to Confidential from one of Frank Sinatra’s lovers, the megastar always ate a bowl of Wheaties before sex, then con-sumed three more between encore performances. That tidbit inspired the magazine’s May 1956 story headlined “Here’s Why Frank Sinatra Is the Tarzan of the Boudoir.” Otash joked that Sinatra’s face should grace every box. Still pissed-off at Confidential for the 1955 “Wrong Door Raid” story, and no doubt annoyed that his latest album, In the Wee Small Hours, failed to hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, the thin-skinned Sinatra threatened to sue. Sinatra wasn’t the only celebrity getting fed up with Confidential for tarnishing their polished personas. Stars were growing litigious and the lawsuits were piling up. Tobacco heiress and socialite Doris Duke sued for $3 million after a story reported she had an affair with a former Black handy-man and chauffeur. In the lawsuit filed by Jerry Giesler, she claimed that Confidential’s implication of “indecent acts” was “completely and entirely false and untrue,” exposed her to “disgrace, contempt and ridicule,” and that the sole purpose for her suit was “to defend her good name against the ugly, unfounded and scurrilous attack” and “to discourage this magazine and others of its ilk from making similar unfounded attacks on innocent people.” In 1957, the case was settled for a substantial sum. In the wake of these and other lawsuits, Harrison began giving way to his original policy of never settling a claim. Otash, who was receiving ample praise from clients for his meticulous investigations, reassured Harrison that the stories he investigated had enough backup to withstand legal chal-lenges. But nobody bats a thousand, not Babe Ruth, not Joe DiMaggio, and not Fred Otash. In July 1957, Confidential outed Liberace as a homosexual. Ever flamboyant with coiffed hair and custom-made suits, tabloid trouble came after he made unwanted moves on a young and straight male press agent while on tour in Akron, Ohio, and again in Dallas. Otash must have been overconfident about the story’s veracity, given that the self-proclaimed piano virtuoso had hit on him in a Hollywood dive bar while working as an under-cover police officer. But Liberace didn’t take it lying down and publicly proclaimed he was heterosexual. Otash scoffed at the career-saving move. What he didn’t bet on was that Liberace had concrete proof that the dates of the accusations didn’t jibe with his touring schedule. He sued the magazine for $20 million. The case was eventually settled for $40,000, which he donated to charity. Maybe Otash was spread too thin. In addition to Confidential, he had taken on a heavy workload to build his business while continuing an active social life. He was also spending as much time as possible with his now six-year-old daughter, Colleen, who looked forward to their weekly outings at Kiddieland. The popular amusement park was frequented by Hollywood elites and Sunday bachelor dads like Fred, who, dressed in tailored suit and tie, somehow managed to squeeze his strapping six-foot-two frame into the small carnival rides with his little girl. What else could explain his sloppy work on the Maureen O’Hara story? Red-haired and radiant, O’Hara was catapulted to Holly-wood stardom in the 1940s after a series of critically acclaimed roles in hit films such as director John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, The Black Swan starring Tyrone Power, and opposite an eight-year-old Natalie Wood in the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. When the magazine uncovered that the Irish-born actress had been more than canoodling with her Mexican lover while seated in the last row of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre during a matinee, she filed a $5 million libel suit. True, she was having a romantic liaison with a Mexico City hotel man who fit the exact description of the man the two Grauman’s ushers spotted with O’Hara. But the day they said it happened didn’t match the day stamped on her passport, proving that she was in London at the time and not in the famous Hollywood movie theater. Simply put, Otash had screwed up. He felt terribly that he left Harrison legally vulnerable and wanted to make it up to him. That chance came in 1957 when he got a call from his own attorney, Arthur Crowley, asking him to help Sinatra beat a perjury charge that had resulted from Confidential’s “Wrong Door Raid” story. *** Crowley explained to Otash that a California Senate committee investigating tabloid magazines had dug into the two-year-old story and subpoenaed the records of Hollywood Research Inc., as well as Marjorie Meade, DiMaggio, and Sinatra to testify. DiMaggio was back in New York and out of reach of a subpoena but gave a written deposition stating that the Confidential story was sensationalized. Sinatra, however, testified under oath that he stood by the car smoking cigarettes as he waited for DiMaggio and the others to talk with Marilyn inside the apartment, an assertion that both detective Phil Irwin and the landlady contradicted during their sworn testimonies. The committee members seemed to believe Irwin was telling the truth because he had been beaten up for selling the story to Confidential. “Right now it is our educated guess that he could be indicted for contempt at least, and for perjury at most . . . he could go to jail,” Crowley told Otash. To make matters worse, the LA district attorney had convened a grand jury to determine if DiMaggio, Sinatra, and the others involved should be indicted for conspiracy to commit criminal mischief. Crowley needed Otash to corroborate Sinatra’s claim that he hadn’t been in the apartment. Otash didn’t know if Sinatra had committed perjury or not but didn’t think he should go to jail over such a trivial matter. If he took the case, Otash would be working for and against Confidential and for and against Sinatra—a dicey proposition. When Crowley implied that Sinatra would not sue the magazine over the Wheaties story, Otash saw an opening to use the conflict of interest to his—and the magazine’s—advantage. He went to Harrison and explained the symbiotic angle that working for Sinatra would give his boss one less lawsuit to worry about, which was just fine with the besieged publisher. Otash went to work. He drew up a diagram of the apartment building so he could study its ins and outs. Then, with a court reporter present, he interrogated the landlady. The break-in happened at night, but she claimed she saw Sinatra “plain as day.” It was meant as a figure of speech, but Otash felt he could turn it to Sinatra’s advantage. After the interview was over, he did a midafternoon search of the area for any outside lighting. There was none. Nor were there any streetlights near the apartment building. When he returned that night and examined all the doorways, he couldn’t see a thing. He still wanted more evidence to bolster his case, so he gathered information from the weather bureau that established there was no moonlight on the night of the raid, making any visual identification impossible. Unless Sinatra was serenading her personally, there was no way the landlady could make a positive ID. To button things up, he visited his old pal and fellow detective Barney Ruditsky, who, due to poor health, had been excused from testifying. Ruditsky told Otash that Irwin lied to the committee about staking out the apartment all night when, in fact, he was driving around with his wife earlier in the evening, trying to patch up his marriage after she caught him repeatedly lying about his infidelities. Otash had enough to prove Irwin was a liar. He didn’t ask or want to know if Sinatra was in the apartment because he had enough to absolve him. He also knew that Ruditsky would fall on the sword for Sinatra out of loyalty to his well-paying client Joe DiMaggio. But he sensed Ruditsky was holding back information. “Something doesn’t add up, Barney,” Otash said. “You had Marilyn under surveillance and knew exactly where Sheila lived.” “So?” Ruditsky replied. “C’mon, you were too good at your job. How the hell could you not identify Sheila’s apartment?” Ruditsky chuckled. “Of course I knew. I broke into the wrong goddamn apartment to save DiMaggio from doing something crazy.” “You did the right thing, Barney,” Otash said. “A lot of good it did me,” Ruditsky said. “I lost my license. Don’t be a schmuck like me, Fred. The last thing you need in this job is a conscience.” Otash laughed knowingly. Although he had privately concluded that Sinatra was indeed in the apartment, Otash cast enough doubt on the landlady’s story and Irwin’s credibility that the committee exonerated Sinatra, who, thanks to Otash’s work, avoided a grand jury indictment. Prior to this, the two men had been friendly acquaintances who always exchanged pleasantries whenever they bumped into each other. Now Sinatra avoided Otash like the plague because he knew he knew the truth. Surprisingly, the committee didn’t indict Irwin despite having evidence that he lied. But they did cite Otash with contempt when he wouldn’t reveal his sources or turn over his Confidential files. Crowley eagerly sprang into action on Otash’s behalf. He accused the committee of violating the state’s professional code of conduct, which prohibits a private detective from divulging information except to law enforcement agencies, reminding them that they were not a law enforcement agency nor entitled to the information. He also scorched them for wanting to divulge that information so they could grandstand about it on national television. After a closed-door session, the committee backed down. ___________________________________ Excerpted from THE FIXER: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn. ©2024 Josh Young and Manfred Westphal, and reprinted by permission from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group. View the full article