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Admin_99

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  1. What could be more destabilizing—or trail more fascinating narrative threads—than a person vanishing without a trace? It’s no mystery why countless authors kick off their books with people gone missing. Marry this trope with speculative fiction, and you’ve got stories whose possibilities are literally limitless. In my new book, The Bad Ones, four people vanish from around a wintry suburb in a single night. The best friend of one of the lost learns that a slumber party game centered around a figure of local lore is key in unlocking the mystery. Here are six more supernatural and horror-inflected stories in which vanishings drive the plot. Knock Knock, Open Wide, by Neil Sharpson Twenty years ago college girl Etain left a party in the middle of the night, driving alone into the wilds of rural Ireland. She was found days later, forever changed by the nightmare she survived. What happened to her colors her entire future and that of her husband and daughters—one who vanished in childhood, the other, Ashling, marked by her toxic relationship with an alcoholic mother who can hardly bear to look at her since her other child vanished. But Ashling knows what no one will ever believe: her sister’s disappearance has everything to do with a local children’s television show and a box on set that must never be opened, containing the wicked entity that took her sister away. This is a family horror story threaded through with cult activity and terrifying Celtic mythology, its mysteries revealed with tantalizing precision. House of Hollow, by Krystal Sutherland Once upon a time three small sisters disappeared beneath their parents’ gaze, seemingly into thin air. When the trio returned a month later, they were dreadfully altered: hair paled, throats scarred, all their lost baby teeth restored. Worst of all is their ability to mesmerize those around them, whether they want to or not. In the decade since, eldest sister Grey Hollow has become an iconic and elusive fashion designer of darkly dreamlike clothes. When she disappears, youngest sister Iris—the one least comfortable with their strangeness—sets out to find her with the help of wild middle sister Vivi and Grey’s model boyfriend. Their haunted journey takes them through a darkly enchanted London and into even stranger places beyond. The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings Giddings creates an insidiously plausible world in which witchcraft is real and highly regulated, used as a lever to control women utterly: requiring all women to submit to marriage to a man or the sponsorship of a male relative by age thirty, in order to be eligible for freedoms as basic as employment. When Josephine was a teen her mother vanished, tainting her daughter by association; fourteen years later, she’s presumed dead. Now twenty-eight, Josephine is feeling increasing pressure to marry when a version of her mother’s will is found that leaves her a large bequest—but in order to claim it, she must visit an island that only appears once every seven years. There, she may find all she has been seeking and more. I was especially gripped by Giddings’ descriptions of the museum where Josephine works, full of dreamlike, vividly imagined art created by witches. The Return, by Rachel Harrison Four women gather for a girls’ trip in a super-hip, highly secluded inn to celebrate the mysterious return of one of their number: Julie, back after two years gone, without any apparent memory of where she has been. Things are a little awkward—they haven’t been together in a long time, their friendship dynamics are uneven. Not to mention the fact that Julie is skinny and stinking and craving raw meat. Fresh meat. Things degrade from there in a disgusting fashion, featuring Harrison’s usual excellent character building and funny, sharp dialogue. This is a friendship story to soothe your ego if you’ve ever lived through a less than perfect reunion. White Horse, by Erika T. Wurth Kari is an urban Native who lives a small life of well-worn pleasures: Stephen King, heavy metal, hanging out with her cousin, Debby—when she’s able to escape her needy and manipulative husband—and regular visits to local bar White Horse. She has long believed her mother left her and her father when she was just a kid. But when touching a bracelet that belonged to her mother makes her experience visions of her young mother in obvious pain, she’s forced to reexamine what she’s been told about her own past. Dogged by persistent visions, Kari sets off on a literal and figurative journey to finally face the demons that dog her. Shark Heart, by Emily Habeck This book doesn’t exactly hit the brief, yet the disappearance on which it centers may be the most haunting on this list: the vanishing in plain sight of newlywed Wren’s beloved husband, whose humanity and physical body are slowly mutating into the rageful simplicity and terrifying form of a great white shark. Habeck’s debut is set in a world that looks like ours, with one mind-bending difference: humans can be stricken with a whole array of transformative animal mutations, changing them into creatures ranging from deep-sea predators to birds. Behind the seeming bombast of the premise—man turns into shark!—is a gorgeous, tender, and heart-wrenching tale, focused less on the fantastical than it is on Wren: a woman who has already watched her mother disappear into the fog of mental illness, and must now discover again who she in the wake of losing the person she loves most. An absolute stunner of a book. *** View the full article
  2. Seems things can be fun in Tijuana, Mexico – TJ to the initiated – but things can also go very, very wrong. Of course a popular destination being right on the US-Mexico border, with two million people, a population seriously swelled by sojourning day trippers and US college students looking for adventure plus a few DEA agents and cross-border migrants waiting for their chance to head north. Home to the infamous Tijuana Cartel of course, nobody will be surprised to know Tijuana is a narcotics smuggling centre. The drug wars were known for their super violent turf battles between 2007 and 2010. Homicides peaked in 2010 – when 844 people were killed. In May 2022, it was reported that Tijuana had the highest homicide rate in the world at 138 per 100,000 inhabitants per annum. A seriously deadly statistic to contemplate. So often in Crime and the City we write about crime fiction set in places that are ordinarily perfectly safe and where you could leave your front door open. Not this time. This edition of Crime and the City comes from a city where the balance swings the other way. Nobody who regularly reads CrimeReads needs to be told that in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1953) Philip Marlowe meets Terry Lennox, a drunk with scars on one side of his face. Then one night Lennox turns up at Marlowe’s place, in trouble and needing a ride to Tijuana. Marlowe agrees as long as Lennox does not tell him any details of why he is running. Of course it gets more complicated. In Laurence Osborne’s Chandler reboot Only to Sleep (2018), a 72-year-old Marlowe opts for retirement down the road from Tijuana in Baja. By chance it happens that author Mark Rogers lives in Baja California, too, from where he writes the Tijuana Noir anthology series. Rogers’s Tijuana is dark, super dark. It’s hard to work out quite what order they come in, just that they come thick and fast (and all seem to be dated 2022!). TJ99 introduces Rafe, a 99er (apparently a colloquial term for unemployed people in the United States) who, with his Mexican-born wife Paloma, ditches economically struggling Southern California behind and make a new life in Tijuana. All is fine and dandy until he gets sucked into the Tijuana underworld of drug cartels and they come from him and his family. In Mockingbird Josh’s Mexican wife Raquel has vanished prompting a journey through Tijuana’s underbelly of sex trafficking, drugs, murder, and corruption. Other books in the series that are particularly revealing of Tijuana include Black Velvet where a struggling young writer ends up in the vicious dogfighting pits of Tijuana and Iron Star where a Haitian immigrant swaps the chaos of Port-au-Prince for the crime-ridden streets of Tijuana. A few other Tijuana-set crime novels… Leigh K Hunt’s Tijuana Nights (2014) sees McKenna Carmichael miss her flight, watching her plane blow up mid-air, and end up stuck in Mexico. Somehow she’s managed to get on the wrong side of the El Diablo Cartel. A novel is a globe trotting series featuring (and I quote the publicist’s blurb here….) McKenna Carmichael – ‘a reclusive historian turned sexpot’! Carl Vonderau’s Saving Myles (2023) features Wade, a respected banker in La Jolla and his estranged wife, Fiona, who have a problem with their son Myles. He’s a drug addict and he’s headed to Tijuana and gotten himself kidnapped. Now Wade and Fiona, with no help from the FBI, must raise the ransom (and perhaps sell their souls) and deal with a Tijuana cartel. Kem Nunn’s Tijuana Straits (2004) involves surfer and ex-convict Fahey offering shelter to a young Mexican woman who barely survived an attack on her life. Turns out she’s a labor activist fighting against exploitative foreign factory owners in the Tijuana maquiladoras on the border. The dark side of NAFTA. Space here for a short plea. Unfortunately the Mexican detective fiction writer Juan Hernandez Luna died tragically young in 2010. He twice won the Dashiell Hammett prize in 1997 and 2007 for the detective novels Tabaco para el Puma (Tobacco for the Puma) and Cadaver de Ciudad (City Corpse). While he has been partially translated his 1998 novel Tijuana Dream remains only available in Spanish. It’s the story of Antonio Zepeda, recently divorced and bored at his job, who takes a trip from Mexico City to Tijuana to unwind. A chance encounter there with a man named Nick starts the beginning of a series of events that will change his life for good. It really should be translated into English. The Tijuana-born poet and novelist Luis Alberto Urrea has described Luis Humberto Crosthwaite as ‘Tijuana’s greatest literary son’. Crosthwaite, along with fellow Tijuana writing legend Bobby Byrd and his son John William Byrd put together the anthology Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots, & Graffiti from La Frontera (2003). Great writing from both sides of the border, plus photographs, corridas, newspaper clips and facts revealing life en la frontera. Mexican contributors include Juan Villoro, Eduardo Antonio Parra, Julian Herbert, Julian Cardona, and David Ojeda. Writers north of the line include Charles Bowden, Luis Urrea, Robert Draper, Cecilia Balli, Gary Nabhan and Doug Peacock. And finally, as we don’t get to mention him nearly enough in this column, a Joseph Wambaugh classic. Wambaugh of course is best known for his LA set policier novels (he is the son of a Pittsburgh cop and served for 14 years with the LAPD). His writing is characterised by great plots, dark humor and crazy anecdotal incidents to emphasize the psychological peril inherent in modern urban police work. And he’s pretty critical of the police high command in the USA. His 1984 non-fiction book Lines and Shadows is a fascinating tale of San Diego cops – the Border Crime Task Force – taking on the Tijuana underworld. As Wambaugh wrote – ‘The bandits were no fools. They lived in Tijuana but operated on the American side where it was safe. Tijuana lawmen can be very unpleasant, as the bandits well knew.’ The story moves about, back and forth, across the border and stands, perhaps, as a testament to America’s long running an seemingly never ending – progressing or advancing – war on drugs along the border. And of course that war defines Tijuana and so much crime writing set in the city. View the full article
  3. I loved Love Lies Bleeding, the otherworldly, lesbian body-horror drifter-thriller from director Rose Glass. As suggested by that long epithet, there is a lot going on in this movie, the volume of which makes the film’s thematic and even narrative succinctness all the more impressive. Kristen Stewart plays Lou (sometimes Lou Lou), the taciturn, hardworking manager of a warehouse gym in a suburban backwater of Albuquerque in 1989. She’s the one who gets things done, who cleans up messes. Her life is hardly glamorous; when we first see her, she’s unclogging a gym toilet with gloved hands, reaching into a murky nebula of shit without complaining or even wincing. Her life changes when a stranger comes to town: Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifter, a young bodybuilder looking for opportunities to work and train as she makes her way to a competition in Vegas. The initial sparks between them are voltaic, and it’s not long before the two kindle a romance. But it’s also not long before that romance is seriously complicated by Lou’s rampantly dysfunctional family, mostly in the form of her abusive wastrel brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco), and her local crime kingpin father Lou Sr. (an excessively creepy Ed Harris, with a hairstyle that I will never forget). Lou only sticks around to try to protect her sister Beth (the can-do character actress Jena Malone) and her little nephews; she hasn’t spoken to her father for many years, probably since around the time her mother left. The film, co-written by Glass and Weronika Tofilska and (fittingly) produced by A24, is as much Jackie’s story as Lou’s, even though we see the inner-workings of Lou’s life of “trying to keep things together” more than we do Jackie’s. Jackie’s clear homelessness and delight at having a home is as evident as Lou’s gratefulness at being able to take care of someone who makes it feel worth it. Jackie, like Lou, is haunted by her past, and also suppresses feelings of fear and anger in order to make it through life. But when things go awry, and both women wind up grappling with their fates in the only ways they know how, the film begins hurtles into a satisfying thriller. The film doesn’t feel merely suspenseful as it does deeply ominous; shots of the enormous, New Mexico sky, the barren desert, and a mysterious, crater-like gorge that glows red in Lou’s memories (not to mention the myriad creepy sound cues that pepper the story; this film should be an early Oscar contender for Best Sound) all set up the feeling that there’s something deeper, darker swirling in the air in this part of the word. Theremin warbles in the soundtrack and mysterious crunching noises under Jackie’s skin promise the supernatural, make the whole thing feel altogether alien, but Love Lies Bleeding is ultimately more interested in finding its paranormal activity in normal matter: human bodies, mostly, and their cavities and fluids and even, uh, capabilities. There’s lots to be captivated by, from the galactic cinematography by Ben Fordesman to a particularly unsettling performance by Anna Baryshnikov, to pulsating editing work from Mark Towns. I found myself spellbound by Stewart’s performance; here, she wields her trademark reservedness to convey fathoms of pain, betrayal, frustration, fear, and desperate, desperate love. She also gets to be a little bit funny, which she’s very good at. (While we’re hashing Oscar speculations, where is Stewart’s Oscar nomination, I ask you?) Love Lies Bleeding is a gutsy (sometimes literally), bloody (oftentimes literally) effort, an impressive mobilization of lots of familiar tropes into something that feels both knowledgeable and new. How many times have we seen (and loved) that roving road shot, where the camera is strapped in between two headlights of a car barreling down the center of an empty highway at night? Additions like this tune the vibes of Love Lies Bleeding to just the right frequency of chilling neo-noir. It’s a film about how you never know what will emerge from the darkness: your greatest nightmare or your greatest love. Or maybe both. View the full article
  4. There ought to be a word for the particular form of melancholy you feel, upon finishing a book you’ve been enjoying so much you never wanted it to end. If there is such a word, in some language or other—I’m looking at you, German—then I experienced the extreme form late last year, as I arrived at the hopeful concluding passages of Silverview, a slim 2021 novel about a seaside bookseller in a small British town who becomes entangled with a former spy in a bad jam. That novel, of course, is by John le Carré, nee David Cornwall, and it was quite good—not le Carré’s best, but le Carré’s best is a very high standard, indeed. What distinguishes Silverview is that it was the last book the master of spy fiction ever wrote (technically, the last one he was writing, because he left it unfinished at his death—although only just barely unfinished, according to a loving postscript by his son, the novelist Nick Harkaway, who completed it posthumously). For me, the end of Silverview meant the completion of a years-long project I set for myself almost a decade ago: to read all of le Carré’s twenty-six novels, chronologically, from the beginning of his career to the end. I am hoping this doesn’t sound like some sort of nerdy literary flex, like the guy who read the whole Oxford English Dictionary, or the people who stay up for a whole weekend reading Moby-Dick. I decided to take on le Carré’s oeuvre out of honest enthusiasm, after reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy quite randomly. I was designing a course in mystery-thriller writing for an MFA program and realized I had no espionage on the syllabus. Twenty pages in, I felt like David Letterman in that marvelous clip after Future Islands plays his show, and he grins and goes, “I’ll take all of that you got!” That’s how I felt when I was done with Tinker, a complexly plotted, impeccably crafted, and morally probing novel of Cold War spycraft: I’ll take all of that you got. What I sensed was that somehow there was much to learn here: much to be excited about as a reader and much to be inspired by as a writer. I started at the top, not wanting to miss anything, and not wanting to allow someone else’s arbitrary rankings to dictate which books I read, in what order. And so I traveled with John le Carré from the beginning, with Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) two delightful if unremarkable mystery-thrillers very much of their time and place. It is only with book number three, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) that we can feel the great man becoming great; it is in In From the Cold that he finds his metier, the grubby heroics of Cold War spies, and the sophisticated nuance and drollery of his voice. By the time we get to The Looking Glass War (1965) one has the sense of a true artist, alive in a world he would make his own, adding notes of comedy and world-weary melancholy to his canvass, expanding outwards from the core. And does he ever, in books six, seven, and eight—Tinker, Tailor (1974), Honorable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1979), the famous trilogy starring the flawed spymaster George Smiley, whose owl-frame glasses and air of heroic melancholy will forever define for me what a protagonist should be: not a hero who is always heroic, but one who tries to be, and never quite can. And of course, le Carré was only get started. Indeed, one of the many interesting things I discovered by reading the entirety of le Carré is that his reputation as the definitional Cold War novelist badly undersells him. It was revelatory to watch him develop certain muscles as he wrote his classic Cold War thrillers—in particular his form of complex moral inquiry, a way of seeing all sides without ever abandoning a commitment to simple right and wrong—and then bring those facilities to bear throughout his long, fruitful post-Cold War period, when he turned his searing attention to to, say, Israel and Palestine (The Little Drummer Girl, 1983) or international arms dealing (The Night Manager, 1993) or the slick wickedness of the pharmaceutical business (The Constant Gardner, 2001). As I approached the end of the list, and the 2000s le Carre gave way to the 2010s le Carre, I was afforded one of the most moving pleasures of my life as a reader—reencountering George Smiley, who we had left behind three decades and a dozen books ago, as he wandered into the pages of A Legacy of Spies (2017), a much older and diminished man, still trying his best to see the world clearly and set it to rights. Much, I like to think, like his author. Having arrived at the end of this project, I do heartily recommend it, and not just as regards my man John; whoever your literary fave happens to be, start at the beginning and read until you’ve arrived at the end. (It helps, of course, if your fave published or publishes relatively sparingly; if you’re obsessed with, say, Trollope, you may need to quit your job). What you’ll gain, first of all, is a deeper enjoyment of each individual book, seeing what themes extend from the previous one, and which will be picked up and explored further down the line. What’s to be gained even more so is a deeper, overarching pleasure, of watching this larger entity come into being, this thing called a career, a corpus, emerging as its own text that you can read and enjoy, alongside of and over-top of the individual novels. I will say that in the months since I finished Silverview, I I’ve experienced some version of mourning. I’m sad not only that the man born David Cornwell is gone, and will not be writing any more of these astonishing books…but also that I’ve read them all, and will never again experience the sublime pleasure of reading a le Carre novel for the first time. Although—and maybe it’s a coincidence, and maybe it’s a sly plot turn worthy of the master—but shortly after I finished I saw the news that Harkaway will be writing new novels in his father’s style, to feature George Smiley. I don’t think that under the terms of my deal with myself I will be obligated to read these…but somehow I suspect that I will. *** View the full article
  5. If you’ve written a few chapters and are struggling to finish your book, I know exactly how you feel. Writing is tough work. You’re constantly stretching your imagination to spark ideas and put words on the page. The whole process is stressful, tiring, and makes you feel as if you’re burning the candle at both ends. Because you are. But there are a few tricks that can make this process a lot more streamlined – and I’m going to share them with you. First, it helps to have an outline. Some authors are totally brilliant and don’t bother with this, but I’m a big believer in outlines. They help speed up my thought process and create a roadmap for exactly where my story is going. In Murder in the Tea Leaves, my newest Tea Shop Mystery, I knew I wanted to begin with a film shoot in a spooky old mansion. But that was just a concept, not an actual plot. So I began mapping everything out on a large sheet of paper, starting with a bombshell murder to propel my story forward, then adding in characters, plot points, a second murder, a darkest before dawn scene (where my protagonist, Theodosia, gets frustrated and basically tears out her hair), then a big, crazy ending. Please know (and trust) that much of your novel will evolve organically if you outline carefully. It’s all about crafting a plot versus flying by the seat of your pants and hoping it all turns out like a ready-made best seller. Now that you’ve got the bones of your book, it’s time to do a bit of research. For every novel I write, I create a concept book. Sometimes it’s a three-ring binder, other times it’s a folder that contains articles, pictures, clippings, and even words that catch my fancy. For example, let’s say your novel deals with crime scene investigation – so you’d find articles on DNA testing, evidence collection, lab work, etc. – anything to help you be spot on. When I wrote my first thriller, Little Girl Gone, which was set in the Twin Cities, I visited all the locales I referenced in the book and took photos. It helped me write more accurate descriptions and create a genuine sense of place for my readers. However, a key point to remember is that most authors adore doing research. But research only gives you the illusion of writing, it isn’t actual bang-it-out writing. You can easily help streamline your workdays by doing most of your research up front. Okay, another tip once you start writing – don’t stop and compulsively edit your manuscript. Try to write straight through until you have a complete chapter. If you don’t have the exact words or description, type in a few x’s and keep going. If you need to look something up, don’t. Simply x it again. Once you finish a chapter, then you can go back and look at it. It’s probably not too bad, right? Sure, it might need a little punching up, but what doesn’t? When I wrote Eggs in Purgatory, my first Cackleberry Club Mystery about a cozy country cafe, I wrote the book straight through in three-month’s time without stopping to make a single change or edit. Only when I was one hundred percent finished, did I go back and make my edits and corrections. Much to my surprise, that book got a huge mention in Publisher’s Weekly and the second book in that series, Eggs Benedict Arnold, went on to hit the New York Times bestseller list. Okay, about your writing days – you must keep them absolutely sacrosanct. That means no going out for lunch, shopping online, checking social media, etc. You’re only allowed to walk your dog once and take fifteen minutes for lunch. (You did say you wanted to write faster, didn’t you?) There’s another tip I can’t emphasize enough – and that’s to read as much as you can. After a while you’ll start picking up techniques that other authors use. You’ll see how John Sandford keeps his writing conversational so it’s easily digestible for readers. And when Stephen King makes a leap in credibility? Well, his writing is just so cajoling and comfortable that he actually makes you believe in vampires and doomsday scenarios. Once you hone your own personal writing style you’ll be able to write faster and smarter. There’s also nothing like first-hand experience to jumpstart a novel and keep it clicking along. Several years ago, my husband scored an invitation to visit friends in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. All at once we had access to float dens, partied with float builders, marched in one of the Mardi Gras parades (in costume, of course!), and attended the black tie Rex Ball. Suddenly, I had inside information about something I’d never even thought about. Did I put this know-how to work? Sure did. In four months-time I was able to write Keepsake Crimes, my first Scrapbooking Mystery set in New Orleans, and then write fifteen more books in that series. I’ve also been able to use my general know-how in pretty much all of my novels. I’ve included art and antiques (thanks to Dr. Bob, my clever art historian husband) in my Tea Shop Mysteries, and have also drawn upon my knowledge of horses, investing, marketing, stamp collecting, dog training, tea, baking, and lots more. I have every confidence that you are also a unique repository of all sorts of skills, talent, and know-how. So put your knowledge in your book and jump your writing days into hyper speed. This is also super important. When I first started writing mysteries, I’d read a novel for fun, then I’d go back, read it a second time, and rip it apart. I figured out exactly why the book’s opening chapter grabbed me and how the first turning point propelled unwilling protagonists to get involved. I also analyzed how the author created a “darkest before dawn” scenario, then went on to engineer a surprise ending. Don’t be afraid to learn (and borrow) writing techniques from the masters. The more you see how others write, the faster you’ll gain confidence and speed. A couple more tips: Be sure you have a clear idea of why you’re writing your book. Are you sure there’s a viable market for your subject matter? Who’s your audience? What writer’s tips and tricks are you going to employ to make readers care deeply about your subject matter? Remember, there’s nothing worse than having to go back and retool your manuscript – it’s a terrible waste of time! And always (always!) be daring! Go ahead and tackle new subjects, introduce oddball characters, or do plot loops. There are wonderful authors who’ve created entire new worlds (Ray Bradbury), mind-blowing situations (Michael Connelly), and amazing plot twists (Gillian Flynn). They made it work and so can you! Love to you and good luck with your writing! * View the full article
  6. When an author begins a new novel, the blank computer screen presents a terrifying challenge and a few inevitable questions rise to the surface: How will zero words become one hundred thousand? How can one possibly create a riveting story out of thin air that will surprise and delight readers—even when writing about spies, murder, mayhem and more. Maybe especially when writing about spies, murder, mayhem, and more. When I started what eventually became The Berlin Letters, I knew two things from the get-go—I wanted to use the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall as not only bookends framing the story, but as a character within it. In the split-time narrative I envisioned, readers would follow Haris Voekler’s life from 1961 to 1989 behind the Wall, while rooting for his daughter Luisa, in Wall’s final days in 1989 as she races to free her father from a Stasi prison. But how to connect these stories into one cohesive and compelling narrative? After all, very little communication passed from East Berlin to West Berlin after that early morning of August 13, 1961. Upon waking that day, Berliners discovered that head of state Walter Ulbricht had coiled barbed wire straight down the center of their city and cut train lines and phone lines. The Soviet Sector, commonly known as East Berlin, was instantly cut off from the English, French, and American sectors, referred to as West Berlin. Even a family could not cross that barrier to be together once more. That’s when I discovered the CIA’s top-secret counterintelligence operation, the Venona Project. I found my connection points and a way to pass information across the Wall within letters, and I found some amazing women… Upon entering World War II in 1941, US military intelligence began intercepting all international messages and communications, regardless of whether the messages originated with friend or foe. While decryption operations centered upon Axis communications, Allied messages stacked up in a corner—specifically Soviet messages stacked up in a corner. Even as early as 1943, Col. Carter Clarke wasn’t sure he trusted the US’s new ally, Joseph Stalin, and he decided to find out what Stalin was really thinking—so he hired Virginia school teacher Gene Grabeel to peek into Stalin’s letters. Thus began the Venona Project. Grabeel was soon joined by a number of other women: Josephine Miller, Carrie Berry, Mary Boeke, Helen Bradley, Gloria Forbes, Doris Johnson, Ruby Roland, Juanita McCutheon, Rosa Brown, and Angelia Nanni are among the few who made up the team in Venona’s early days. Each woman was dedicated, bright, and extraordinary at math. That last detail was vital, as breaking Soviet codes took a lot of complex math. Considered “unbreakable,” Soviet codes were based upon a multi-layered security system. To begin with, the Soviets employed a “one-time pad” system. This meant that each code was calibrated only one time using a unique series of numbers recorded on a page that only the sender and the recipient possessed. And, throughout Venona’s work, no key pages were obtained nor codebooks captured. The women started with math and soon discovered that, beyond the “one-time pad,” each final code went through several steps of non-carrying addition to formulate and an equal number of steps of non-carrying subtraction to decipher. Only then could the original words be discovered. The process was tedious and tremendously slow, and, without any duplicates, it also meant that the Venona codebreakers couldn’t achieve any “depth”—they couldn’t compare one message to another, find links, and use those links to make calculated assumptions. Then they got a huge break. In the later days of the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin moved much of his industry from Moscow deeper into Siberia to protect it from capture. In the mayhem, duplicate pads were accidentally created. Yet in the rush of war, with manufacturing slow and demand high, the Soviets gambled that spreading those few sets of duplicates across lanes of communication traffic would protect their code. It did not. One day a member of the Venona team recognized a numerical code within the “diplomatic” lane and remembered she’d seen the same five numbers with the “commerce” lane days before. Using this “depth of two”, the race was on. Grabeel and her team started cracking the Soviet codes with greater speed and, over the project’s active thirty-seven year run, broke thousands of them. In doing so, they discovered such famous spies as Kim Philby and Don Mclean, which helped bring down the whole Cambridge Five spy-ring, uncovered Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project, revealed the duplicity of German-born scientist-turned-spy Klaus Fuch, along with betrayals of Alger Hiss, Alan May, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, among others. But no one could know. In order to be effective, Venona needed to remain secret—even the sitting presidents over those thirty-seven years did not know of Venona’s existence. That meant none of their discoveries could be used in court, as that would compromise the secrecy surrounding the Project. Thus began Venona’s close working relationship with the FBI. The Venona women would find a name, the FBI would follow the lead and discover new information and pass it back to the Venona team, which would then use the leads to delve into the same communiques again. Armed with the new information—possibly dates, code names, and locations—the team uncovered even more material within messages already canvassed, creating a fuller picture for the FBI and subsequent prosecutions. The Venona team returned to the same communiqués again and again, continually uncovering new and valuable intelligence across those thirty seven years. In 1978, the NSA determined nothing more of vital interest could be gleaned from their stash of old World War II messages. The Venona team was given two years to wind down its work and pack up its materials. Even then, no one talked. It wasn’t until 1995 that the Venona material was declassified and many of their successes became known. At the time, the name primarily associated with the Project was Meredith Gardner, Venona’s male linguist. The original female team of Grabeel, Miller, Berry, Boeke, Bradley, Forbes, Johnson, Roland, McCutheon, Brown Nanni and more, were rarely mentioned if at all. But, rather than consider themselves heroes and talk about their work, these extraordinary women kept their secrets. Many of their personal stories and extraordinary lives only became known as reporters and writers sought them out during their final days. Even then most were reluctant to talk. The story of the Venona Project and the fascinating women behind it astounded me. From small towns and unassuming backgrounds, heroes were born of ingenuity, hard work, and a lot of math—there was always the math. But I disagreed with the 1978 NSA decision to disband the project—I imagined that, just like Carter back in 1943, there was still value in digging deeper into Stalin’s mail—still truths to unearth, still spies to discover. So, within The Berlin Letters, I created Venona II and placed them in a top-secret office in Arlington, VA — maybe even blocks from the original team’s secret offices. There readers will discover intelligent and creative women continuing to glean new information from those same codes dating back to WWII and the early days of the Cold War. That is until one of them, Luisa Voekler, discovers a cache of communiquès that tie right back to her own family and the adventure begins… *** View the full article
  7. I am a sucker for a murder ballad, so much so that I wrote an entire novel (The Last Verse) around my love of the form. I can remember the first time I heard Reba McEntire sing “the night the lights went out in Georgia” my skin broke out in goosebumps at the end of every verse. It was the lyrics that got me, the way she brought each revelation down like a sledgehammer, and brilliant way the storytelling is reflected in the music. The original true crime podcast, the murder ballad is an oral tradition that goes back centuries and tells of a gruesome killing and its consequences. The crime is sometimes explicit, other times only hinted at, and the story unfolds with dense, vivid detail. The narrator might be a concerned onlooker, or an omniscient narrator, but often the story is told from the perspective of the killer or even the victim. The intimacy of peering into the mind of a killer—be they cold-blooded or sympathetic—is one appeal. But it’s the blend of a scandalous story, a haunting melody, and deft lyricism that makes the form irresistible, and, in my humble opinion, superior. And the true test of a great one: if the last verse makes your hair stands on end. If you are new to the form or a fan like myself, scroll down for a list of some of my favorite murder ballads and why I love them: “Red-Headed Stranger” by Willie Nelson (written by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz) A great songwriter is a composer, a poet, and a novelist in one, and this ballad is a showcase of the craft. Each line layers on meaning that drives the plot forward and enriches the impact of the verse to follow. A man on horseback leads a bay pony into town. He’s in mourning, his “little lost love lay asleep on the hillside,” and we’re told in the chorus to stay out of his way. There’s tension, because we know someone is not going to heed the warning. When a yellow-haired woman tries to seduce him then steal his horse, the one adored by his wife, he shoots her dead. Murder ballads often have a moral thread, and this one is delivered neatly at the end: The yellow-haired lady was buried at sunset, The stranger went free, of course. For you can’t hang a man for killing a woman Who’s trying to steal your horse. Willie’s scuffed leather voice is perfect for this tune. He’s so full of seen-it-all wisdom and compassion, you can almost see him sitting on the porch, watching the whole drama go down. “The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia” by Reba McEntire (Written by Bobby Russell) It’s a classic southern gothic revenge story, with a didn’t-see-it-comin’ twist at the end. Originally sung by Vicki Lawrence, the song found new fame when Reba recorded it in 1991. As a child of this era, I am Reba all the way. “The Long Black Veil” by Johnny Cash (written by Marijohn Wilken and Danny Dill) Johnny Cash’s crumbly baritone was made for murder ballads. This one is about the haunting of a man who killed his lover. The first line has us by the throat as we learn who is telling the story: Ten years ago on a cold dark night Someone was killed ‘neath the town hall light. There were few at the scene but they all agree That the killer who ran looked a lot like me. His guilt, embodied by the veiled woman, follows him to gallows, and then the grave. I love the 2009 Live in Ireland version. “Kill Bill” by SZA (written by Solana Rowe, Rob Bisel, Carter Lang) This is a fresh take on the tradition with many hallmarks of the classic. A mentally unstable woman obsesses about and ultimately follows through with killing her ex and his new woman. The final line I’d rather be in hell than alone chills to the core. “The Thunder Rolls” by Garth Brooks (written by Garth Brooks and Pat Alger) Another gem from the golden era of country music, this feels in every way like a traditional ballad except for a small detail—no dead body. But the last verse here suggests the gathering rage in the wronged woman’s heart may yet lead to one: But on the wind and rain a strange new perfume blows, And the lightning flashes in her eyes, and he knows that she knows. “Kate McCannon” by Colter Wall (written by Colter Wall) Colter Wall is a new artist with a vintage Outlaw country voice—and this song feels as old as the hills. The title harkens to traditional Irish murder ballads, and he doesn’t stray outside the rough outlines of the form. It’s a jealousy murder told from the killer’s point of view with the moral entity taking the form of a mocking raven. Though Wall does not attempt to advance or play with conventions, Kate McCannon is a gorgeous vehicle for his voice and moody performance. “Goodbye Earl” by the Dixie Chicks (written by Dennis Linde) If you were alive at any point during the year 2000, you heard this song about a million times. “Good bye Earl” is a triumphant payback song, a cheeky girl-power anthem that somehow makes light of a deadly situation without minimizing it. Best friends team up to poison abusive Earl’s black-eyed peas, dump his corpse, then leave town and open up a produce stand. Unlike the narrator of “Long Black Veil,” the killers of this song are not haunted by their crimes—they are liberated. “Frankie” by Mississippi John Hurt (written by John S. Hurt) An early payback song, this beauty pares it down to a deft fingerpicking and Hurt’s blues-weathered voice. The song of a woman whose justification for killing her cheating man is simple: she bought him a hundred-dollar suit and he done her wrong. “Daddy Lessons” by Beyonce (written by Wynter Gordon, Kevin Cossom, Beyoncé, Alex Delicata) Again, no dead body here, but this knockout country/R&B single from 2016’s Lemonade is a loaded gun and the safety is off. This ballad about a flawed father and his daughter’s complicated love for him is Outlaw country in form and function—but better. When trouble comes to town, and men like me come around, oh my daddy said shoot, oh my daddy said shoot. I could write pages about this song. It’s Country, it’s Black, it’s Beyonce, it’s brilliant. And it passes the chills test every time. *** View the full article
  8. As D-Day approached, German soldiers, sailors, and airmen who liked to smoke self-rolled cigarettes would have felt themselves most fortunate to pick up a free pack of Efka cigarette papers, with their familiar drawings of palm trees and pyramids, that someone had left behind on a café table or on the seat on a train, or to discover a pack they had completely forgotten about buried deep in the pockets of their greatcoats. But when they opened them, instead of the expected fifty cigarette papers, they found ten tightly folded sheets of thin paper. On opening these sheets, the members of the Wehrmacht found excerpts from a manual titled Krankheit rettet (Illness Saves), authored by a certain “Dr. Wohltat” (Dr. Do Good). Flicking through them, they would glimpse an introductory letter from the good doctor, followed by instructions and delicate drawings of various plants— just printing these intricate drawings on such thin and tightly folded paper was already a feat in itself. Someone had clearly taken great care in the production of whatever Krankheit rettet was. And what did this paradoxical title mean? How can illness save? The man behind Dr. Do Good was Professor John T. MacCurdy of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. MacCurdy dressed in a long black coat with a lion’s-head clasp, which he rarely took off. Delmer called him “MB’s very own Witch Doctor. A wise one-eyed Canadian.” He would visit Delmer and his team weekly at Woburn, guiding one of the PWE’s most sustained projects to undermine Goebbels’s propaganda of glorious death and to encourage German soldiers to abandon their missions. A psychiatrist who had been an early, if skeptical, part of the psychoanalytical movement, MacCurdy taught courses like “Dreams and the Unconscious” and “Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis” at Cambridge. Since World War I he had researched the mental states of soldiers. He advanced the view that there were two principal wishes involved in what he labeled “war neuroses”: “the wish for death and the wish for a wound. . . . Those who suffer from anxiety states have wished for death during the period of strain and fatigue preceding the final collapse . . . or for some disabling illness.” Some soldiers yearned for death to relieve the stress of war in an honorable way or to rid themselves of the burden of responsibility of commanding fellow soldiers; others wished to save themselves with an injury that would get them sent home from the front. At Woburn, the challenge for MacCurdy was to stimulate the desire to abscond from the fighting and downplay the desire to sacrifice yourself for a greater cause. But that meant working out what could make death attractive in the first place. Ideas about the attraction of death were being debated among psychoanalysts at the time. “There is an age-old conviction,” explains Josh Cohen, “important to religious, national, and other affiliations that to believe in an entity means readiness to die for it, as though it only becomes real at the moment you’re ready to sacrifice yourself to it. It endows death with meaning, and to the true believer, it gives assurance you’ll be remembered. It is a death you choose, that endows the choice with agency. Freud suggested more than once that you could love being in an army or a religion with the same force and energy as loving another individual.” In Delmer’s memoirs, curiously, he associates such feelings with Ukrainians: indeed it is only when he sees Ukrainians ready to die for their nation that he starts to realize that Ukraine is a “real” country. In 1939 he was reporting from western Ukraine as it was seized by Nazi- backed Hungarians when he saw a group of Ukrainian partisans who had been captured: “A gang of prisoners were marched down the main street carrying a heavy log on their shoulders. For the first time I really believed there was such a thing as the Ukraine. Seconds later I saw them shot, all six of them, one after the other. They went down in a shrieking, sobbing, kicking tangle, still chained to the log.” In the 1930s, as in the 2020s, Ukrainians were seen as emblematic of people dying so that their cause might live. “But there’s another way psychoanalysts at the time looked at death in war,” says Cohen. “Not death for a greater cause, but death for the sake of death, and murder for the sake of murder.” After having witnessed the self- destructive horrors of World War I, Freud concluded that “thanatos,” the death drive, was as powerful as the “love drive” of “eros.” In Beyond the Pleasure Principle he related Thanatos to a desire to dissolve oneself back into a state before all the responsibility and burden of being oneself: “An urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon . . . the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life.” “But as this drive was self-destructive,” Cohen explained, “Freud believed it bumped up against a desire to live and was then turned outward into aggression: we kill others so as not to kill ourselves. It bred a condition where passivity was interspersed with spurts of aggression.” MacCurdy had been early in spotting how the focus on death for the sake of death was becoming an ever greater part of Nazi propaganda. In an analysis of a Hitler speech from April 1942, MacCurdy observed that Hitler had lost the belief that he could enter a state of “shamanic” ecstasy and transmit “truth.” Instead of leading the nation on a journey to glory, Hitler now dwelt on his death as a sacrifice in the struggle against the ultimate evil: Jewry. “The notion of a great military victory had passed into the background while he poses more as a martyr, the speech ending on the theme of his death.” Hitler was embracing “the dying god myth.” In the debates MacCurdy was steeped in, death propaganda offered two attractions: the “positive” seduction of dying for a greater cause; and the darker desire to surrender your will to live and just dissolve into nothingness. Any plan to undermine the allure of the Nazis’ appeal to sacrifice had, first of all, to position itself as part of a positive collective mission, had to be somehow a part of your duty to your fellow Germans; second, it had to restore your sense of being able to act and overcome the desire to just sink into passive acceptance of your demise. A PWE strategy document put the challenge bluntly: “A lust for self immolation is not infrequent among Germans. While it may lead to a willingness to fight on to a Nibelungen end it should not be impossible to divert this urge to an acceptance of surrender as a great self-sacrificing and honourable act of patriotism.” This was the trick Illness Saves tried to put into practice. In the manual German soldiers pulled out of the EFKA packets, Dr. Wohltat explained the dangers of “war strain” that came with years of service, how fatigue built up quietly over the years and was so subtle that doctors could miss it, but it could cause a breakdown at any moment. The doctors’ lack of knowledge about “war strain” was clearly a disaster in waiting for the safety of a military unit during an operation. Indeed, this oversight in medical science meant it was the soldiers’ patriotic duty to fake illness and get sent home or to a hospital from the front. MacCurdy insisted that “the malingerer must give the physician the impression that here is a patriotic citizen, dedicated to his duty, who has the misfortune to be ill despite himself.” And he must never try to name or define his disease, for that was up to the doctor to do: “One single symptom which the doctor has discovered by his own questions, is worth ten the patient has volunteered.” The rest of the manual was filled with examples of how to give yourself serious symptoms— without causing lasting damage. For a throat infection, for example, apply silver nitrate on the tonsils and swallow a small amount of gunpowder. Faking TB was harder but effective because there was so much of it about a doctor could easily be convinced you had it. If you were working at a munitions factory, obtain a few drops of dinitrophenol, which is used in the manufacture of explosives. A tiny amount taken every day will cause high temperature and fever. Then tell the doctor you also have blood in your mucus. He will test it for bacilli. To create counterfeit TB bacilli, avoid washing a few days and allow some “cheese” to form beneath your foreskin. Then mix this “cheese” with your mucus and a little blood you draw from out of your finger— and swallow the mixture. For violent diarrhea, munch on the dried seeds from the corn cockle flower, which grows wild in cornfields. To make sure you could find this and other useful plants, there was a whole appendix of beautifully drawn flora that caused various rashes, lesions, burns, and blisters on the skin. Isabel Delmer drew all the illustrations: “I had to make drawings so accurate there could be no mistake about the plant.” Dr. Do Good was always spurring you toward action, toward being a sort of theatrical actor on the stage of deception, nudging you away from passively accepting death. For the manual to be credible, it had to actually work. And that meant someone at Woburn had to test all the formulas. For such tasks, Delmer inevitably turned to one man: “Halkett will see to it” had become a commonplace order. “I tried out everything in that book—it was sometimes painful,” Halkett would recall. He didn’t detail whether he tried the formula for faking TB but was certainly upset that Delmer’s memoirs didn’t credit him properly for his work. For Delmer, these “malingering manuals” had a double purpose: to help soldiers get out from the front lines but also to force German military medics to trust their patients less as they learned about the existence of the manuals. This distrust, in turn, meant that real patients would suffer, and this could increase the enmity between medics and soldiers. Almost everything that Delmer did had a double, often triple, purpose. The malingering manual would be so successful that the Germans made a copy, translated it— and then directed it across British lines. The concept had, Delmer admitted, boomeranged. ___________________________________ Excerpted from HOW TO WIN AN INFORMATION WAR: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler. Copyright © 2024. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. View the full article
  9. When you think of Gothic fiction, the image of a woman in a diaphanous nightgown, running from a sinister house might come to mind. A classic feature of paperback novels from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, these iconic covers convey several things at a glance: fear, sensuality, mystery. Words that, in a nutshell, help define Gothic fiction. Often denigrated as campy pulp fiction, these books and their covers, in my opinion, also serve to highlight the heroine’s agency against overwhelming odds. After all, she is willfully running from the haunted house—a powerful metaphor for patriarchal oppression in the genre. It’s no coincidence that Gothic horror enjoyed a renaissance during the early women’s rights movement, when women were feeling increasingly constrained by their domestic roles—something I explore at length in my upcoming novel, The Devil and Mrs. Davenport. But even with as far as we’ve come, we have a long way to go. With a nod to the traditions of the past, today’s Gothic fiction authors effectively employ the constructs of horror as feminist commentary. The books in this article—seven of them by contemporary authors, one by a classic icon of the genre—all serve to illustrate the dangers of misogyny while centering the power and resilience of all women. The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers When 1960s actress Gemma Turner mysteriously vanishes into the movie she’s filming, she must use her wits to survive the twisted world created by an obsessive auteur on the brink of madness. The dreamlike atmosphere Sayers conjures is reminiscent of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête but make no mistake—this is still Gothic horror, and Gemma’s repeated attempts to escape the surrealistic cursed film she’s imprisoned in convey a palpable sense of claustrophobic oppression. A captivating time-slip love story and a powerful celebration of feminine agency. The Village Healer’s Book of Cures by Jennifer Sherman Roberts In seventeenth-century England, Mary Fawcett refines the healing recipes she’s inherited from generations of women before her to better serve her community…until real-life witchfinder Matthew Hopkins arrives in her small village and the benevolent Mary finds herself under suspicion of witchcraft. In order to save her life and protect those she loves, Mary must use her talents to outsmart the devil himself. A compelling tale of retribution, revenge, and true justice. The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas Following the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz weds the dashing but distant Don Rodolfo to secure her future and build a new life for her family at his estate in the countryside. But the Hacienda San Isidro is hardly the sanctuary Beatriz imagined. As forces both supernatural and corporeal conspire against her, the once fiercely independent Beatriz faces certain doom unless she can break the sinister curse that binds her to the hacienda. With brilliantly layered subtext centering the evils of colonialism, Cañas’s groundbreaking debut is both timely and timelessly Gothic. The Last Heir to Blackwood Library by Hester Fox In post-World War I England, young Ivy Radcliffe unexpectedly inherits an estate on the Yorkshire moors, including a magnificent library containing strange, esoteric texts. But something isn’t right at Blackwood Abbey, and as events grow more sinister, it’s up to Ivy to uncover the library’s mysteries before it’s too late. A tale of the powerless reclaiming their power in the face of patriarchal and historical constraints, this is Hester Fox at her finest. The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson In the land of Bethel, the Prophet’s word is law, leaving women and girls under a heavy mantle of subjugation. Immanuelle Moore, the biracial daughter of a woman rumored to have consorted with witches, must follow Holy Protocol, and lead a life of submission and absolute conformity, like all the other women in the settlement. But when the spirits of four powerful witches bestow a gift on Immanuelle—her mother’s secret diary filled with arcane knowledge and the truth behind Bethel’s founding—she realizes her true calling. If Bethel is to change, it must begin with her. This novel is a visceral treatise on the dangers of unbridled religious control, racism, and misogyny with a strong, unforgettable heroine. A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland When village midwife Jean discovers a laboring mother outside her cabin one dark and stormy night, she falls into a web of dark secrets centering on her neighbor and his mysterious new wife in this sapphic retelling of The Selkie Wife folktale. While charming Muirin claims to be happy with her husband, Jean can’t overlook the fear in her new friend’s eyes. Her growing concern—and growing feelings—for Muirin means she can’t set her worries aside. But when the answers she’s seeking are more harrowing than she ever could have imagined, Jean finds herself in peril as she strives to save the woman she loves. The Madness by Dawn Kurtagich In this upcoming Dracula retelling set on the modern, windswept coast of Wales, Mina Murray at last gains the voice and agency she deserved in the original story. With her friend Lucy’s life on the line, Mina finds herself asking questions and being drawn ever deeper into a web of secrets, missing girls, and the powerful, nameless force that has been haunting her for years. As terrible, ancient truths begin to reveal themselves, Mina must confront her own darkest secrets, and with them, an evil beyond comprehension. The mental health representation in this novel is second to none—and the unity of women working together to defeat a truly monstrous enemy is inspiring. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier While this novel may seem an unlikely pairing with the others on this list, it’s my favorite by Du Maurier because it shines a subversive yet unflinching light on the dangers of misogyny. The unfortunate Rachel suffers under the weight of patriarchal objectification and the suspicion of every male character within the novel, but none more so than the callow narrator, Philip, who is besotted with the mysterious Rachel until she fails to meet his narcissistic expectations. When Rachel refuses to marry him, he dispenses with her, quite literally, in favor of his loyal childhood friend, Louise, who he once scathingly disdained as provincial. Du Maurier was writing about incel culture, the male gaze, slut-shaming, and toxic nice guys way before the terms ever existed. While Rebecca is an undeniable masterpiece, Rachel has as much social relevance today as it did when Du Maurier penned it. *** View the full article
  10. I once attended a writing seminar that claimed the landscape of your childhood home informs the way you move, think, and talk. A rocky, mountainous place might shorten your sentences into a rhythm that makes room for quick bursts of speed; a hot and humid landscape might lead you to consider your thoughts slowly, without straining yourself. Embarrassingly, I have forgotten exactly who led this discussion (if you’ve attended something similar, please tell me!), but the idea has never left me—that, in the same way some people wind up looking exactly like their dogs, the place where you live can infect you to a deeper degree than you might have realized. It’s by turns a comforting notion, and a disturbing one. What might you be carrying with you, subconsciously influencing your choices? And what if your relationship to those childhood landscapes isn’t altogether positive? I think of my grandmother, who, when asked about this concept at a dinner not long after, visibly recoiled from the question. Her early memories of Mississippi river flats and anything that land might have imprinted on her were not welcome at our table. She spent much of her life traveling, finally landing in New York, and only conceded to move as far south as Virginia because my brothers and I were children there. My own work is deeply influenced by places I’ve lived and the way I felt being there, from the rolling fields and deciduous forests of the Blue Ridge foothills where I grew up and where my first book, What Grows in the Dark, is set, to the secretive wetlands and snow-capped peaks of the Pacific Northwest where I live currently. In the case of Virginia, I haven’t lived there in fifteen years but I could still tell you exactly what a hay barn smells like on a muggy summer day, or how it feels to walk barefoot on a gravel driveway; I could describe the silvery pain of getting a paint chip under your thumbnail while you sit on the roof of a run-down house while crickets chirp and fireflies dance. Or I could tell you how thick the woods feel at night, how those trees mat together, even in winter when they’re skinned and powerless. And I could certainly talk about how it felt to wonder how people were looking at me in high school, what they thought after I shaved my head that time in the park—not whether they thought I was losing it, but whether I was safe. For that first book, I drew on all of the above. Any precision of place I achieved came first from what had already worked its way under my skin. Think now of the snow crunching beneath Jade Daniels’ boots in Proofrock, Idaho, the setting of Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake trilogy, a beautiful, isolated petri dish turned pressure cooker for violence that hides in plain sight—and for bold swings against all flavors of evil. Or the parched, sun-baked expanse of Texas across which Julia Heaberlin’s thrillers unfurl, her characters lonesome and defensive, generally running to nowhere and eventually realizing just that. Here, “setting as character” takes on additional meaning: not only are these places specific and unique, able to transmit emotions and ideas to the reader as clearly as the best dialogue exchange, but they also infiltrate the people we’re reading about. When bad things happen and those people react with panic or confusion or in their own burst of violence, it’s not only the character work that makes us believe them, it’s the sense of place that sneaks past our defenses and tells us, “You can imagine what it’s like to be there, so come on. What would you do?” That kind of empathy is the bread and butter of horror authors. You can’t scare someone until you’ve made them think, “What if it was me?” This is not to argue that this is a new and exciting idea, or that only dark fiction authors benefit from immersive settings, but I am a horror author writing this, so here we are. Writing a setting that crawls from under your skin to under the reader’s requires the same dedication to specificity and nuance as good character work. It’s not just about visual description, but the smells, the way the air feels against skin—and of course, it’s about what fills that space that isn’t so tactile. What are the class dynamics that inform which part of town your basement monster lurks beneath? Who paid for the fancy alpine lodge someone’s about to get murdered in, and who was forced out to make room for it? What kind of laws were recently passed to protect (or remove protections from) whom? You don’t need to be from somewhere to consider these aspects, and if you’ve never visited your setting, I definitely recommend going hard on the research: find videos, read blogs, talk to people. Once you’ve answered those questions, imagine a few individuals: not your main characters just yet, but the tertiary people who make up their backdrop. Their grandfather who still lives in the same house he was born in; their high school classmate who’s famous in small circles for bucking the social norms. What about the barista they briefly encounter, or the guy who never pays his bar tab? How does living in this exact place change and define them? What fears does it engender in them, and what do they love about it? Of course not all of this will make it onto the page—but it’s the smallest, most precise details that will shift your setting from inert to alive. As a reader, I find atmosphere far more effective if I can imagine a place’s beauty along with its terrifying potential; this goes for secondary worlds and science fiction settings that are inherently unfamiliar as well. As a writer, I love to use that juxtaposition to explore the uncanny: make the reader feel like they know a place, and twist it just enough to steal their balance. Crucial to that twist are, finally, the main characters of your story. Just like those tertiary people who help make up the fabric of your setting, your main characters were either shaped early-on by this place, came to it later in life and brought their own experiences to it which were then infiltrated and morphed, or are experiencing it for the first time and are ready to be a window for the reader—both into first impressions, and into how staying in any given space for too long opens you up to its influence. These three broad buckets leave you with plenty of room to play around and bring your characters’ personalities and traumas into the mix, and allow place to inform how their mental state evolves over the course of the book. This can lead to a deeper, more immersive experience for the reader, which in turn gives you as the author an easier in when it comes to scaring the pants off them. After all, people come and go, but places last. So do whatever horrors they house—which, if you’ve done your job as an author, now live inside your reader as well. *** View the full article
  11. I’ve always liked my women a little bad. Give me the imperfect, the wrathful, the vindictive. In my opinion, those are the women who have the most fun. In my debut, Women of Good Fortune, three women decide to dismiss societal expectations and make their own fortunes. Reluctant bride Lulu cannot imagine herself marrying her bland, rich fiancé, and so she devises a heist with her best friends, luxury-chasing Jane and career-oriented Rina. If they can steal away the red envelopes that their well-to-do guests gift at Lulu’s wedding, then each of these women will get closer to the life she so desperately desires. As they get closer and closer to the wedding day, though, unforeseen obstacles appear, forcing the women to question their friendship and what they truly want. I’ve included some of my favorite books with women behaving badly. Be careful of these ladies—they have charming smiles, but they bite. Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Koller Croft Bea has seduction down to an art form, rigorously trained into her psyche by her equally crafty mother. But she’s ready to retire, and what better way than to marry an established blue-blood and have all his assets within her disposal? Told in Bea’s sarcastic, cutting voice, the story is full of twists and turns, along with an arresting cat-and-mouse game that Bea plays with her target’s lovelorn best friend. I was rooting for our intrepid conwoman to succeed the whole way. The Housekeepers by Alex Hay London, 1905. Mrs. King gets unceremoniously let go from her position as housekeeper of one of the grandest homes in Mayfair. After the wrongs that have been committed towards her, she pulls together a crew of skilled women to ransack her former place of employment during a grand costume ball. It’s always refreshing to watch the wronged take back power for themselves, especially during a period when social hierarchy was defined so rigidly. I can never resist a good heist, and this one was no exception. Yellowface by R. F. Kuang It doesn’t get worse than stealing the unpublished manuscript of the woman who was supposedly your friend, all while appropriating an identity that was never yours. Yellowface is an unsettling portrayal of the publishing world and the lengths one woman is willing to go for recognition and fame, helped along by the arbitrary opinions of a judgmental public. June Hayward’s transformation into Juniper Song is chilling, more so because it hits a bit too close to home. Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen We’re all looking for side hustles these days to diversify our revenue streams. Counterfeit introduces one that you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of: scamming greedy consumers with luxury replicas. The book switches between the perspectives of straight-laced Ava and her calculating college roommate Winnie. The two of them band together to execute on this bold con, but there’s plenty of mistrust and suspicion. Beyond its many insights into the luxury goods trade, the book also explores the model minority myth, our modern-day obsession with consumerism, and Western exceptionalism. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto There’s nothing like a dead body to ruin a wedding. So begin the trials and tribulations of our protagonist Meddy, who must team up with her nosy and distractible aunts to make it through a billionaire’s island wedding without letting anyone discover that there’s also a corpse onsite. The aunties steal the show—they’re equally as likely to shove a body in a trash bag as they are to peel you a mango. Layer on top an ex who happens to be the hotel manager and a bunch of unwieldy drunk groomsmen, and you’ve got unrelenting, hilarious chaos. Pick this up for a nonstop joyride. Every Last Secret by A. R. Torre Beautiful, stately Cat welcomes a new neighbor next door: ambitious, cunning Neena. Cat has everything, and Neena wants what Cat has. The stakes heighten as their lives becoming increasingly intertwined, and Neena meets Cat toe-to-toe in her efforts to lie, backstab, and assert her dominance. Unlikable as these women are, you have to respect their efforts. This is an exceedingly well-crafted tale of toxic friendship and a warning: you don’t know what these women are capable of. The Whispers by Audrey Audrain The Whispers starts with a child’s fall out of his bedroom window and brings us back in time to the events leading up to this fatal moment. At the center of this book are four women who live in the same neighborhood, but who lead very different lives. Over the course of the story, we learn about their struggles with self-doubt, perfectionism, and motherhood. There are plenty of secrets and betrayal, but the reason this story lingers is its raw, unapologetic look into womanhood. *** View the full article
  12. If your last name was Farto, would you want people nicknaming you Bum? Evidently Joseph “Bum” Farto didn’t mind it a bit, and that alone probably hints at his being a person of interest. Born in 1919 across the street from the Key West Fire Department, Bum Farto hired on as a fireman in the 1940s and worked his way through the ranks until becoming the fire chief in 1964. Fate handed him that job thanks to a long tenure and an FBI investigation into corruption in both the island’s fire and police departments, the result of which entailed the resignation of then Fire Chief Charles Cremata and Police Chief George Gomez. Combined with a new police chief, Farto gave rise to hopes by the island’s residents that he would clean things up and restore order in the all-important fire department—most of Key West’s structures were made of wood. But that was a tall order. The already shaky reputation of Key West—referred to by some as Key Weird—as a bawdy, open town began in the late 1800s when the main business activity centered on salvaging wrecks. Suspicions ran high as to whether the wrecking crews in shallow-draft boats purposely misdirected large ships laden with goods onto jagged reefs. Many other wooden keels fell victim to faulty charts that misplaced reefs or lighthouses that often would mysteriously go dark on stormy nights. Although the Florida Keys consist of about 1,700 islands (keys), only 43 are connected south of the state’s mainland, from Key Largo to Key West via the bridges of U.S. Highway 1 that separates the Atlantic Ocean, Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Monroe County, the southernmost county in Florida, envelopes all of the Florida Keys and portions of Everglades National Park and the Big Cypress National Preserve. Since 1990 the entirety of the Keys and surrounding waters lie within a national marine sanctuary. Key West received national notoriety when Ernest Hemingway decided that the southernmost city suited him just fine. The novelist lived there in the 1930s, allocating plenty of time when not writing or fishing to haunting Duval Street’s sordid watering holes and brothels. Key West became a clique of fishermen, rum guzzlers, and folks who didn’t care much for outsiders meddling in their affairs. Nonetheless, by the 1950s word reached Florida’s capital city of Tallahassee that things smelled fishy in Key West, which by then had attracted all kinds of residents with liberal drinking habits and questionable character. The island became a frequent hangout for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator who, the feds knew, was playing ball with the Mafia. Even his future nemesis, Fidel Castro, dropped by the city to bask in capitalist-style leisure before he took to the mountains of Cuba to orchestrate a communist takeover. Besides part ownerships and investments in Havana casino hotels and other coastal resorts lying a mere 90 miles south of Key West, the Mafia operated with total impunity in Cuba, the Pearl of the Antilles. Reciprocally, Cuba became a Mafia business partner completely outside the reach of the U.S. government, and it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to recognize that this could not occur without complicity and total cooperation on the part of Batista. And the dictator sure wasn’t doing it for free. The Cuba-Mafia connection ran deep in Key West. Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante Jr., who inherited from his dad a bolita operation in Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Key West and later Cuba, undoubtedly crossed paths with Batista if not one of his henchmen. The common denominator: The popularity among the Latin community of bolita, which gained traction in the 1880s in Tampa and was enhanced in the 1920s by then Tampa mob boss Charlie Wall. Bolita involves an illegal form of gambling often referred to as a “numbers game.” It’s a daily game in which 100 numbered balls are placed into a bag, the bag is shaken a few times, and one of the balls is blindly drawn. If your ball gets picked, you win a portion of the money pooled and the rest goes to the sponsor—in this case, the Mafia. Although most individual bets are usually a dollar or less, the simplicity of it adds to the popularity and thus can enrich the winners and bring in a steady daily cash flow to the mob. Like all forms of gambling, it can be rigged in a variety of ways. The progression here is that keeping up the flow of illegal bolita money involves making sure palms get greased, and thus the corruption element also comes into play with law enforcement and the legal system. But essentially Batista made himself the legal system in Cuba, and he fed at the Mafia trough. Although Santo Trafficante Sr. died in 1954, as already mentioned his son—Luigi Santo Trafficante Jr.—inherited control of organized crime in Tampa with partnerships in Cuba and South Florida. Through the Trafficante connections and coordination of organized crime with Mafia families in New York City and New Orleans, business in Cuba flourished under the protection of Batista’s dictatorship. And hence all other aspects of Mafia dealings besides bolita sprouted openly in Cuba and also in Florida: casino skimming, prostitution, extortion, loan sharking, insurance fraud, and with it numerous corrupted officials. Those who tried to stand in the way quite often disappeared when fishing or on Everglades hunting trips. In the late 1950s heroin became of interest to the Trafficantes, even though the NYC families—still controlled by old-school La Cosa Nostra bosses—eschewed it. A perfect conduit for heroin and later other narcotics into the U.S. involved Havana serving as the hemisphere’s distribution center. After Cuba received flights and shipments from various countries like Colombia and Turkey, speedboats had their hulls laden with heroin and marijuana and sped unfettered over the 90 miles across the Gulf Stream to Key West. The web of organization included the timing of trucks at the docks to haul the illicit drugs to Miami under the auspices of Trafficante mobsters and drug dealers. Despite Key West’s diminutive dimensions of 1.25 miles at its widest point and four miles long, its population still represented the largest concentration of residents and businesses scattered throughout the chain of islands that make up the Florida Keys. In a crowded little town like Key West, rumors became facts and facts became rumors, particularly as they pertained to Mafia presence. FBI files on Key West Mafia ties and activities were opened in the 1950s and swelled through the 1960s. That was when names started turning up in those reports like Farto, Trafficante, Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa and Teamsters operatives Sam “The Fat Man” Cagnina and Raimundo Beiro. As in all small communities, a web of connections existed. Allegedly, Cagnina was a nephew of Santo Trafficante, and besides doing the bidding of the Teamsters Union he ran a crew in Key West involved in all aspects of organized crime. One law enforcement source listed Cagnina and his accomplice Beiro as cousins. Bum Farto, a lifelong Conch—the moniker bestowed on native Key Westers—could not have been ignorant of all these happenings and familial relationships, particularly considering that in 1955 he’d married Beiro’s sister, Estelle. Even in the southernmost city of the Lower 48 states, deep dark secrets could not be hidden from the rest of the world forever, and Florida’s Governor LeRoy Collins would soon take action. But before that hammer fell, other events shook the island and the world. First, Batista fled Cuba on January 1, 1959, before Castro could arrest him. Since the inevitable defeat of Batista’s troops could be foretold months previously, he flew out of Havana to Portugal, likely with enough cash to last four or five lifetimes (he died in 1973). Castro immediately shut down the Mafia operations and nationalized everything in the mold of the Soviet Union, which had been secretly funding and abetting his revolution. Not surprisingly and yet to Eisenhower’s horror, Castro publicly declared his allegiance to communism. The start of the Castro dictatorship also meant that the Havana to Key West to Miami drug artery no longer flowed. The Mafia was none too happy to lose such a perfect setup. Nevertheless, things went on as usual in Key West with shipments of narcotics coming from ports other than Havana to the city and other drop points up the line of islands. But the mob’s troubles in Key West took another hit on January 1, 1961. Governor Collins made his move—the “Bubba Bust,” consisting of 40 arrests. That included local bolita kingpin Louis “Blackie” Fernandez along with his coterie of ticket sellers and accomplices; undercover cops packed up and left for home. Undaunted, once the dust had cleared Trafficante restarted bolita operations and took control of the island’s police and fire departments. The Tampa Mafia did the same with Key West’s commission and the trucking and construction unions—the latter orchestrated by frequent Key West visitor Jimmy Hoffa. By controlling shipments of goods to Key West via U.S. 1—the only road connecting Key West with Florida’s mainland—the mob could extort local businesses. Teamsters’ money flowed into ownership of Key West resorts, a shopping center, and, as a PR gesture, a seven-figure check was donated to the local hospital. Bum Farto weathered the storms. In 1964 as the new fire chief, he set out to prove he wasn’t merely going to keep the seat warm. With fervor and bravado, he upgraded the fire department’s trucks and gear, boosted the staff’s morale, provided free safety inspections, quickened notifications when a fire was reported, and improved fire truck response time. To feed his ego, Farto proudly referred to himself as “El Jefe,” Spanish for The Chief. Over the next 12 years he helped rescue Cuban refugees and provided them safety and comfort—hey, not even bad people are all bad. But one thing Farto didn’t know: He and his fire department were on the feds’ radar screen. One such investigation—Operation Conch—would prove to be his Waterloo. On September 9, 1975, state and federal law enforcement authorities made their move, resulting in Farto’s arrest. He’d been caught red-handed selling drugs to an undercover agent. Besides Farto, the city attorney and 27 others went down as well—mostly those with Miami drug ties. As further details emerged, Farto was accused of using the fire station as a base of operations to sell cocaine. The news created shock waves throughout Key West and resurrected persistent rumors about Farto’s coziness with organized crime figures. His reputation and many good works spiraled down the drain. As quickly as the ink dried on Farto’s arrest warrant, whispers centered on who else he and the others might take down with them. Sentenced to 30 years, Farto damn sure knew the fate of potential squealers facing long prison terms. The news about Operation Conch immediately spread, reaching the ears of Santo Trafficante, New York Mafiosi, and drug kingpins in Miami and Colombia. Facing either decades of decay in a cell or his corpse being eaten by sharks, on February 16, 1976, Farto put his taillights to Key West and likely drove exactly at the speed limit to Miami—his car was discovered there two months later. He’d jumped bail, a real Farto vanishing in the wind. Did he go on the lam to another country? No records suggested such. Did he get silenced by the Mafia or drug lords? No proof of that exists. In fact, his body—like that of Jimmy Hoffa, who coincidentally disappeared five weeks prior to Farto’s arrest—has never been found. An all-points bulletin and periodic manhunts proved fruitless. The years peeled off the calendar. Anyone who knew anything about the whereabouts or getaway plans or death of Bum Farto kept mum. Finally, he was declared dead. Whether he passed away long ago (he’d now be over 100) or made it to a safe haven is anyone’s guess. But I’ll state my theory. It’s likely that Farto was the driver of his car to Miami, where drug contacts lived. The fact that he jumped bail signaled his intent never to cooperate with law enforcement, which the Mafia realized. But at the same time, they knew if he got caught he could still do a plea deal. In other words, Farto reckoned that he needed to escape to a place offering a decent lifestyle with a new identity where no one could finger him. The Bahamian and Caribbean islands were too small to remain incognito. He wouldn’t go to Cuba because while he may have been chummy with Castro during his visits to Key West over a decade earlier, Farto realized that the new Cuban dictator wouldn’t be keen harboring an American drug fugitive. In fact, Castro might even use Farto as trade bait with the U.S. Ergo, I believe that a former drug contact in Miami helped Farto obtain forged ID and concealed him for a few weeks. Farto then hopped aboard a private plane or boat and hightailed it across the Gulf of Mexico. I conclude that Farto ended up in Costa Rica for two reasons: It’s one of the more pleasant and stable countries in Central America, and in 1976 living outside the capital city of San Jose pretty much assured anonymity. Guesswork aside, Joseph “Bum” Farto’s disappearance remains a mystery over 50 years later. But the evolving lure of drug money in the Florida Keys hardly ceased. In fact, it escalated, and if the players weren’t quite as colorful in name or action as Farto, the fever from suitcases stuffed with Ben Franklins infected the hearts of many notable Keys figures. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Sunshine State Mafia: A History of Florida’s Mobsters, Hit Men, and Wise Guys by Doug Kelly. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, March 2024. Reprinted with permission of University Press of Florida. View the full article
  13. A town of seemingly perfect housewives. A severed ear in a patch of green grass. The last man alive hiding from his monstrous neighbors. A family ostracized from the community after their sugar bowl is poisoned. From Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and most of Shirley Jackson’s body of work, there’s something about the suburban gothic that keeps us coming back for more. It’s creepy, it’s familiar, and it’s omnipresent. A broad and rather elusive subcategory, the suburban gothic focuses on the existential horror that lurks in small towns, close-knit communities, and suburban neighborhoods. These locales might not have been the original source of gothic terror, but in our modern landscape, they’ve become some of the most recognizable places in our lives—and even the most ominous. # When I was writing the first draft of what would become my novel, The Haunting of Velkwood, the concept of suburbia was front and center in my mind. In fact, I literally used the photography book, Suburbia, by Bill Owens as part of my mood board for the novel. (Suburbia, it should be noted, also served as the inspiration for the Detroit suburb in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, the candy-coated neighborhood in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, and the 1970s costume aesthetic in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If there has ever been some kind of arcane magic in a book of photographs, then Suburbia has most definitely got it.) So what is it about Bill Owens’ photography and the seemingly ordinary neighborhoods and families in his work that have captured so many storytellers’ imaginations? Part of the answer lies in the way the gothic has always focused on a sense of place. It has a long tradition of depicting its physical locations as almost mystical and sentient. After all, what would Wuthering Heights be without the brooding moors, or Jane Eyre without Thornfield and all the secrets locked away in the attic? Dracula thrives off the terror of Carfax Abbey and Castle Dracula, and it’s virtually impossible to remember The Picture of Dorian Gray without his mansion and its hidden room and hidden portrait. These locales are filled with just as much nuance and complexity as the characters that dwell within them. They’re strange and dark and haunted, untold dangers lurking at every turn. But while traditional gothic settings tend to include ancestral estates and vast, foreboding landscapes exposed to the ravages of nature, the neighborhoods of the suburban gothic don’t seem nearly as threatening. They’re so new, so brightly lit, as to appear perfectly normal. Sprinklers in well-manicured lawns, ice cream trucks on summertime corners, allotments arranged in neat rows with identical houses peering back at you. Whether in daylight or moonlight, it feels like we should be safe here. And that’s exactly where the horror thrives. David Lynch knows all too well the terror of suburbia and small towns. The opening of Blue Velvet literally digs deep into the mythos of suburban life, exposing the unseemly underbelly waiting there. Early on in the film, the camera focuses on a bright blue sky and a literal white picket fence with beautiful red roses growing in front of it. From there, we see respectable houses and a line of schoolchildren placidly crossing the street. But nothing is as it seems. A man watering his grass is suddenly stricken and collapses without anyone else noticing, his body left shaking on the ground. That’s when the camera descends into the earth, the dirt rising up around us like we’re a corpse, as we see the darkness and the rot and the hungry insects lurking beneath us all the time. Before long, our protagonist will inadvertently come across the single object that sets the whole film into motion: a severed ear. Blue Velvet might begin with a sunny day in suburbia, but it knows where this all ends: in devastating secrets and unspeakable violence. We want to believe terrible things only happen if you find yourself in a dim alley among nefarious strangers, but the truth is if you have something to fear in life, it’s almost certainly going to happen in a place you recognize among people you know well. This ubiquitous danger of suburbia has permeated other famous media of the last half century. The town of Stepford appears to be a wonderful place to raise your kids; that is, until you realize all the women are strangely glassy-eyed and robotic, thanks to the cruel appetites of their narcissistic husbands. The Lisbon family in The Virgin Suicides are an apparently idyllic family—and then the bereft daughters begin to kill themselves while the befuddled neighborhood watches, unable or unwilling to do anything to stop it. While the suburban gothic can be set anywhere, it’s sometimes seen as a subsection of the American gothic, and maybe there’s a good reason for that. The so-called American Dream promises us a life of comfort and stability and bright-eyed happiness (so long as you commit to a life of drudgery to a corporate overlord). But as the suburban gothic so adeptly explores, any alleged promises are only an illusion. No matter where you go, the terror is sure to follow. # Gothic literature has long been a reflection of our collective fears, and the stories have evolved over the decades to convey that. With the suburban gothic, it asks a fundamental question that haunts our modern lives: is home a haven or a hellscape? Can the friendly smiles of our neighbors keep us safe from the outside world? Or are we simply creating our own prisons? If there was ever a writer who didn’t trust her small-town neighbors, it was no doubt Shirley Jackson. Look no further than her classic short story, “The Lottery,” if you want to see what people will do to maintain their beloved traditions. Jackson understood better than most that the places that should keep us safe often become the most unsettling and dangerous settings in our lives. While The Haunting of Hill House is often described as Jackson’s crowning achievement, her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, perhaps succeeds even better at capturing the dread of insular communities. After most of the Blackwood family is poisoned, sisters Constance and Merricat live an isolated existence away from the townspeople who despise them. The locals assume Constance is a murder, though most readers will quickly deduce that younger sister Merricat is clearly the culprit. Although the book never explicitly explores the reasons for Merricat’s hatred of her family, there are intimations of her father’s abusive nature as well as mysterious arguments that hint at deeper secrets that are never revealed to the reader. Whatever the motive, in Merricat’s eyes, there was no safety for her within or without, not in the village and not in her own family, at least until she took matters into her own bloodthirsty hands. Only then did her house become a sanctuary for her. # Home. It’s a simple word but such a tricky notion. It’s much easier to describe a house itself—the physical dimensions of a literal space with a roof and rooms and a mortgage to pay. But a home is something we each learn to define through our own eyes and our own experiences. Your memories growing up might be all about comfort food and Christmas mornings and togetherness. Or maybe it was screaming matches and latch keys and loneliness. Perhaps it was all of those things or none of them at all. The suburban gothic manages to encapsulate all those perspectives while also acknowledging that in one way or another, every house is a haunted house. And it doesn’t have to be one that’s filled with ghosts; plenty of haunted houses are occupied solely by the living. Returning once more to the work of Shirley Jackson, her lonely protagonist Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House is a woman without a home and without a future. After dedicating her whole life to her hateful mother, there’s not much left of the hopes and dreams she once had. With Eleanor, Shirley Jackson asked a question that still gnaws at me years after I first read Hill House: what if a haunting isn’t only a place, but also a person? What if your trauma and all the pain of your past have turned you into a living, breathing haunted house? Because while you might be able to flee Hill House, there’s no way to escape yourself. And as the suburban gothic proves, perhaps we’re the most frightening phantoms of all. *** View the full article
  14. My latest novel Finding Sophie is a crime novel about a teenager (Sophie) who goes missing one seemingly uneventful day. That simple but monumental event rips open the lives of her parents, Harry and Zara and sends them spiraling in opposite directions. Where one lives in hope, the other clings to despair. When one finds strength to commit to a search, the other seeks answers internally—in a search of the soul. They each want to find truth but to do that they have to learn to understand and navigate a path between hope and grief. Missing persons stories are usually told from the lens of the police or a private detective—a dispassionate investigator who can leave emotions behind in order to get to answers. But I chose to tell the story from the perspectives of the missing girl’s parents because I wanted to get closer to their emotions and their internal worlds. I wanted to feel as well as to discover. There are many ways to tell the missing person story but this, to me is by far the most dramatic and heart-engaging one. The stakes are personal and for that reason, I think, all the more thrilling. In my job as a criminal barrister I have dealt with missing persons cases, in the context of murder cases. Judges and juries try cases together, the one dealing with the law and the other with the facts. But together they try the case as impartial actors. They don’t have any personal skin in the game beyond doing what is right and just. However, these kinds of trials are usually highly emotional. There are families and whose futures and whose need for resolution are at stake. A missing person case is a special kind of case precisely because so much hangs in the balance. It is literally a case of life and death. Is the missing person alive and well carefully holding the dreams of those who love her and await her return or have those dreams withered and been buried with her? Parents seem to have a conjoined identity in dramas and novels involving their children. They act as a unit. They feel the same things. They often have the same thoughts. But I wanted tell this story in the separated voices of Sophie’s parents, Harry and Zara. I felt it important to give equal weight to their stories because they react to Sophie’s disappearance in such different ways. To understand them as individuals and to appreciate the depth and variety of their feelings it’s necessary to unstitch them from one another. To see how they deal with their challenges and their obstacles as individuals. To examine how particularly they meet with and absorb their grief. Grief. That is the beating heart of a missing person case. It is often said that the depth of a person’s grief, is in direct proportion to the depth of the love they have lost. Grief is the testimony of love, its twin and its mirror. We know grief just as surely as we know love. But in the same way that love might be unrequited, so too can loss be inchoate. There is a liminal state, I think, that is produced by incomplete grief. When the person for whom you grieve isn’t definitely dead, but is missing, how do you process that? What do you do when, in Schrodinger-speak, you have a cat that is both alive and dead at the same time? How do you rationalize and then deal with a possible loss, in a way that is authentic to both outcomes? To feel grief feels disloyal to hope. And feeling hope feels like a treason to loss. For me this conflict was the natural place to begin. But then as I drew further into the novel, I found I had to tackle something more practical. Justice. In criminal cases, the absence of a body isn’t a bar to trying a defendant for murder. In some ways, a trial is more crucial in these cases than anywhere else because people need something to stand in place of the sickening labile uncertainty of a missing loved one. A trial in a kind of miraculous way can give you that something. You take the evidence and feed it through a court and wait for the dark magic to unfold. Because a verdict once it is given creates a truth out of thin air. Every criminal case is tried by a jury that didn’t witness the events in question. Nobody on that jury can know for sure whether X was acting in self-defence in the heat of the moment or if Y mistakenly identified X as the suspect. We only have the word of a witness or witnesses. A word based, even if honestly believed, on a memory that is dwindling as fast as time is moving on. But once the verdict is in, X is guilty. He is a murderer. Whether in reality he is or not. And so a verdict delivers certainty out of uncertainty, give closure where once there were only open wounds. Even if that verdict is nothing more than a fiction, in which twelve jurors have conspired. And that strange creation of truth was one of the reasons I wanted to splice a murder trial in between Harry and Zara’s alternating accounts. The drama in court is where we unearth the ‘truth’. I keep the courtroom scenes tense and unpredictable to replicate in some small way the feeling that Harry and Zara perhaps have of holding onto a hope that is liable to turn on them any second. And also court is tense. There are moments in every trial where it feels as though the world can just come tumbling down. We all, as courtroom advocates, hold our breaths for the answers to questions we are not sure we should have asked. But when all is said and done, a verdict is not a true substitute for truth. And no family was ever fully healed by a trial unless their loved one was found (dead or alive). We need to find answers as readers of crime fiction that leave us whatever the answer, in a state where we better understand the world. Because the world out there is a chaotic and dangerous place and the least we can do as writers is to restore some order. So I promise that at the end of Finding Sophie you will find out what happened to Sophie. And what became of Harry and Zara. And what this murder trial tells us about hope and grief. Because to leave you without that resolution would be to leave you with your own inchoate loss and liminal spaces. And frankly I never liked the idea of a cat that could be both dead and alive at the same time. *** View the full article
  15. Clothes are a storyteller’s dream when it comes to showing, not telling. In Patricia Highsmith’s 1950s novel, The Price of Salt, Therese Belivet describes what Carol is wearing even before she mentions her future lover’s eyes, or mouth, or languorous walk. (“She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with her hand on her waist.”) Carol’s appearance as a centre of stillness within the frantic atmosphere of a Manhattan department store has a lot to do with her fabulous coat, and the way she models it, and yet her poise, though striking, is not durable. That’s how it goes with coats: they are easily removed, lost, stolen or damaged. A fictional character whose essence is symbolised by a coat is very vulnerable indeed, especially if she inhabits a Patricia Highsmith novel, where moral compromise and psychic disintegration are the order of the day. A coat without a wearer is an object of infinite possibility, begging to be filled, whether literally or imaginatively. The eponymous coat in Helen Dunmore’s, The Greatcoat, has lost its rightful owner, and when Isabel Carey finds it in the back of a cupboard, and takes to using in her freezing 1950s flat, she summons a ghost from Britain’s recent wartime past. Isabel’s airman is a dreamy and romantic apparition, unlike the red-coated figure in Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now. Tantalised by shadowy half-glimpses, John Baxter becomes convinced that the child in the hooded red coat is his dead daughter, and pursues her through the streets of Venice—only to discover, too late, that he has been misled by his own obsessive longings. I have forgotten the precise colour of my granny’s fur jacket, but it certainly wasn’t red; it had the natural tones of an animal pelt. My sister and I used to borrow it when we were playing ‘posh ladies.’ The fact that a living thing had been killed in order to create it contributed to its adult-ness: I couldn’t be sure whether the death of the mink (or fox, or rabbit, or whatever it was) made it more precious, or more creepy, or both. Certainly, if a grown-up woman in a children’s book is wearing furs, she is likely to be bad news: the link between fur coats and cruelty is made explicit in the character of Dodie Smith’s Cruella de Vil, and implicit in Philip Pulman’s Mrs. Coulter and C.S. Lewis’s White Witch. The message is much more ambivalent when Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy don furs in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as of course they do, when they climb inside the antique wardrobe and find themselves in Narnia. There are sound practical reasons for borrowing those oversized coats (it’s always winter in Narnia, under the witch’s reign), but the fact that these are adult clothes, and furs at that, is telling. They are exchanging their childhood innocence for a world of magic and violence, in which the boundaries will be blurred between wild and tame, animal and human, natural and unnatural. A blinkered refusal to countenance the blurring of any such boundaries is the error that dooms Captain Sir John Franklin and his men, in Dan Simmon’s gothic chiller, The Terror. Trapped in the Arctic wilderness, plagued by cold, hunger, mutiny—and a semi-mythological, man-eating monster—these nineteenth century adventurers hold on to their ‘civilised’ ways with a tragic zeal. Good old woollen coats, flannel underwear and dodgy tinned food will surely see them through: never mind that the indigenous Inuit people have fur clothing (much more water-resistant than wool, and with more internal layers for trapping and warming air) and a notably lower mortality rate. There’s a beautiful scene towards the end of the book, where Captain Francis Crozier emerges from unconsciousness, having been rescued from certain death by the Inuit woman whom he calls Lady Silence. She has removed all his useless woollies, and wrapped him in furs, and he is blissfully warm and safe for the first time in the course of this gruelling novel. Lady Silence nurses Crozier for days, while he lies naked inside those furs—and if that’s not erotic signalling, I don’t know what is, so it’s no surprise when the two become lovers. Dressing in someone else’s clothes is an intimate thing to do, and there’s a pivotal scene in Jane Eyre where our heroine stands shivering in her shawl, having rescued Mr. Rochester from his burning bed, and he offers her his cloak. It is their most intense encounter yet (“Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look”) and the complexities of their nascent romance are captured in the image of the “poor, obscure” governess wearing her wealthy employer’s clothing. Yes, it evokes eroticism (the cloak that usually wraps his body now wraps hers) and love (the cloak provides warmth and shelter), but it also speaks to the darker themes of the book. Rochester’s cloak doesn’t fit Jane; it swamps, captures and claims her. Through the course of the book she must, figuratively speaking, throw it off, refashioning Rochester’s autocratic passion into a love between equals. ~ “A thing is never just a thing in itself,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. Just like children playing “posh ladies” in their grandmother’s old furs, novelists love to build their stories around an allusive object. An airman’s woollen greatcoat, a little girl’s red overcoat, an Inuit’s sealskin parka, a Victorian gentleman’s cloak: on the one hand, they are just bits of fabric that have been pieced together to make outerwear; on the other, they are stories waiting to be told. Coats and cloaks will always be beloved by writers of gothic fiction, because they can speak so resonantly about the darker realities of life: absence, possession, vulnerability, desire, concealment, violence and—not least—a human dread of the cold, in all its forms. *** View the full article
  16. “The trial of Polly Bodine will take place at Richmond, on Monday next, and will, no doubt, excite much interest,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe on June 18, 1844, for the Columbia Spy. Poe had recently moved to New York where, he declared, “I intend living for the future.” He got a temporary lift when he sold “The Balloon Hoax” story, a fictional account of the first transatlantic balloon crossing to Moses Yale Beach of the Sun. THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!! screamed the Sun in April 1844. James Gordon Bennett exposed Poe’s story as a hoax and Beach issued a retraction. Not even the Sun could hold its readers entirely on hoaxes. Soon, Poe was broke again. He found a city of strangers and ran up debts. Poe lamented that in America “to be poor is to be despised.” In May 1844, he got work as a correspondent for the Columbia Spy for which he wrote epistles on “the Doings of Gotham.” Poe spent that summer “roaming far and wide over this island of Mannahatta” to chronicle the city. But he kept pitching stories to magazines, always searching for the commercial success that had eluded him. For years, Poe had read with fascination the penny press’s reports on murder investigations, and this sparked a notion in him: perhaps he could solve cases through the newspapers? Indeed, he might even be better at crime-solving than the authorities. In 1841, Poe wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” his groundbreaking detective story featuring Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur sleuth in Paris who unravels crimes through “ratiocination,” the application of deductive logic to the clues. Monsieur Dupin reads in the newspapers about the savage murders of two women. He explains to his sidekick that the police focus too narrowly on the rules of evidence. “This may be the practice in law, but it is not the usage of reason. My ultimate object is only the truth,” he insists. Dupin deduces that the killer was . . . an orangutan that’d escaped from a sailor’s possession. The story concludes with Poe’s defense of amateur crime-solving. “The Chief of police was not happy that the answer to the mystery of the killings had been found by someone who was not a policeman,” says his sidekick. Dupin replies that while the chief is a “good fellow” he often misses “something which is there before his eyes.” Then a real murder captured Poe and the public’s imagination. On the sweltering morning of July 28, 1841, passersby spotted a woman’s corpse floating on the Hudson River. The victim was Mary Cecilia Rogers, a beautiful, twenty-one-year-old “cigar girl” at John Anderson’s tobacco emporium. The Herald speculated that she was killed by a “gang of negroes.” The Post reported that an Irish gang lured Mary Rogers to the shore where she was, “after the accomplishment of their hellish purposes, brutally murdered.” Dissatisfied, Poe did something audacious: he set out to publicly solve the Mary Rogers case while the investigation was ongoing. He pitched a new, thinly veiled Monsieur Dupin detective story in which he would reanalyze the Mary Rogers case and reveal the real killer. “I believe not only that I have demonstrated the fallacy of the general idea thinly-veiled—that the girl was the victim of a gang of ruffians—but have indicated the assassin in a manner which will give renewed impetus to the investigation,” he promised his editor. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was serialized in William Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion. Dupin explains to his sidekick how he intends to solve the crime. “Not the least usual error, in investigations such as this, is the limiting of inquiry to the immediate, with total disregard of the collateral or circumstantial events,” he explains. “It is the malpractice of the courts to confine evidence and discussion to the bounds of apparent relevancy.” While the prevailing theory was that Marie had been the victim of gang, Dupin deduces that the killer was a naval officer. Developments in the actual Mary Rogers case threatened to destroy Poe’s theory. Two sons of Mrs. Frederica Loss, an innkeeper, were arrested on suspicions that they’d murdered Mary Rogers at the inn. Mrs. Loss confessed on her deathbed that Mary had come to the inn with a physician for an abortion, but she died from the botched abortion. Neither scenario squared with Poe’s theory that it was a naval officer. Faced with public humiliation, Poe drank heavily. By the time of the final installment, he came up with a literary trick. Dupin debunks the gang theory. But just as he’s about to reveal the perpetrator, there is a supposed note from the editor which states that, for legal reasons, “we have taken the liberty of omitting” information about the real killer. Today, Poe is credited with establishing the modern detective genre in his Monsieur Dupin stories. But his stories celebrating amateur detectives portended something else as well. In trying to publicly “solve” the real Mary Rogers case through dramatic storytelling, Poe was the forerunner to the “true crime” documentarians of our own time. He believed that outsiders could solve cases which have baffled or misled the authorities. When he vowed to “give renewed impetus to the investigation,” we can hear echoes of documentarians of today who seek to reopen moribund cases, or to free those whom they believe were wrongfully convicted. Like Poe, they’ve had mixed success. By the time of the trial of Polly Bodine that summer of 1844, Poe was in full bloom as a crime writer. His classic short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Black Cat” (1843) imagined killers as unnamed narrators. The morbid details of “The Oblong Box” (1844) were inspired in part by John Colt’s attempt to ship the corpse of Samuel Adams. That summer, he also sold “The Purloined Letter” (1844), his third and final detective story featuring Monsieur Dupin. 8 So it was inevitable that Poe would weigh in on the real case that seized the nation that summer. “The trial of Polly Bodine will take place at Richmond, on Monday next, and will, no doubt, excite much interest. This woman may, possibly, escape; for they manage these matters wretchedly in New-York,” he wrote. Trial testimony hadn’t even begun. But the initial press reports were enough for him to deduce that Polly was plainly guilty. The Polly Bodine case had stirred up in him old feelings about the Mary Rogers debacle. “It is difficult to conceive anything more preposterous than the whole conduct, for example, of the Mary Rogers affair,” Poe wrote. “The police seemed blown about, in all directions, by every varying puff of the most unconsidered newspaper opinion,” he said. “The magistracy suffered the murderer to escape, while they amused themselves with playing court, and chopping the technicalities of jurisprudence.” His column also resurrected arguments from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” that “very much of what is rejected as evidence by a court, is the best of evidence to the intellect.” Poe ended with a tantalizing prediction about how the rules of evidence might affect the pending trial. “I have good reason to believe that it will do public mischief in the coming trial of Polly Bodine,” he wrote. What crucial evidence did Poe think would be excluded? What “mischief” did he think would occur in the coming trial? ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice, by Alex Hortis. Copyright 2024. Published by Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article
  17. One time my brother almost saw a ghost. He was in New Orleans, in an ancient bar, during a bachelor party weekend, I think. To be honest, I can’t quite remember all the details because this story was very long and he clearly didn’t have an ending in mind when he began telling a room full of people about this spooky situation that culminated in a bathroom where he almost saw something. Something invisible, it turned out, almost became visible by the urinal. But in the end, he didn’t see it after all. The ghost. This payoff was met with derisive laughter, which is the normal response in my family if someone squanders your time with a bad story. I have three middle-aged brothers who like to roughhouse and my mom keeps a running tally of who’s the funniest Flaherty. She says she’s number one, and she’s probably right. But my brother who almost saw the ghost ranks high on that list, and he laughed at himself because he was hearing his tale for the first time too, as he was telling it. He’d started to say something about a weekend trip, when he realized that all side conversations had suddenly stopped and everyone was listening to him. A middle child, like me, he’s long known that attention can be hard to come by. So, rather than mention a strange bar and quit, he decided to go on and on. He’s a natural storyteller, after all, and in the past, he’d smoothly landed the plane after far shakier liftoffs than a freaky location in a city famous for voodoo and vampires. That night, though, he circled the runway until he ran crashed. But I understand now that there was more to his story than nothing. And it wasn’t that he didn’t almost see something. It was that he felt something. Some kind of strange energy there that he couldn’t explain. That happens in certain places. I once lived in Hawaii and did some camping on the Big Island, where new land is born every day. One night, I got lost hiking on a lava field and fell into a hole, the contents of which I’m still too frightened of to put into words here. But I felt an energy in that moment that wasn’t ghostly, per se, but like nothing I’d ever experienced. I knew there were unusual electromagnetic properties afoot because of the island’s volcanic activity, and maybe that’s what it was, but I don’t know. A friend there once told me that on a boat near Kaho‘olawe, an island the US military used as a bombing range, she suddenly just burst into tears and didn’t know why. It was some feeling from the land that just came over her, she said. The place that has always affected me the most like that are the woods in the town where I grew up in northern Connecticut, which is the inspiration for the setting of my debut novel, The Dredge. The house we lived in was built in the 1820s and we had old photographs in a bathroom of past owners who’d farmed there at the turn of the century. We shared a home with these dead. We saw their marks on floorboards and hand-hewn joists with old bark still on them. As a kid, I saw one of their apparitions in my bedroom one night. Not almost, actually saw it, I thought. This is the first time I’ve ever mentioned that. And though I can rationalize it away now as an adult, a waking dream or an unusual refraction of moonlight, I still spent the majority of my childhood in a room that I believed was haunted and never told anyone about it before you. Some of the details of that house and the surrounding woods I used in the The Dredge, including a tree along a brook bank where someone carved the highwater mark of the great flood of 1955, which killed nearly two hundred people in Connecticut. And there’s a version of a pond that I had a nightmare about nearly fifteen years ago. In its dark water, I saw a pale stick of birch that terrified me. Though it’s only a detail now, I felt the whole story in that image and it took me all this time to be rid of it. Most of us can probably name a place that does some kind of mysterious thing to us. New Orleans, Hawaii, my little hometown, everywhere you look, anywhere you really are, there is strange history, layers upon layers of it piled up endlessly, as you know. Bones in the ground, marked or not. Oddities created by people, by nature. And energies that can’t be fathomed, much less explained. Often, we cannot articulate what can’t be seen. All we know is that we felt something in that setting. Something so unusual that it seemed in the moment that the next logical step would be for it to reveal itself to us, but it just didn’t. And that’s all it becomes. A spooky little blip that lingers. Do you remember? Have you ever told anyone? It’s true, isn’t it? That one time you almost saw a ghost. View the full article
  18. I started writing my second novel, Like It Never Happened, at the beginning of 2020. It started, as all stories do, with a handful of characters and an inciting incident. In this case, four eighteen-year-old boys get in a fight with two strangers in a parking lot. They kill one boy and incapacitate another. They get away with it, but they argue about what to do next. Their friendship shatters, and they lose touch. It usually takes a fair distance into a story—after I learn what happens—before I start to get a sense of what it’s about. As I churned out words and pages and chapters, Covid crept toward us and then engulfed us, and my story that began with violence drifted toward secrets and lies and blame. * From the beginning, we all searched for someone to blame for Covid and the way it upended our lives. The second semester of my son’s senior year of high school was effectively cancelled. His freshman year of college went online. My special needs daughter, who was living in a residential treatment center, was sent home just a little bit before she was ready. It became difficult to connect with family and friends, and like everyone else, we lost the illusion of control over our lives that we’d spent so much time and energy cultivating. As the pandemic lockdown stretched from weeks into months, I met some friends one evening in a park along the bike path. We stood six feet apart—eight middle-aged men drinking beer that we had pulled from our backpacks like teenagers. We quickly exhausted the few topics at hand—the fruitless search for toilet paper, remote work, too much time with our immediate families. The discussion turned toward who to blame. We cycled through the usual suspects from that time: China, the president, the CDC, Bill Gates even. We were all unsettled and uncertain and worried about what would come next. Some demanded accountability, even if they didn’t know exactly what that meant, or what that would get them, or from whom they were demanding it. * I open the novel when those four boys are approaching fifty, and they are all chafing against that night so many years ago, grasping for that sense of control we all crave so much. When the most troubled of the four dies, the other three see each other for the first time in thirty years at the funeral. They also meet the dead man’s wife. They learn that she’s a reporter, and that she knows everything. She blames them for her husband’s chaotic life and for his death, and she’s determined to make them pay, to hold them accountable. But what is accountability? I wrote Like it Never Happened in close third person with a rotating point of view. The story studies the same terrible event and, more importantly, its aftermath, from a variety of angles. That choice allows the reader to see how that night in the parking lot affected each of those men and how their lack of accountability damaged their families. Most importantly, it allows the reader to blame and then forgive each character as the story shifts from one subjectivity to the next. As I wrote, the pandemic wore on all of us, and we started to blame each other. Some of us blamed too few masks or vaccines or distance while others blamed shutdowns and vaccines and masks. Each according to their point of view, but we all found someone or something to blame. Too few of us held ourselves to account. What’s the difference between accountability and blame? They seem like twins at first, all but identical. But when you study them, subtle differences emerge. Blame leans toward accusation, the assignment of fault. It drives conflict, division, and polarization. Accountability, on the other hand, represents the acceptance of responsibility. It leads toward learning, and it implies a willingness to collaborate and to grow and to change. Viewed through this lens, demanding accountability seems a bit like demanding friendship. Examined closely, blame and accountability seem like distant cousins at best. * My daughter, who struggles with much, added online high school to her anxiety inventory when she came home at the beginning of Covid. Her anxiety often leads to crisis and sometimes violence. She sat at the dining room table in front of her laptop trying to hold it all together. I sat across from her at my own laptop wearing a set of noise-cancelling headphones so that I could get some words written, trying to move the story forward. Even as I worked, I watched her. I waited for the telltale signs that, if left unchecked, might throw our home into chaos. It was my responsibility to step in when she became overwhelmed and to help her deescalate. I took the headphones off to listen to the quadratic equation lessons, because I had forgotten anything that I had once learned about quadratic equations, and because helping her through her algebra homework was also my responsibility. We were still in lockdown the night that my son’s cancelled prom was supposed to take place. I heard him shouting to nobody in the basement, venting his frustrations like everyone. I went downstairs and asked him if he’d like to play cards. He shrugged, mumbled something that might have been the word Fine. I went back upstairs for the cards and a twelve-pack. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and responsibility takes many forms. Responsibility is certainly accountability’s sibling. Taking responsibility for our actions. Taking responsibility for the wellbeing of others. As the pandemic wore on, I realized that responsibility and accountability aren’t negative words, that they are filled with agency and possibility. They aren’t related in any way to blame—they aren’t even the same species. * When you read a novel with a crime at its core, you want to see justice served, the guilty punished. But I wanted more than that for my characters. It wasn’t enough for others to demand accountability from them. I wanted them to hold themselves accountable. I wanted to see them seize it and begin to repair their broken relationships. The pandemic got much more difficult before it became easier. Like everyone, I learned a lot from the experience—about patience and endurance and centering myself in stillness. I learned what I could reasonably expect from others and what I shouldn’t. I learned, both on the page and off, that accountability isn’t a punishment for a transgression, but a choice. If my characters damaged their relationships by dodging accountability, I could strengthen my own when I chose to embrace it. *** View the full article
  19. Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Tana French, The Hunter (Viking) “Tana French has become her own reliable industry of top-shelf crime thrillers.” –The Washington Post Elizabeth Brooks, The Woman in the Sable Coat (Tin House) “Secrets, betrayals, and compromises abound as these very different women navigate treacherous relationships to find safe harbor in Brooks’ taut novel.” –Booklist Brendan Flaherty, The Dredge (Atlantic Monthly Press) “In this accomplished debut mystery, Flaherty revitalizes the familiar trope of old secrets threatening to resurface with sinewy prose and well-tooled suspense . . . The past and present unfold gradually from the vantage points of Flaherty’s well-drawn leads, keeping readers on a knife’s edge as the full scope of each character’s history clicks into place. Admirers of Eli Cranor’s Ozark Dogs will be riveted.” –Publishers Weekly Sophie Wan, Women of Good Fortune (Graydon House) “[A] crackling debut…. The novel moves along briskly while dutifully adhering to the tropes of the heist genre, but this stands out for its unexpected depth; Wan expertly delves into her protagonists’ emotional backstories and reveals their complexities…. Wan pulls this off without a hitch.” –Publishers Weekly Elle Cosimano, Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice (Minotaur) “Another rollicking round of high-speed felonies for mystery author Finlay Donovan and those unwary enough to get pulled into her orbit… perfect escapist fare.” –Kirkus Reviews Amy Tintera, Listen for the Lie (Celadon) “Listen for the Lie is a page-turner from the first sentence to the very last. In addition to being a world-class whodunit, full of carefully doled-out twists, Lucy is a terrific character, feisty and funny and, it turns out, brave as hell. It’s great fun. Readers will rip through this one.” –Stephen King Ben Winters, Big Time (Mulholland) “Big Time is a wild and wonderful trip, a kaleidoscope of mind-bending science, metaphysics, and good old-fashioned thrills. And most engaging of all are the characters Ben Winters creates: a hugely appealing Everywoman sleuth, a young woman struggling with a harrowing dilemma, and one of the scariest antagonists in recent memory.” –Lou Berney Ken Bruen, Galway Confidential (Mysterious Press) “The raffish hero’s world feels like an unusually sordid theme park attraction. Just be sure to wipe your hands when you exit.” –Kirkus Rob Osler, Cirque du Slay (Crooked Lane) “Chock full of unconventional characters, both LGBTQ+ and not, this entertaining cozy is heartwarming in the characters’ caring for one another.” —Booklist Alex Hortis, The Witch of New York (Pegasus) “In this excellent work of true crime, Hortis examines the case of Polly Bodine, who became infamous after she was accused of murdering her sister-in-law and infant niece. Hortis’s historical detail makes the episode come to life, and he successfully evokes contemporary tabloid scandals like the Amanda Knox trial. Fans of Daniel Stashower will love this.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article
  20. The early 1980s were a crazy time for adventure movies. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” had come out in the summer of 1981 and was a huge box-office success, spawning sequels that would continue more than 40 years later and imitators that adapted old adventure tropes like “King Solomon’s Mines” in 1985 and “High Road to China” in 1983, the latter starring the man who might have been Indiana Jones if not for prior commitments, Tom Selleck. So it’s interesting that the best of the Indiana Jones follow-ups spun the story in a direction that was infrequently explored: what better plot than one revolving around a writer, and what better way to thrust a writer into action than thrusting them into one of their own stories? Released in 1984, “Romancing the Stone” beat by decades latter-day “authors in their own adventures” films like “The Lost City” and “Argylle.” “Romancing the Stone” – and its lesser-and-lesser-remembered sequel, “The Jewel of the Nile,” from 1985 – got there first, by decades. “Romancing the Stone” really perfected the formula. And – tragically – it is the fate of the film’s novice screenwriter, Diane Thomas, that is the strangest story connected to the film. Mudslides and arduous filming It’s honestly debatable how much “Raiders” influenced “Romancing the Stone” because both were in the works, at least in pre-production, years before Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders” came out. As early as May 1978, newspaper accounts noted that Spielberg and friend and “Star Wars” creator George Lucas were working on a project called “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” A California paper cited it as a project about which little was known. Then in September 1979, the Los Angeles Times published a profile of Diane Thomas, not long after she had been working as a waitress and after she had spent a year writing “Romancing the Stone,” “which neither she nor (producer and star Michael) Douglas nor her agent will say much about. The fear, as with many film ideas, is that someone will steal the idea and turn it into a quickie TV movie or low-budget feature.” “I’ll never sell my first screenplay again,” the 33-year-old Thomas is quoted as saying. “I know this is a Cinderella story, although I don’t have any glass slippers around my house. Maybe I should get a pair.” Thomas could afford them. She had famously been paid $250,000 for the screenplay for “Romancing.” The headline on the Times article: “A New Career with a Cinderella Ending.” “Romancing the Stone,” in the meantime, wouldn’t be released until the end of March 1984, when the competition at the box office included “Footloose,” “Splash,” “Against all Odds” and “Police Academy.” Even in April, the first full month “Romancing” was in release, it came in second in terms of tickets sold to “Police Academy.” It seemed like the immediate payoff was not there. After all, star and producer Michael Douglas had been working on the film for five years, nurturing Thomas’ script. And production in Mexico was arduous. “I had really underestimated the logistics of shooting a chase picture in the middle of the jungle in monsoon season in a foreign county,” Douglas said in an interview published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We were flying without a net a lot of the time. We were out on the edge.” While the movie probably got made through Douglas’ perseverance, it was director Robert Zemeckis who pulled off the film. Zemeckis had made three films, including the large-scale action comedy “1941,” before making “Romancing the Stone.” He was not yet the seasoned director who would later make “Back to the Future” and two sequels, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Forrest Gump,” “Castaway” and other, lesser films. Among Zemeckis, Douglas and Thomas, “Romancing” boasted memorable scenes, probably none as memorable as the mudslide scene, in which the leads slide down a steep hillside in the rain and mud. Douglas and Zemickis assembled a small but tight cast. Douglas played reluctant adventurer Jack Colton, but the standout was Kathleen Turner – who had a sensational debut in 1981 with “Body Heat” – playing successful romantic adventure novelist Joan Wilder. She’s a homebody – she has a cat, for goodness sakes, as if “Argylle” couldn’t find enough other plot points to cop – who goes to Colombia to help her sister and in the adventure becomes more confident, a woman able to stand up to gangsters and secret police and crocodiles. It’s not quite one of those woman-takes-her-glasses-off-and-is-a-beauty clichés, but Joan does reveal the beauty that is Turner. Other cast members include Danny DeVito as a small-time hood who helps to move the plot along and while the movie isn’t as dated as I was afraid it would be, there’s not the kind of depth of character that we’d see in a movie like this today. “Romancing the Stone” was a hit, though, grossing $115 million and Zemickis said the movie’s success ensured he could direct “Back to the Future.” But Diane Thomas, the screenwriter of “Romancing the Stone,” did not have the Cinderella-like ending the Los Angeles Times had wished for her back in 1979. Listening ‘while Diane saved the world’ After she wrote “Romancing the Stone,” Thomas co-wrote the Spielberg film “Always,” a romantic fantasy starring Richard Dreyfuss. She also finished a draft of a third Indiana Jones movie, which reportedly revolved around a haunted house. By some accounts, Spielberg decided against going forward with the idea because it reminded him too much of “Poltergeist,” which he had produced in 1982. In October 1985, Thomas died instantly when her Porsche Carrera, which was being driven by her boyfriend, spun out of control while traveling at speeds approaching 80 miles per hour on the Pacific Coast Highway. Thomas had been sitting in the backseat of the sportscar. Another passenger died of injuries from the crash. Thomas died six weeks before the “Romancing” sequel, “Jewel of the Nile,” was released. Aside from a few characters she worked on for Douglas, Thomas had not been able to pen the script for the sequel because she was busy with her work on “Always.” She is one of three writers credited with the script for “Jewel of the Nile.” A few weeks after her death, Betty Spence wrote about Thomas for the Los Angeles Times and the remembrance paints a picture of every writer ever – or at least who they’d like to be – and every writer who’s ever written themselves into their own story. “She worked relentlessly, with a discipline that amazed us. Her habitual eight hours at the typewriter might result in a dozen pages or only two, yet she persisted, even when writing on spec. One night before her movie was made, she showed her day’s output: a list of five neatly typed ideas. Eight hours’ thinking. “Wine glass in hand, legs akimbo on the couch, she pitched one to me, her dreamer’s mind unleashed as she unraveled an original saga of a girl with the secret of the philosopher’s stone. In awe, I listened while Diane saved the world as naturally as she might recount her own history.” View the full article
  21. The amnesia trope is a popular one in mysteries and thrillers, and for good reason. It’s a terrifying thought, having a secret locked away in your own head. Often times, the suppressed memory is of a violent event, so not only is the reader unsure if they can trust the character, the character also doesn’t know if they can be trusted! This is what happens in my novel, Listen for the Lie. Due to a head injury, my main character, Lucy, has no memory of the night her best friend died. The evidence seems to point to her being the murderer, and everyone in her small town sure believes that, but she has no idea. I loved writing the amnesia trope, because it means that the reader and the character are solving the mystery together! And I took inspiration from a few of my favorite lost memory books: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins A modern classic, The Girl on the Train is a favorite of mine, and, in my opinion, one of the best executions of the amnesia trope. The main character, Rachel, is an alcoholic who frequently wakes up the next morning with no memory of what she did the night before. When a woman that Rachel has been spying on from her train disappears, Rachel is sure she knows something, but just can’t remember what it is. I love the execution of the amnesia trope here partly because it’s very realistic – drinking to the point of no longer being able to create memories is something that actually happens to people (in fact, many of us have probably had to relay previous night’s events to a friend who went too hard!). Also, the trope is used as a way to make us think about who we believe and why, which is something I explore in my own novel. In The Woods by Tana French Three kids go into the woods, two never come back. This book is about Rob, the third child, who is found with blood-soaked shoes and no memory of what happened to his friends. Twenty years later, he’s a detective investigating a child’s murder in those same woods. This book employs another popular amnesia trope – the trauma-suppressed memory. This is the most devastating way to use the trope, in my opinion, because it causes a sense of dread through the whole book. We want the character to remember, but we also worry that he’ll be traumatized forever if he does. The ending of this one can provoke strong opinions, and one thing is for sure – you won’t forget it. What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty Perhaps more women’s fiction than thriller, but I had to include this one on the list because it’s one of my favorite books about selective amnesia. Alice hits her head at the gym, and wakes up to discover that she’s 39, has three kids, and is about to get a divorce…which is weird, because she’s pretty sure she’s 29, pregnant with her first child, and totally in love with her husband. She’s forgotten the last decade, and she spends the book trying to solve the mystery of how her life ended up this way. I love this one because it’s all about the why, and to me, that’s the most interesting thing about a mystery. There’s no murderer to uncover, just a question of how exactly you became this person you don’t recognize. It’s actually a little scary, in a very different way than a traditional thriller. The Murder After the Night Before by Katy Brent Like my book, The Murder After the Night Before revolves around a woman whose best friend was murdered. In this case, Molly wakes with a terrible hangover, a stranger in her bed, and her best friend dead in their flat. To make matters worse, Molly has gone viral for performing a sex act in public with an unknown man, an act she couldn’t have consented to, considering she was too drunk to remember it. This adds another layer to the familiar blackout drunk trope – as Molly’s life falls apart because of the video, readers are left thinking about consent and social media pile-ons. The question of who the strange man is in the video haunts Molly right along with the murder of her friend, making this one hard to put down. Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney Sometimes I Lie introduces a new twist to the amnesia trope – this time, the main character is in a coma. She remembers her name, her life, her husband, but doesn’t know how or when she ended up in a hospital bed, unable to move or speak. The book alternates between the present and the recent past, as Amber attempts to figure out what happened to her. The coma is a brilliant choice, because it makes it impossible for Amber to take any action to figure out what happened. The reader feels trapped right along with her, as we try to piece together the clues and recover her memories. It’s a brilliant and terrifying execution of the amnesia trope! *** View the full article
  22. Funky Nassau – capital of the Bahamas, beauty spot of the Caribbean, a British colony until 1973. Officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, it is comprised of around 700 islands (though only 30 are inhabited) with the capital, Nassau, located on the island of New Providence. Sun, sea, cocktails, hedonism, tourism, off-shore banking, tax dodging and a real life murder scandal plus plenty of crime fiction… Let’s ease ourselves in gently to the Bahamas with a few cozies, as if into the beautiful warm waters of the Caribbean or a bubbling luxury hotel hot tub… Dorothy Dunnett’s Operation Nassau is the fourth in the Dolly mystery series – the Dolly being a yacht owned by portrait painter Johnson Johnson that sails into town. Here Johnson is drawn into an espionage caper involving a savvy and tough young Scottish woman and a poisoned British secret agent. Other Dolly mysteries have ventured to Madeira, Ibiza, Rome, Split and Marrakesh. JP Roselle’s Murder in Nassau (2017) involves a teenage boy chasing treasure and investigating a murder in Nassau (suitable for YA readers incidentally) while Barb Mihalchick’s Murder in the Bahamas, Twice Again (2021) follows a series of murders that screw up a planned honeymoon in Nassau. Tanya R Taylor’s The Cornelius Saga is a 16-book series that involves murder and investigations but also witches and ghosts. Book five is called The Contract: Murder in the Bahamas (2017) and sees main recurring character Mira Cullen in the Bahamas attempting to solve a decades old mystery. To be fair you probably need to read the series from the start to make sense of this novel, though it does get the story to the Bahamas. Don Bruns’s Bahamas Burnout (2009) is a very different sort of book to either fantasy investigations or cozy crimes. Rock and roll journo Mick Sever heads to Nassau, home of the legendary Highland Studio. Great, until it’s destroyed in a devastating fire. Someone wants to stop the music. Book #3 in the Mick Sever series. In Jeffery Deaver’s The Kill Room (2013) New York DA’s Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs hit the Bahamas to solve a major crime – the assassination of a US citizen who had been targeted by the United States government in a major case. On the ground they discover there is no crime scene investigation, no evidence, and no co-operation from the local Bahamian police. Left to their own devices but also it seems someone doesn’t want them poking around the islands. Plenty of Bahamas-set crimes seem to involve yachts. Will Peters’s The Nassau Incident (2005) sees Bill Randolph, a successful but disillusioned advertising executive, buy a yacht and sails the Caribbean with a girlfriend. Leaving a bar in Nassau one night, he witnesses a murder, is chased, but eludes the assailant. But then the murderer comes after him and the action moves from Nassau to Freeport (the main city on Grand Bahama, an island off the Florida coast). white slavery, drugs, assassins, the FBI and organised crime all feature. Laura and Alan Holford’s Swimming with Pigs (2024) is one of the odder titles this column has ever featured. But apparently swimming with pigs in the beautiful blue waters of the Bahamas is actually a thing (google it!!). Now a retired London copper is working security on a luxury cruise in the West Indies, but of course a murder occurs, and he has to solve it. Pigs may not fly, but they do apparently swim!! Alan Holford was a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police for thirty years. And a psychological thriller set in the exclusive world of the Bahamas’s private islands. Sian Gilbert’s She Started It (2024) sees Poppy Greer getting married and inviting four of her old schoolmates are to be her trusted bridesmaids. Free first-class ticket to white sands and bottomless cocktails on a private Caribbean island? But over the years since school the women have changed – dramatically! “Lord of the Flies meets And Then There Were None . . . but with Instagram and too much Prosecco” has to be one of the book marketing slogans of the decade! There is one looming true crime case in the Bahamas that has inspired a legion of books, conspiracy theories, conflicting accounts and involves everyone from the Duke of Windsor, one of the world’s richest men, corrupt Miami cops and, perhaps, Meyer Lansky too. I’m talking about the Harry Oakes murder. Here’s the skinny in brief – Sir Harry Oakes, 68, was born and raised in Maine, had become the possessor of a Canadian gold-mine fortune and a British title making him the wealthiest peer in the British Empire, He lived in the Bahamas to avoid taxes and made many investments there in property, agriculture, airports etc. In 1943 he was bludgeoned to death in the bedroom of Westbourne, his bougainvillea-adorned Nassau estate. From the looks of the crime scene, he’d also been set on fire. The case was a wartime scandal. The former King (the one that abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson) Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor was the wartime governor of the Bahamas (a British colony). He called in some cops from Miami and sidelined the local detectives. What was up – financial shenanigans involving the Duke and Nassau’s wealthiest? Meyer Lansky and the Mafia looking to turn the Bahamas into a version of their Cuban/Vegas dreams? No definitive answer has ever been found but there has been a hell of a lot of speculation. Here then a random selection of Harry Oakes murder books if you feel interested in diving down this particular true crime rabbit hole – Alfred de Marigny’s A Conspiracy of Clowns (1990); James Leasor’s Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? (2016); John Marquis’s Blood and Fire: The Duke of Windsor and the Strange Murder of Sir Harry Oakes (2006); Sheryl Macdonald’s Murder! (2009). To my knowledge there are at least another dozen or so books on the case and at least two more in production that I know about as I write. Seems like the fascination with Oakes’s murder, the Duke of Windsor and Lansky’s involvement and the seedy underbelly of wartime Nassau still fascinates readers. And finally….an oldie and a goodie. Desmond Bagley was an English journalist and novelist known for his prolific output of bestselling thrillers in the vein of Hammond Innes and Alastair Maclean. He lived around the world and often wrote about places he knew – South Africa and various other African countries mostly. He published about 20 thrillers that all sold well, and a few got made into movies. He made a decent living from his writing and, in 1979, took a holiday with his wife in the Bahamas. The trip inspired him to write a novel – Bahama Crisis (1982 and the last published before his death – though a few works came posthumously). Tom Mangan is a wealthy white Bahamian who has made his fortune in the island’s tourism business. An old school fiend visits – also wealthy – and wants to invest in a new tourism venture with Tom. Their families get along, all seems simpatico. Then disaster – a yacht with Mangan’s wife and one of his daughters mysteriously disappears, and the body of his daughter washes up on a beach hundreds of miles from where the yacht should have been. Things start to go wrong with his business – labor strikes, food sickness outbreaks in his hotels, broken luggage carousels, arson, an oil slick on the beaches. What the hell is going on? Bahama Crisis is over 40 years old now but still a good read and, of course, anything that threatens the idyllic image of Bahama’s tourism industry is a major catastrophe. Remember Billy McFarland and the disaster of the Fyre Festival in 2017 – on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma! View the full article
  23. After his five decades in show business, the late Richard Lewis is rightly being remembered for many career highlights: his peerless stand-up routines and late-night comedy appearances, his neurotic and oddly soulful portrayal of a fictionalized version of himself in 12 seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. However, if you were a lover of mystery stories and a budding comedy nerd in the 90s, you might first have seen him chasing a dachshund across Monte Carlo. Lewis’ role in the 1992 crime caper Once Upon a Crime will not make any list of his achievements. But, briefly, he is oddly winning and wonderful in a lovable little flop of a film. It’s an improbable performance that still shows us some things about comics and the strange ways they work themselves into murder mysteries. Once Upon a Crime is a comedic take on the “whodunnit abroad” genre. Films of Agatha Christie’s Murder Orient Express and Death and the Nile feature star-studded casts and gorgeously shot, luxurious locations. Riffing off of this model, Once Upon a Crime takes place in grand, glittering Monte Carlo. (The film is lavishly photographed by famed cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, who worked with famous Italian directors like Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini.) Where the big-budget Christie adaptations featured high-wattage stars from Ingrid Bergman and Penélope Cruz, Crime featured a cast of comedic actors (including John Candy, Sybil Shepherd, and Jim Belushi) each fall under suspicion for the murder of the elderly millionaire Madame van Dougen. There is even a philosophical, mustachioed detective, Inspector Bonnard (played by the wonderful Giancarlo Gianini) subbing in for Christie’s beloved Hercule Poirot. Each character is implicated: Candy’s Augie Morosco (a strangely dapper John Candy) had lost to Madame van Dougen at the casino. George Hamilton’s Alfonso, a ladies’ man, has not-so-mysterious ties to the dead woman. Belushi’s Neil Schwary (the stereotypical obnoxious American abroad), and his long-suffering wife Marilyn (played by Shepherd) are found on a train with a suitcase full of Madame van Dougen’s limbs. You only need to look at the recent successes of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films to see that comedy whodunnits are a popular subgenre. Once Upon a Crime is itself an adaptation of the 1960 Italian film Crimen, directed by Mario Camerini). Camerini himself remadeCrimen remade in 1971. A Hindi film, 36 ChinaTown Road, is apparently a shot-for-shot remake of Crime. The story is a particular type of whodunnit comedy, one that is not about humorusly enngineered plots or funny clues. Instead, Crime’s comedy is very character- and performance-based. It was directed by comedy legend Eugene Levy. (He makes a brief appearance as a casino cashier.) Levy’s training in improv grounds the film’s setup, where characters are placed in humorously suspicious situations where they can bounce off of each other. On some level, everyone’s doing their job. Belushi is a back-slapping, brassily over-confident schmuck. His condescension towards Marilyn makes him small and weasely. His overweening confidence in a perfect “system” for winning at roulette draws him into the wake of another compulsive gambler, Candy’s Augie. Candy’s towering comedic talent makes the most out of this improbable man, with a brash North American accent, an oddly Continental air and the brocade robe to match. When the chips are literally down, his infantile side comes out as he and Belushi egg each other on. Shepherd’s Marilyn first seems like a put-upon simp, but it takes little more than a Versace gown and a whirl at the tables for her to come into her own. Hamilton, excels in doing what he does: his superficial charm and deep, deep tan are catnip to the town’s neglected housewives and elderly widows. But despite the various attractions of the characters and performers, Crime’s mystery plot is flimsy at best. (It’s only 90 minutes and even that feels stretched a little thin.) The greatest whodunnits have some good twists and turns. With this small number of suspects, there’s only so many fakeouts the plot can throw your way, and the solution ends up hanging on a single clue. But this flimsiness—for worse, but also for better–means Lewis’ performance adds substantially to the film’s charms. Lewis plays Julian Peters, a down-on-his luck actor stuck in Rome when he finds Madame Van Dougen’s missing dachshund, Napoleon. The recently-dumped Phoebe (played by Sean Young), has also spotted the dog, and hopes to bring it back to Monte Carlo and collect a hefty reward. After a bit of bickering, they agree to hop on a train and split the reward, but their plans go off the rails when they discover Madame van Dugen’s body in her garage. Julian and Phoebe are immediately suspected by the police, but they are the only characters we know couldn’t have done it. (We later learn that Julian was actually on the phone with Madame van Dugan during the murder, rolling his eyes throughout.) It’s hard to imagine Lewis as a killler anyway–there’s no way his infamously high-octane neuroses could handle the guilt. (He is, however, just the guy you’d want to accidentally discover a body–Lewis’ normal level of freakout seems, in this situation, to be totally warranted.) This leaves Lewis in the slightly unusual position of the straight man compared to this collection of highly suspicious oddballs. His incredulous reactions to inncredible people and events make him an unconventional everyman. At the beginning of the film, Lewis’ Julian is out of money and losing hope of being “the next Al Pacino.” (His claims to fame are a small role in Godfather III and a production of Cats.) In other words, the character is on just the right wavelength for Lewis’ sarcastic self-deprecation. “I’m a chronic whiner,” Julian admits, “it’s like a hobby with me.” It’s one of the moments where Lewis’ standup persona is woven into Julian’s character. He’s still very much Lewis–there’s his signature slouchy posture and extravagant shrugs, but he’s always also something more at work. For most of his screen time, he’s bickering back and forth with Young. They bristle against each other as they babysit the dog and then run around town in a desperate attempt to avoid incriminating themselves. It seems like this was intended to be a kind of enemies-to-lovers romcom subplot; Phoebe and Julian do end up together, but that conclusion is extremely perfunctory and the film does little to plant those seeds alongside the mystery plot. It seems like this was intended to be a larger part of the film and got pared down. (Nancy Meyers collaborated on the screenplay.) Young’s Phoebe is short-tempered and high-strung, Lewis, for once, is the one on a relatively even keel–despite his kvetching, he’s something of a lovable knight-errant who does the right (or at least the brave thing.) In the dangerous risks that Julian grumbles through, Crime’s fluffy pastry of a film manages to capture Lewis’ essence: both his anxieties and his great warmth. View the full article
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