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Admin_99

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  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. THE ALL-AMERICAN RALSTON FAMILY AND THEIR IDEAL SUMMER HOME Photo essay in Life magazine, July 1932 Dr. Phillip Ralston of New York City and his wife, theater star Faye Ralston, have certainly mastered the art of good living. And they have quite a lot of lives in their care! The doctor adopted six of his children in 1915 while working in England during the war. They welcomed their seventh child, Max, four years ago. The doctor and his wife spend most of the year in New York City and the older children board at school. In the summer, they come together in their private paradise in the Thousand Islands region. It is called Ralston Island now, though it was formerly known as Cutter Island. Their magnificent home is called Morning House. Built at a cost of four million dollars, everything in Morning House is designed to foster good health and creativity. “Whenever my children show a gift in a particular direction,” Dr. Ralston says, “I make sure to nurture it.” For this purpose, Dr. Ralston called in architect P. Anderson Little of Los Angeles to build a two-story playhouse that would not be out of place in a story by the Brothers Grimm. It is a cheerful place, built of stone, with windows of varying sizes and a turret on the side. Most people would imagine a playhouse to be a small affair—this one is the size of a large family home. The first floor boasts a large library, an art studio, and a room for study. The second floor is high-ceilinged and features a large open space with mirrored walls and a ballet barre, as well as a piano and other musical instruments. Excerpt continues below cover reveal. The family follows a precise schedule. They breakfast together at seven thirty each morning. Dr. Ralston and his family follow the natural diet prescribed by institutions such as the Battle Creek Sanitarium. There is no meat, no sugar, no coffee or tea. Instead, the family enjoys large helpings of yogurt, cooked fruits, nut cutlets, stewed peas, and custard. By eight, they are out on the lawn, practicing calisthenics in matching uniforms. The boys and the girls exercise together. After this, the group either swim laps in a walled-off lagoon that serves as an outdoor swimming pool or compete to see who can swim around the island the fastest. “My daughter Clara is the strongest swimmer in the bunch,” Dr. Ralston adds proudly. “No one can beat her time to the shore and back. We’re working to get her into the next Olympics, though she would rather concentrate on her dancing.” By nine thirty, exercises are complete for the morning. The children have two hours of instruction led by Dr. Ralston. Topics include medicine, chemistry, heredity, history, politics, and geography. Lunch is served at noon—another round of nourishing natural foods. The children then have the afternoon to pursue their individual interests. There’s another round of swimming at four. If the weather is inclement, they practice diving in the twelve-foot-deep pool in the lower level of the house. At dinner, the family reviews their day. They relax in the evening, sometimes with games, or perhaps with a motion picture. It’s hard to imagine a more wholesome and idyllic summer than one spent with the Ralstons at Morning House. TWO CHILDREN DEAD IN MORNING HOUSE TRAGEDY The New York Times, July 28, 1932 Tragedy has befallen the family of doctor and philanthropist Dr. Phillip Ralston. His youngest child, Max Ralston, aged four, was found drowned in the waters of the St. Lawrence River yesterday afternoon. It is thought the child left his room while his nurse was asleep and attempted to swim on his own. Hours later, overcome by grief, his oldest sister, Clara, aged 16, jumped four stories from the roof of the house. . . . __________________________________ From DEATH AT MORNING HOUSE. Used with the permission of the publisher, HARPERTEEN. Copyright © 2024 by Maureen Johnson. View the full article
  5. Yes, you read that right. Mark Twain consistently reinvented his original 1876 novel Tom Sawyer, adding sequels of different genres to it (for different reasons) for the next twenty years. Tom Sawyer was Twain’s bestselling book, though not initially. According to scholar Peter Messent, Tom Sawyer received lackluster commercial sales during its first year in print, selling only 23,638 copies. Compare these numbers to those from the sales of from Twain’s 1869 humorous travelogue The Innocents Abroad: 69,156 copies sold during its first year. This was partially because, until Tom Sawyer, Twain was known better as a travel writer; but Tom Sawyer‘s imminent popularity was portended by the enormous number of pirated Tom Sawyer stories that began cropping up. By the time Twain wrote its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, the love for Tom Sawyer was so great that Huckleberry Finn sold approximately 39,000 copies in its first month. As you might remember from high school, the differences between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin are vast: the former is a clever picaresque, a story (written in the third-person) about two boys in the 1840s who go on various adventures in their Missouri town. Huckleberry Finn is different, a first-person account of a period in the life of Huck Finn that mounts a criticism of racism in America. Huckleberry Finn is set not long after the events of its predecessor, and is similarly set in the Antebellum South; but Twain’s writing about slavery in a post-Civil War context helps build his criticism of the American treatment of Black people throughout the nineteenth century. (It’s worth noting that Twain’s novel, while still appreciated as vanguard and important, has since been unpacked fully by scholars for its simultaneous denunciation of racism and its copious engagement with and participation in racist stereotypes and themes.) Messent notes that Huckleberry Finn was denounced after it was published and banned in some towns, though not for its perspective of race or criticisms of America, but for its upholding of the themes of “juvenile delinquency” and its featuring coarse and vulgar language. The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts led the charge, refusing to allow the book on its shelves, lest it corrupt the local youth. Indeed, because Tom and Huck are about thirteen-to-fourteen years old, and because Tom Sawyer is an amusing adventure story about boys who find treasure, it was assumed that Huck Finn was also intended for children; Louisa May Alcott, who, before writing Little Women, wrote sensation fiction, criticized the book and said “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.” Twain, though, wasn’t upset at the uproar brought about by the book banning attempts. On April 15th, 1885, he wrote in his journal, “Those idiots in Concord are not a court of last resort, and I am not disturbed by their moral gymnastics. No other book of mine has sold so many copies within 2 months after issue as this one has done.” As you might expect, a mass analysis of the complicated anti-racist sentiments of Huckleberry Finn didn’t arise until many years after publication. Nonetheless, Huckleberry Finn prevailed as an example of transforming a beloved mainstream adventure novel into a different kind of book, still rollicking but something far more literary and challenging and with something far more important to say. But Twain didn’t stop there. In 1894, ten years after the publication of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote another sequel. He returned to the popular genre that he had used to bust into the literary world, the humorous travelogue, combining it with a newish genre that had been growing in popularity: the science-fiction story. This book, Tom Sawyer Abroad, is a parody of stories by Jules Verne and H.G. Welles (most notably Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa), and is about how Tom and Huck and Jim take a hot air balloon to Africa, where they fight brigands and robbers and encounter various remaining ancient wonders of the world. This is a very different kind of book, tonally and formally, than Huckleberry Finn, though perhaps this is signaled by the fact the title references not Huck but Tom and his simple novel of adventures. Huck remains the narrator, though, and takes the readers through a wild, colorfully-described romp (that, as you might expect, does submit to the kind of racist and Orientalist characterizations present in travel novels of that ilk; complicating the American anti-racist elements of Huckleberry Finn). Mostly, though, the novel is about the three young men and their relationships: namely, the new bond between Huck and Jim and the old bond between Tom and Huck, and Tom’s position as the manager of their little cohort. Two years later, in 1896, Twain did it again. He published Tom Sawyer, Detective, and, like its predecessor, it was both a send-up of a new popular genre, detective fiction, and an immersive and satisfying participant in that genre. As in Tom Sawyer Abroad, Huck is the narrator and Tom is the protagonist. But it’s set on the Phelps Farm from Huckleberry Finn. (Jim isn’t here for this one, in case you’re wondering.) Twain’s novel seems to have been based on the Danish writer Steen Steensen Bilcher’s 1829 novel The Vicar of Weilby, which was based on a real case, a trial from 1626 of a man named Pastor Søren Jensen Quist, in Vejlby, Denmark. In 1909, a Danish teacher named Valdemar Thoresen accused Twain of plagiarizing Bilcher’s novel. As Bilcher’s novel had been translated from Danish to German, and not English, Twain claimed that it was impossible for him to have plagiarized it, but did acknowledge that he was inspired by the original 1626 case. Twain made the historical incident his own, however; not only are Tom and Huck detectives in the style of Holmes and Watson, but they also investigate and correctly solve an outrageous mystery involving murder, stolen diamonds, mistaken identity, con men, and (possibly) ghosts. The story culminates in what scholar John C. Gerber has called a “dramatic backwoods trial.” Twain didn’t publish any further installments in this series of Tom and Huck’s adventures, though he probably intended to. Numerous fragments of stories about Tom and Huck were found in his papers after his death in 1910. In 1891, three years before Tom Sawyer Abroad, Twain teased an idea for a novel in which an elderly Tom and Huck reunite. ” “Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—and crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, and scans always every face for Tom and Becky, etc. Tom comes at last from . . . wandering the world and tends Huck, and together they talk the old times, both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful, is under the mold. They die together.” Both Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective are available online, and in critical editions. View the full article
  6. Living in Harlem in the early 1970s, my father’s third floor apartment on 123rd and Seventh Avenue was upstairs from infamous barbershop and bar The Shalimar. Glancing out of the window on a Friday or Saturday nights, it wasn’t uncommon to see rows of brightly hued Cadillac’s lined-up from corner to corner and equally flashy men with their dolls hanging in front of their rides before parading inside the lounge. As I wrote decades later in the essay “Cashmere Thoughts” published in the 2007 book Beats Rhymes & Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop: “Every kid on the block wanted to be down with the loud suits, feathered hats and candy colored platform shoes that defined that funky-flared soul generation. The last ambassadors of black elegance, those brothers were slicker than a can of oil.” In the beginning I had no idea who these dudes were, but after seeing the Blaxploitation classic The Mack (1973) when I was ten, I realized that the rainbow coalition of sharp dressed men were pimps. A cold-blooded flick, The Mack provided a window into a world of vice that regular folks (i.e. squares) knew nothing about; while many men were often “tricks” who had no problem paying a few bucks to spend time with a pretty woman, few had been Macks. Starring Max Julian as the title character, Richard Pryor as his bugged-out sidekick and Dick Anthony Williams playing the notorious Pretty Tony, the flick would go on to inspire folks from Snoop Doggy Dog to Quentin Tarantino, who included name checked the movie in his True Romance (1993) script. Still, in my childhood innocence, a few years passed before I realized that The Mack, as well as other pimp films The Candy Tangerine Man and Willie Dynamite, all of which I saw opening weekend at the Harlem grindhouse known as The Tapia, were themselves inspired by Iceberg Slim’s bestselling memoir Pimp: The Story of My Life. Originally released in 1967 from Los Angeles based Holloway House, the cheapo Los Angeles publishing house that later gave the world numerous exploitation novels as well as Players magazine, the book’s author, whose real name was Robert Beck, was a former “gentleman of leisure.” A devilish man from Chicago, Iceberg Slim had turned the streets into his big pimpin’ playground for decades before relocating to the City of Angels to restart his life and spend time with his mother in her dying days. Having quit the pimpin’ profession, he worked as an exterminator by day. After-hours he and his wife Betty worked on Pimp (he dictated as she typed) and sold the raw book to Holloway House for the small fee of $1,500. In a 1996 Observer article Iceberg Slim: Needles and Pimps, writer Sean O’Hagan noted: “Bentley Morrison, Beck’s publisher at Holloway House, remembers ‘a soft-spoken, well-built and immaculately dressed man who walked cold into the office one morning in 1967 with seven or eight typed pages of a manuscript.’ Morrison was ‘startled by the richness of the language and the overwhelming power of the story he had to tell’ and, in retrospect, credits Beck with creating a fictional genre. ‘It was black ultra realism — totally street cool and unflinchingly confessional. It allowed the reader a glimpse into a lifestyle that was alien to most blacks, never mind most whites.’” Pimp would go on to sell millions, though it wasn’t sold in bookstores, but in urban candy stores, gas stations, record shops and head shops throughout Black America. It would also launch the genre known as street lit that included fellow Holloway House author Donald Goines as well as Sister Souljah (The Coldest Winter Ever), Shannon Holmes (B-More Careful) and Teri Woods (True to the Game). In 57-years, Pimp has never gone out of print, and has served as an influence on varied creative artists including The Hughes Brothers, Ice-T and Irvine Welsh. In 2009 the Trainspotting author wrote in The Guardian, “Iceberg Slim did for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and thief and William Burroughs did for the junky: he articulated the thoughts and feelings of someone who had been there. The big difference is that they were white. Unlike them, and despite one Harvard study of Pimp as a ‘transgressive novel,’ Slim was, and still is, marginalized as a writer.” In his lifetime Slim wrote quite a few books for Holloway House including Trick Baby: The Biography of a Con Man (1967) and Mama Black Widow: A Story of the South’s Black Underworld (1969), but he never made much loot from his gritty literary efforts. Looking for other revenue opportunities, in 1976 he teamed-up with his saxophone playing buddy Red Holloway, whose band performed nightly at the Parisian Room. Red helped him get a record deal with Ala Enterprises, a subsidiary of the African-American comedy album folks Laff Records. The label’s roster included Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor and LaWanda Page, who played Aunt Ester on Sanford and Son. According to Iceberg Slim biographer Justin Gifford, author of Street Poison (2015), “Jazz legend Red Holloway often emceed at the Parisian and he wowed listeners by wading into the crowd playing his electric sax; he opened and closed the joint, and throughout the night he held court, announcing the arrival of pimps and black “royalty” to the crowd…It was a bravado atmosphere reminiscent of 1940s Bronzeville or Paradise Valley, and Beck (Slim) fit right in. He ultimately became a fixture at the Parisian…After hours, they often reminisced about Chicago, where they had both lived in the 1950s, and one day, Beck told him that he wanted to do a recording of pimp toasts. Holloway introduced him to Lou Drozin, the owner of Laff Records…In 1976, Beck recorded four toasts with the Red Holloway Quartet playing jazz improvisations in the background. Reflections went on to influence rappers, including Ice-T, and it predated hip-hop originals such as “Rapper’s Delight” and “The Message” by a few years.” In 1998 rapper/actor Ice-T wrote an introduction to Slim’s last novel Doom Fox: “Iceberg Slim always kept it real. It is blatant, uncompromising and as close to the truth as you can get without going there yourself…He knew pimping. He knew hustling. He knew the streets…Black ultra-realism: totally street cool and unflinchingly confessional with a brutal twist of dark humor that you have to scratch well beneath the surface for. “Understand, it allowed the reader a glimpse into a lifestyle and a language that was alien to most blacks, never mind most whites. In that very same way I chose to take my life experiences and put them to music. I spoke from the inside about the hustler lifestyle. I rapped about guns, drugs, gangs, and fast women. I even took on the name Ice. The most important thing Iceberg Slim did was not only show the world the game, but show young men like myself that no matter where you come from, you can always go on to that next level. My job was to show the hustlers from my generation that they too can take it to the next level.” Reflections was a strange, but enticing album that featured Iceberg’s spoken-word reciting what is known as hustler toasts, a type of ghetto poetry that was popularized on street corners dark bars and prison yards, three places Slim knew a lot about from his hardcore life. The hard to find The Life: The Lore and Folk Poetry of the Black Hustler by Dennis Wepman (1976) is the perfect book for those wanting to know more about those streetwise poetics. In fact, Iceberg remixed the lyrics from the toast “Duriella Du Fontaine” for his track “Durealla.” As Slim’s velvety voice dropped lyrical jewels about wicked whores (“The Fall”), his own dying mother (“Mama Debt”) or a sharp dressed pimp who becomes a shabby heroin addict (“Broadway Sam”), Holloway’s quartet supplied the laidback grooves of easy listening soulful jazz that blends perfectly with the rhythm of Iceberg’s speech patterns. On “Broadway Sam” we hear a hint of the Drifter’s 1963 hit “On Broadway” played on guitar while on the “The Fall” we get a taste of Holloway’s smoky sax, but the musical solos on Reflections only last a few beats before Iceberg slides in and starts talking about sin again. While the album cover featured a cool picture of Slim sitting on blocks of ice, an idea photographer Robert Wotherspoon swiped from a 1968 Esquire magazine cover shot by Carl Fisher used to illustrate a James Baldwin essay, the back cover had liner notes written by the record label’s bookkeeper Shelby Meadows Ashford: “Throughout the Album you will laugh with the ‘BERG’ as he turns many a colorful phrase sprinkled liberally with licentious humor, in setting his memories to rhyme. You will also share the anguish as he rhymes poignant memories delicately laced with the despair of the forgotten…ICEBERG SLIM has been and continues to be a tremendous asset to our literary culture.” Forty-eight years after its release, Reflections sounds a little dated, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. A natural born shit talker, Slim’s voice is hypnotic, but he doesn’t rush through his words as he patiently schools us lames about the brutal pimping game that he never tries to glamorize. “You know the price when you’re dealing vice,” Iceberg says coldly on the opening track. However if don’t, you soon going to learn. View the full article
  7. In my current release, The Deepest Kill, the central murder may possibly relate to a lucrative missile defense contract. One character compares it to a series of real-life deaths, prompting my agent to ask, “Did that really happen?” Yes. Yes it did. The late 1980s really did witness a series of deaths involving scientists who worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also famously known as “Star Wars.” This ambitious space-based missile defense program, proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, would intercept missiles while they were still in the air. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. The concept turned out to have a few reality checks that couldn’t be gotten around and besides, the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. After that, politicians and taxpayers alike were happy to stop throwing money at it—and we’re talking a lot of money, as in thirty billion over ten years. The kind of money that makes people ambitious and maybe crazy. But during SDI’s heyday more than 20 SDI scientists, primarily employed by the British defense company GEC-Marconi, met untimely deaths. A few took place between 1982 and 1985, but the vast majority occurred in a clump between August of 1986 and October 1988. Now, yes, people die every day. But ‘untimely’ isn’t an apt description here. Out of the reported deaths, only one was attributed to natural causes, while the rest—well, here’s an abridged summary: We begin with Dr. Keith Bowden, a senior computer scientist and SDI contractor for GEC-Marconi. One night in March 1982, after attending a social function in London, Bowden’s car veered off a bridge, hurtling down an embankment into an abandoned rail yard. The official account suggested drunken driving, but Bowden’s wife and solicitor didn’t buy it. Three years later, in 1985, the Marconi radar designer Roger Hill died by shotgun at his home. Hill’s death was followed by Jonathan Wash’s fall from a hotel window later in the same year. He had left GEC and gone to work for British Telecom, and had expressed fears for his life. In August 1986 Vimal Dajibhai, a 24-year-old scientist working on computer control systems at Marconi, jumped 331 feet from a suspension bridge over the Avon River. His body was recovered with his pants around his ankles and a needle-sized puncture wound on his buttock, something that mystified the Bristol coroner and has never been explained. In one of the most bizarre incidents, Arshad Sharif, another Marconi satellite detection system scientist, allegedly tied one end of a rope to his neck, the other end to a tree, jammed his foot on the accelerator, and decapitated himself. Sharif had been acting strangely in the days leading up to his death, but that method of suicide is beyond strange. 1987 began with Richard Pugh, a computer expert and consultant to the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Pugh’s body was found in his flat with his feet bound, a plastic bag on his head, and a thick rope coiled around his body. The coroner controversially ruled it as an accident due to sexual misadventure, which is a useful verdict if you want the family to stop asking questions. In April, Mark Wisner, software engineer at the Ministry of Defence, was found dead with a plastic bag on his head and clingfilm wrapped around his face. Once again, the verdict was death by sexual misadventure. Today they might guess (or press) suicide, but asphyxiation by plastic bag method was just warming up in the ‘80s. More followed in succession during 1987 and 1988: A MOD researcher, Avtar Gingh-Gida, disappeared and turned up four months later in Paris, unsure how he got there. MOD scientist John Brittan died in an apparent suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. So did Marconi engineers David Skeels and Trevor Knight, MOD researcher Peter Peapell, and British Aerospace engineer Andrew Hall. In March 1987, David Sands, a senior scientist working on computer-controlled radar at a Marconi sister company, made a sudden u-turn in his car to crash into an empty café at high speed. The vehicle burst into flames,2 maybe because there were two additional five gallon cans full of gas in the car.3 Sands was identified only through dental records. Others dead in car crashes were Michael Baker, 22, digital communications expert for Plessy, a Marconi acquisition and Stuart Gooding, research student at the Royal College of Military Science. A systems analyst for another contractor, George Kountis, drove his car into the Mersey. Plessy communications expert Michael Baker crashed through a barrier near his home. On the same day as Gooding’s death, David Greenhalgh of ICL (a defense contractor) paused in his drive to work to jump off a bridge. He survived for a few days afterward, stating he had no idea how or why he’d been there. In April of 1987 Shani Warren—the only female on this list—was found gagged, with hands bound behind her back and her feet tied, and with a noose around her neck. Official reports suggested that she had somehow done all of that herself, then hobbled in her four-inch stiletto heels to the lake to drown herself in 18 inches of water. GEC Marconi bought her company a week later. However, thanks to the magic of DNA, this case was solved in 2021 with the arrest of a serial rapist who had nothing to do with either Marconi or the Strategic Defense Initiative. Plessey electronic weapons engineer Frank Jennings, 60, died of a heart attack in June. Granted, a sixty-year-old dying of heart attack back then wasn’t so odd. What is odd? Plessy software engineer Alistair Beckham, 50, completed some light Sunday afternoon gardening. Then he went in the shed, attached wires to his chest, pushed them into a power socket and, with a handkerchief jammed in his mouth, hit the power. Beckham’s wife described how secretive he was about his work and how just hours after his death men from the Ministry of Defence arrived at the scene and took away several documents and files. Later the same month, Marconi marketing director John Ferry, 60, jammed stripped wires into his own tooth fillings and electrocuted himself. It wasn’t that no one noticed. By this point several articles (and eventually a book4) had appeared questioning whether there was actually some kind of KGB or Eastern bloc conspiracy to kill the scientists. A few MPs and a trade union leader called for an inquiry into the deaths. But the UK Defence Ministry declared the cluster to be coincidence, at best attributable to the unusually high stresses associated with secret defense research. But is it that stressful? A 2021 CDC survey5 lists the detailed occupational groups with the highest suicide rates among males: Agricultural/Food Scientists, Logging, Entertainers, Fishing and Hunting Workers, and Construction/Extraction Workers. A 2016 survey did not vary by much. Engineering ranked lower and Computer/Mathematical, much lower still. There is variation among reports but general conclusions remain steady. But that’s America—in a UK study of 1979-1983, veterinarians topped a list of thirty (yet they were nowhere to be seen on the list for 2001-2005). However, it is likely that ‘aerospace computing engineer’ is simply too narrow a category for reliable statistics. It’s not difficult to guess why the field could be particularly grueling, and SDI provides an excellent example. Global political pressure, the kind of money that could make or break a company, a race against well-matched rivals both external and internal, and oh yes, perhaps just the fate of the free world depending on your abilities. It could have all been a plot worthy of le Carré and the facts will stay forever buried under Red Square—but suddenly a mental health crisis cluster doesn’t look so far-fetched. We will, almost certainly, never know. *** View the full article
  8. Minnesotans of a certain age remember when 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling went missing the night of October 22, 1989. Jacob, his brother, and a friend were riding their bikes near the Wetterling home in St. Joseph, Minnesota, when a man with a gun took Jacob. No one saw Jacob alive again. (His killer finally confessed in 2016.) Whenever my friends and I would play in the woods, we kept an eye out for Jacob. I remember scouring the trees, thinking maybe he’d gotten lost, and I could help find him. We didn’t understand that monsters walked among us. I wonder if Jacob’s abduction explains, at least in part, my lifelong fascination with true crime. I have this need to understand why people do terrible things. Each book I write is my attempt to answer that question, just a little bit. In our culture’s desire to devour everything true crime (I’m guilty of it, too), the victims often feel reduced to characters in someone else’s violent story. But the dead still have stories to tell. In my newest novel, Dead Girls Talking, I put the focus on the victim and her daughter. The protagonist, 16-year-old Bettina, is famous for all the wrong reasons—her father killed her mother, and she was the star witness at his trial. When a string of copycat murders hits her hometown, she teams up with the undertaker’s daughter, and town outcast, to stop the killer. I loved writing about teenage girls who discover their own power and push back against the narrative that a woman’s only role in true crime is that of the beautiful victim. Here are eight true crime books that explore the genre in wildly different and interesting ways. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote In 1959, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith killed four members of the Clutter family in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. The murders shocked America, and soon author Truman Capote arrived on the scene. He spent hours interviewing the victims’ family and friends, the Holcomb community, and the men convicted of the killings. He even attended their executions. Capote described In Cold Blood as a “nonfiction novel.” Most agree it’s a classic of the true crime genre. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll In Bright Young Women, Jessica Knoll fights against the idea that serial murderer Ted Bundy was smart, handsome, and charming. Her Bundy-inspired killer takes a backseat to the victims. Knoll shines a light on the brave, resilient women who survive a brutal attack at a Florida sorority house. She also gives a voice to the lives that were cut painfully short. This book is a powerful addition to true crime-inspired fiction. Sadie by Courtney Summers Sadie is the story of a girl trying to find her sister’s murderer, and a male podcaster telling their story. Summers’s choice to make the podcaster a man is no coincidence. Her novel is a fascinating, cutting exploration of how society in general, and the true crime genre in particular, exploits women and girls and turns their pain into entertainment. The Girls by Emma Cline Would you ever join a cult? In The Girls, 14-year-old protagonist Evie Boyd is lonely and bored when she meets a group of girls at a park. She is drawn to one older girl in particular, who invites her into a captivating, and dangerous, new world. Cline’s novel is inspired by real-life cult leader Charles Manson who ordered his followers to carry out seven gruesome murders in Los Angeles, California, in 1969. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter is one of my favorite villains. In The Silence of the Lambs, FBI trainee Clarice Starling seeks the advice of this brilliant, yet violent psychiatrist as she attempts to capture a serial killer nicknamed “Buffalo Bill.” The real-life case of Ed Gein provided the chilling blueprint for Buffalo Bill, who like Gein, removed his victims’ skin. It’s no surprise that Gein’s life also inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl takes the familiar story of the missing wife and shady husband and turns it on its head. Her characters, Nick and Amy Dunne, are not in a happy marriage. When Amy goes missing, all eyes turn to Nick. But Amy is so much more than she appears. Flynn has said she saw parallels between Gone Girl and the true story of Laci Peterson. Laci was eight months pregnant when she was reported missing in 2002. Her husband, Scott Peterson, played the grieving husband for the media. Two years later, he was convicted of murdering Laci and their unborn son. Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson Does literary crime fall into the true crime genre? For me it does! I read Go Ask Alice, the anonymous diary of a teenage addict, when I was in junior high. It is allegedly the true diary of a girl growing up in the 1960s. The girl falls in with a “bad crowd,” becomes addicted to drugs, and dies of an overdose. Only it turns out, the “diary” was fabricated, and the story of how this literary fraud was perpetrated must be read to be believed. The Family Plot by Megan Collins What would it be like to grow up in a family obsessed with true crime? Megan Collins explores this idea in her novel The Family Plot. The parents in the novel are obsessed with true crime, naming each of their children after famous murder victims. When the father dies and the adult children return home to bury him, they find their long-lost brother already buried in their father’s reserved plot. Several true crime cases are alluded to in this story, including the Black Dahlia, Charles Manson, and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. It’s a deliciously sinister read. *** Above is the cover reveal for Megan Cooley Peterson’s Dead Girls Talking, forthcoming from Holiday House in June 2024. View the full article
  9. A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers, from Bookmarks. * Michael Wolraich, The Bishop and the Butterfly (Union Square & Co.) “Wolraich’s account of the murder and the ensuing investigations, helmed by the former judge Samuel Seabury…is brick-dense yet propulsive. Unlike the sensationalist reporters of the era, Wolraich manages to handle even the seediest of underworlds with reportorial spareness and elegance, treating his material more as a nonfiction political thriller than a true-crime whodunit … The book also provides a fascinating portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then New York’s governor, as he navigated the fallout from Gordon’s murder and the public’s demands to clean up the state’s snakes’ nests … Equally unnerving is the book’s reminder of how infrequently and unevenly justice is meted out. While Wolraich justifiably marvels that Gordon’s murder led to the collapse of Tammany, this posthumous triumph was qualified by the fact that Gordon’s actual killers were exonerated by a jury.” –Lesley M.M. Blume (New York Times Book Review) Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings (Little Brown and Co.) “Nolan begins by embracing the genre’s major tropes (dead child, plucky journalist, family secrets) only to turn their governing logics against them with prosecutorial persistence and precision. This is a murder mystery in which there is little mystery about the murder, a page-turner in which the suspense hinges less on what happened than on how and why certain people become the people to whom such things happen … Nolan’s prose is clean and exacting, with an almost clinical interest in the power of shame: class shame, sexual shame, national shame, the shame of the addict. It seems to rank high among Nolan’s writerly principles that the cure for shame is honesty, however ugly the truth is … Nolan’s vision is grim but not hopeless, unflinching yet uncynical.” –Justin Taylor (The Washington Post) Paul Theroux, Burma Sahib (Mariner Books) “The Burma that he conjures in these pages is wonderfully present in lush and dense prose … Theroux is now in his early 80s and this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre. The talent is in remarkable shape.” –William Boyd (New York Times Book Review) Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wild (Harper) “It’s a gripping page-turner with a surprising twist, as a set of disgruntled survivors form an unlikely alliance and take drastic action. The complex characterizations and realistic scenarios converge to deliver a satisfying punch.” –(Publishers Weekly) Brandi Wells, The Cleaner (Hanover Square Press) “Darkly humorous and sharply observed … Wells has brilliantly crafted an obnoxiously opinionated, delusional, yet sympathetic raconteur, tightly holding the reader’s attention while exposing existential dread gleaned from petty human drama. And it’s so inappropriately fun to read.” –Andrienne Cruz (Booklist) View the full article
  10. Tisanes, hot chocolate, a pint, gin and gingerbeer, a strong cup of tea: it’s simply not a Christie mystery without an array of beverages at the ready. As a longterm Christie devotee, during re-reads, certain aspects of her usage of beverages kept asserting themselves. Whether it’s head honcho Poirot or a minor character murdered in the second chapter, what each character chooses to drink says something discernible about personality, class and historical context. Christie’s most famed detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple, certainly had their liquid preferences. “Hercule Poirot sat at breakfast in his small but agreeably cosy flat in Whitehall Mansions. He had enjoyed his brioche and his cup of hot chocolate. Unusually, for he was a creature of habit and rarely varied his breakfast routine, he asked his valet, George, to make him a second cup of chocolate.” In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, as well as in countless other Poirot short stories and mysteries, his passion for sweets also translates into his drink preferences. He loves his hot chocolate, as well as his sweet liqueurs, such as creme de menthe and sirop de cassis. It’s also hard to forget Poirot’s passion for tisanes, various herbal teas. These preferences become a literary nod to his “foreign” character. When Poirot requests these libations, the general response of his friends or those around him is to be incredulous that anyone would want to imbibe such concoctions. Poirot’s unusual liquid preferences for the time are chalked up to his Belgian nationality and status as an outsider, as well as his flamboyant stylistic choices. On the flip side, elderly amateur detective Miss Marple is as stereotypically Victorian British as can be, preferring a strong cup of tea. No cocktails, liqueurs or ale for Miss Marple, although she does keep brandy on hand for gentlemen callers or in case of shock. In fact, the only occasion where Miss Marple nearly ends up being poisoned, in Nemesis, a soothing nighttime “milky drink” is offered to her. A nightcap or an espresso simply wouldn’t have been a logical in-character option for Jane Marple. Marple fans often find her character a reassuring presence, and her teatime scenes ooze coziness- even when in Bertram’s Hotel with its legendary high tea services, things aren’t as cozy as they seem. Christie also makes subtle social commentary about class, gender and profession by what many of the other characters opt for: the burly policemen and British detectives in Christie’s work go in for ale or beer, the Bright Young Things and beatniks down cocktails and Champagne, and intellectuals opt for black coffee. The upper-class characters who had the means to travel in luxury, such as resort tourists in A Caribbean Mystery, indulge in tropical period drinks like Planters Punch (a Jamaican rum cocktail from the late 1800’s). In another exotic travel setting, passengers riding the Orient Express in Murder on the Orient Express indulged in cocktails, likely sidecars, Sazeracs and mint juleps. Christie also famously offs a lot of her murder victims with the help of a drink, owing likely in part to her wartime work at a dispensary which gave her a vast working knowledge of various poisons. Heather Badcock meets her end after a poisoned daiquiri at a house party in The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side. An unfortunate vicar departs the world following a lethal cocktail in Three Act Tragedy, while Rosemary Barton drinks a fatal Champagne laced with cyanide in, as one might guess from the title, Sparkling Cyanide. Several characters in her short stories are poisoned with black coffee or tea as the means to kill; with the bitter taste of coffee and the tannins in tea helping to mask the flavor of the danger lurking within. Not only, though, do these liquids play a part in the storyline, but again, the murderous beverages are an indicator of the victim’s personality and societal status. One might even argue that the crime could not have occurred if said victim was not the type of person, as it were, to have downed the drink. Heather Badcock was chatty and overly excited to see her heroine. A rum-based daiquiri would’ve been exotic and exciting for someone who likely never had a “fancy” mixed drink on a regular basis. Wealthy Rosemary Barton faced her doom at a fancy birthday dinner at an upscale restaurant – champagne was de rigueur. The mention of a murdered elderly lady by the swapping out of hat paint for syrup of figs in Cards on the Table is yet another brilliant instance. Similar to how Miss Marple would never have been able to be poisoned with beer or a cappuccino, an invalid yet relatively well-to-do elderly woman’s killer would’ve also had to resort to a drink that made (fatal) sense for their victim to quench. Christie, I’ll drink to that! View the full article
  11. A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers, from Bookmarks. * Michael Wolraich, The Bishop and the Butterfly (Union Square & Co.) “Wolraich’s account of the murder and the ensuing investigations, helmed by the former judge Samuel Seabury…is brick-dense yet propulsive. Unlike the sensationalist reporters of the era, Wolraich manages to handle even the seediest of underworlds with reportorial spareness and elegance, treating his material more as a nonfiction political thriller than a true-crime whodunit … The book also provides a fascinating portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then New York’s governor, as he navigated the fallout from Gordon’s murder and the public’s demands to clean up the state’s snakes’ nests … Equally unnerving is the book’s reminder of how infrequently and unevenly justice is meted out. While Wolraich justifiably marvels that Gordon’s murder led to the collapse of Tammany, this posthumous triumph was qualified by the fact that Gordon’s actual killers were exonerated by a jury.” –Lesley M.M. Blume (New York Times Book Review) Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings (Little Brown and Co.) “Nolan begins by embracing the genre’s major tropes (dead child, plucky journalist, family secrets) only to turn their governing logics against them with prosecutorial persistence and precision. This is a murder mystery in which there is little mystery about the murder, a page-turner in which the suspense hinges less on what happened than on how and why certain people become the people to whom such things happen … Nolan’s prose is clean and exacting, with an almost clinical interest in the power of shame: class shame, sexual shame, national shame, the shame of the addict. It seems to rank high among Nolan’s writerly principles that the cure for shame is honesty, however ugly the truth is … Nolan’s vision is grim but not hopeless, unflinching yet uncynical.” –Justin Taylor (The Washington Post) Paul Theroux, Burma Sahib (Mariner Books) “The Burma that he conjures in these pages is wonderfully present in lush and dense prose … Theroux is now in his early 80s and this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre. The talent is in remarkable shape.” –William Boyd (New York Times Book Review) Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wild (Harper) “It’s a gripping page-turner with a surprising twist, as a set of disgruntled survivors form an unlikely alliance and take drastic action. The complex characterizations and realistic scenarios converge to deliver a satisfying punch.” –(Publishers Weekly) Brandi Wells, The Cleaner (Hanover Square Press) “Darkly humorous and sharply observed … Wells has brilliantly crafted an obnoxiously opinionated, delusional, yet sympathetic raconteur, tightly holding the reader’s attention while exposing existential dread gleaned from petty human drama. And it’s so inappropriately fun to read.” –Andrienne Cruz (Booklist) View the full article
  12. You’re reading a mystery. You want to know whodunnit. You follow the detective—maybe it’s a cop or a PI, maybe it’s an amateur sleuth forced into circumstances to play that role—as they unearth clue after clue. Eventually, they identify the villain. How? By marshalling evidence. Maybe there are fingerprints. A witness. DNA. A confession in the penultimate chapter. You as the reader finally arrive at that elusive thing, The Truth. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? All mysteries are, in a way, a search for truth. Hell, fiction in general is such a search—mysteries are just a tad more bold about it. We read to learn something about ourselves, the people around us, the human condition. So what happens when no one can agree on truth? For too long now, we’ve been living in an age of disinformation. Conspiracy theories, deep fakes, propaganda, bald-faced lies. Between the reality-distorting power of the internet and social media, and certain politicians’ willingness to say just about anything to win power, it’s never been harder to get people to agree on basic facts. People claim to have their own facts, alternative facts, their own evidence. Everyone has their rabbit hole, their echo chamber. Everyone is a villain to someone else. Because of all this, we’ve gotten used to the common refrain that we live in “unprecedented times.” But the thing about writing historical fiction is that you realize that pretty much nothing is unprecedented. All kinds of crazy stuff has happened in human history; it’s surprisingly hard for anything to happen today that hasn’t been foreshadowed at some other time in our history. There are precedents everywhere. We trip over them like a detective trips over a body in the dark. As rampant with lies as 2024 may be (and with an election on the horizon, it’s only going to get worse), and scary as it may be to see the pillars of our society shaken to their very foundations, things were equally scary in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Okay, I know that’s not exactly comforting—no one wants to live through another world war or another fascist dictatorship—but it puts our current troubles in perspective to remind ourselves that our grandparents lived through similar turmoil and found their way to the other side. I’ve always wanted to write a World War II-era crime story, and I’ve always wanted to set something in Boston, the closest big city to where I grew up. Boston is the so-called “cradle of liberty” and an academic mecca where the search for truth is taken seriously indeed. My new novel, The Rumor Game, takes place in 1943 and follows a Boston reporter whose job is to write a weekly column that disproves harmful war rumors. Like the rumor that if women who had perms worked in a munitions plant, their heads would explode (an actual rumor at the time!). America was fighting in the Pacific, had already fought in North Africa, and was planning an invasion of Europe, and the home front was rife with rumors and gossip. Some of it was simply the result of fear, some of it was political posturing, and some was actual propaganda placed by Axis agents. Like the one about the Army hiring abortion doctors because so many “loose women” were serving in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Or the one about Jews not enlisting for the draft. Or the one about Blacks secretly spying for the Japanese. It’s surprising, and at the same time not that surprising at all, the things people will say about each other during times of great stress. Especially about people who look different than them. When my character finds that one of the rumors she’s trying to disprove ties into an FBI agent’s murder investigation, things get complicated. Two people who have great reason to distrust each other, and who disagree politically and live in their own rabbit holes, and who both have ulterior motives, will have to work together to find the truth. Or something close to the truth. If they can even agree on what the truth actually is. *** View the full article
  13. I often wonder when reading mysteries such as the first of its kind The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins or the groundbreaking Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, what would I do if I was wrongly accused of a crime like certain protagonists in these novels? Would I vigorously proclaim my innocence or would I be so shocked that I’d be incapable of speaking up at all? Knowing myself and my inability to remain quiet in general never mind while being accused of a heinous crime I didn’t commit, I’m betting on the former. However, I can’t really know, can I? Unless it happens, and I really don’t want it to. Still it fascinates me, wondering how I’d handle such a fraught situation, which leads me to my topic today. Mystery novels have long captivated readers with their intricate plots, enigmatic characters, and unexpected twists. One subset of the genre that consistently intrigues and engages audiences is the mystery where the protagonist is compelled to solve the crime, because they are the prime suspect. This unique narrative approach adds an extra layer of complexity and suspense to the story, leaving readers eagerly turning pages to unravel the truth behind the falsely accused investigator. Here are some of my theories as to why these types of mysteries are so compelling. Empathy and Connection: One of the primary reasons readers are enamored with mysteries featuring wrongly accused main characters is their personal feelings about the protagonist, especially if it’s a long running series. The sleuth, either a sharp and insightful professional or a quirky yet likable amateur, suddenly finds they’re under suspicion of a crime like Agatha Raisin in M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. Readers are invested in Raisin’s struggle to remove suspicion from herself, creating an emotional bond that heightens the stakes of the investigation. Twisted Morality Play: Mysteries often delve into the complexities of human nature, morality, and justice as seen in Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson where the protagonist has no memory of her past and discovers she’s a suspect in a crime she can’t remember. This transforms the narrative into a compelling morality play, especially when she has no idea who she can trust, including herself. Readers are presented with a scenario where right and wrong are blurred, and they are left pondering the ethical dilemmas faced by the falsely accused. Suspenseful Plot Development: The wrongly accused detective trope injects a healthy dose of suspense into the plot. The more the evidence stacks up against the main character, the more invested the reader becomes. As the reader follows the investigation, they are simultaneously unraveling two mysteries—the original crime and the detective’s predicament. The dual narrative creates a dynamic storytelling experience, keeping readers guessing as they eagerly anticipate the resolution of both mysteries as in Lincoln Rhyme’s quest to prove his innocence and find the real killer in The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver. Unpredictability and Surprise: The essence of a good mystery lies in its ability to surprise and confound readers. When the detective is wrongly accused, it subverts expectations and challenges conventional storytelling norms. Kinsey Millhone in Sue Grafton’s H Is for Homicide has to use her private investigator skills to get out of jail by working a fraud case for the local police. Readers are compelled to work alongside her as she infiltrates a crime ring, trying to discover the real culprit among a cast of sketchy characters. The unpredictable nature of having a main character barter for their freedom keeps readers engaged and invested in the story until the very end. Character Development: The wrongly accused protagonist trope offers an excellent opportunity for character development. Readers witness the investigator facing adversity—do they protest their innocence or make a run for it and why? Following the main character as they navigate personal and professional challenges draws the reader deeply into their world. Rusty Sabich in Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent is a perfect example of how character growth adds richness to the story, transforming the protagonist into a multidimensional and flawed figure that the reader can’t help but root for. Mysteries where the detective is wrongly accused provide a captivating and immersive reading experience. How could a reader not be invested in Travis McGee’s need to prove his innocence when he’s wrongly arrested in John D. MacDonald’s The Long Lavender Look? The emotional connection with the protagonist, the exploration of morality, the suspenseful plot development, the element of surprise, and the opportunity for character growth collectively contribute to the enduring appeal of this subgenre. As readers immerse themselves in these enigmatic tales, they are not only solving crimes but also embarking on a thrilling journey of self-discovery and moral introspection. Also, these novels give a me a wide variety of scenarios to ponder when I wonder what would I do if I was wrongly accused of a crime I didn’t commit? What would you do? *** View the full article
  14. Mary Kubica is a very private person. So private, in fact, no one but her husband knew she’d started writing a novel, The Good Girl. And even then, she didn’t let him read her manuscript. She fell in love with writing when she was almost a teenager, she says. “It was one of those things that when I discovered it, I never stopped…It was very much a hobby for me. I never thought it was something I would pursue.” She studied history and English in college and took one creative writing class where she wouldn’t even share her written musings with classmates. After college she taught history in the Chicago suburbs to high school freshmen and juniors. Standing in front of a classroom not far from where she grew up energized her, she says. This says a lot about Kubica. She not shy, just private. After she married and had her first child, she finally started to take writing seriously. Her daughter was just three weeks old, and being at home all the time, Kubica found time to write when her baby was napping. And then a lightbulb went off that changed her life. “When I started The Good Girl, I thought it was going to be a love story…It was starting to develop questions that I didn’t have answers to…So it was totally by accident (that it became a mystery).” She’d never written a novel before. Ever since she was young, she’d started but never finished one either. She just lost interest. “Not with The Good Girl,” she says, “because I put the elements of mystery in it, and it kept my attention. I knew I was supposed to be writing.” “It was the first thing I wrote that has any suspense and mystery elements at all. I felt it was my calling…It was the first thing that I really felt I wanted to get out into the world.” The Good Girl is about a young woman, Mia Dennett, from a prominent family that is fractured, a fact no one is willing to admit, not even to themselves. But Mia feels it. Her dad is a prominent judge and distant father. Her mother, a middling socialite. Mia is kidnapped and held in a cabin deep in the woods by a young man she eventually falls for. The Good Girl explores their evolving relationship and ends with a shocking twist. Kubica wrote her novel from several points of view: Mia, her kidnapper, her mother, and a detective who’s investigating her case. “I’m not a plotter, so it started with this idea of a missing woman…I liked the idea of exploring it from different characters’ points of view. I didn’t write the book in the way you read it…I definitely had to tweak things, so everything was revealed at the right point…that was really a fun experience.” She struggled to find the best way to organize it, so it took a while. In fact, it took five years to interweave all of her characters’ stories. “I knew in my head if I jumped back and forth, it would get very jumbled.” And it did for a while. And to add more hurdles for the young writer, the story flashes from present day to the past. Doing both in a single story is no easy task. For a first-time novelist, it’s like reaching the summit of Mount Everest and planting your literary stake on your first try. When she finally sent a query letter in search of an agent, she was still navigating the guardrails protecting her private writing world. “I think I had to find the confidence to put my work out there.” And it was certainly out there. She contacted 100 agents, and only three eventually expressed interest. But over the months, all three turned her down. She waited two years for a positive response, and none came. And then one day she received a call from Rachel Dillon Fried, a former agent’s assistant. She’d read Kubica’s manuscript two years earlier, but the agent she worked for took a pass. Fried never forgot Kubica’s manuscript and how much she liked it. When she finally was promoted to agent, her top priority was to make The Good Girl one of her first acquisitions. She sold Kubica’s novel to Mira Books and editor Erika Imranyi took over. During the editing process Kubica struggled to handle her editor’s criticism, something she’d never experienced because she’d kept her manuscript to herself. This was the first time anyone had cast a critical eye on every line of her work. “It was hard. You need to be prepared for it,” Kubica says. “That feedback from the editor is so crucial to the process and you have to get used to it. I’ve met some first-time authors who pull back, but it’s so important.” Even after she was published, she still worried her words were inadequate. “The first time I saw The Good Girl in a bookstore my reaction was it was out there for everyone to see…I had no idea though, how it was going to do—if anybody was going to read it. I’m also a bit of a pessimist. I was just thrilled to be published.” However, she says, “I knew that they (Mira) believed in it and that was huge.” And boy did they. Her publisher Mira Books (a division of Harlequin before it merged with HarperCollins) was so enthusiastic about The Good Girl that they paid to splash it on the cover of Publisher’s Weekly where it received a starred review. But as every writer knows, not every review is stellar and over the years Kubica has had to learn how to deal with bad reviews. “You’re never going to please everybody, and I’ve had to tell myself that…I have to write what I want to read…That’s all I can control. I can’t control how the reader responds to it.” She says it took her time to deal with opening up to the world. “My editor even told me to stay off Goodreads reviews.” One of her biggest thrills was attending the BookExpo America when it was at New York’s Javits Center. When she arrived, she saw Mira’s giant banner hanging from the ceiling announcing her novel. The hardback sold well, but never in the bestseller stratosphere. About a year later, eBook sales picked up just as The Good Girl began its paperback run and sales exploded. Kubica hit the New York Times bestseller list with her first novel, and it continued to sell. Today, more than a million copies have sold. Not bad for a debut author. Since her first novel, Kubica has continued to tell her stories through multiple points of view—in fact all her subsequent novels are written in her signature multiple point-of-view style. And since her first novel she’s streamlined her writing process by first writing each character’s entire story. She then weaves the parallel plots together into yet another bestselling suspense read. Writers as a whole suffer from all kinds of insecurities. They are shy, introverts, and like in Kubica’s case, sometimes very private. They struggle every day to overcome these personality glitches because they know they have something to say and must reach out to say it. So, it’s no small accomplishment for someone who values her privacy the way Kubica does, who never saw herself as pursuing a writing career, still manage to lay herself bare to the world. And the world is a lot happier for it. ___________________________________ The Good Girl ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 5 years I want to be a writer: Age 12 or 13 Experience: Writing was my hobby. Agents Contacted: 100 Agent Rejections: 97 Time to find agent 2 years First Novel Agent: Rachel Dillon Fried First Novel Editor: Erika Imranyi First Novel Publisher: Mira Books Age when published: 27 Inspiration: Examining everyday people and what they do in extraordinary situations. I’m a news junky so I get a lot of ideas there, and put my own spin on it. Website: MaryKubica.com Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, and Lisa Gardner. View the full article
  15. When I was asked to contribute an essay to CrimeReads, I was given a choice between compiling a Reading List, or to come up with something pertaining to the Themes in my debut novel, Hollywood Hustle. I can tell you, I hate making lists (even for grocery shopping) but since I couldn’t get anything done without them, I make them anyway. And though, as a new author, I have found other author’s suggestion lists to be invaluable to me, being so new to this game I fear a reading list of my favorite books would be a mere echo of so many better curated ones. Kind of like a recipe for spaghetti: Everybody got one, you don’t need mine. But “Theme” is something I can get behind. I theorize that we writers return to the same themes again and again, whether we try to or not, or even whether we’re even aware of it or not. To go a bit further, their origin may be a complete mystery to us. An enigma. I know it is for me. But why do we tend to return to the same themes? A theme is more than a subject, concept, thread, or motif. It derives from the same personal, internal, creative source that our stories do. Without a doubt, the main theme in my book is Redemption. That word is generally defined as “the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil.” In other words, an act that gives someone, being ourselves or someone our main character loves, a future that one can survive, and even thrive in. But what is the root of that redemptive act? For me, it would be “hope”. Hope as a theme (and its first cousin Redemption) is all over my work. Why? Because it is all over my life. How could it not be? I work in Showbiz. Hope is what gets those of us in this business out of bed in the morning, that the embrace of hope will energize us to perform an act that will redeem our lot in life, especially when we are, as we say in Hollywood, “between jobs”. Trust me, a lot of hope is required for those lean times, and we all endure them. If I really unpack it, I can safely say that Hope is a major theme in the screenplays I wrote before coming to novels. Which begs yet another question: What is driving the need to sit down and write in the first place? (I’ll leave that to the shrinks, since I fear figuring it out could diminish my desire to write.) But the more I’ve come to know other authors, the more I’ve also come to believe that the inclusion of repeating themes in our work is fairly universal, albeit mysterious. Perhaps for the simple reason that the presence in our consciousness of that personal “theme” is a reflection of what we’ve most experienced in our lives. When it comes to the notion that a given theme cannot help but seep into our work, it’s because it is almost like a living verb that’s taken up residence inside us. Since my training and background is in the world of drama, Film, TV, Theatre, I’ve had to think about “theme” a lot, but I don’t think I really understood it until I read the late Sidney Lumet’s book, Making Movies. In it, he stresses the importance of clearly identifying the theme of any piece, as that clarity would guide his creative approach. That is to say, he would get clear on the theme, and then he would know how to tell his story. Of course, as a filmmaker, his responsibility was to determine the visual approach to the work after the script had been written. But Lumet was a prolific writer himself who authored many of his own screenplays, either solo or with a collaborator. He also stated that any theme needs to be boiled down to one or two words, again, for clarity’s sake. But Lumet’s handling of Theme is an element he defines before he would shoot his film, which was his real work. As novelists, we tend not to identify it at least after our first draft. A screenplay is a completely different animal, as it is not a finished work. It is more of a big-a** outline for what comes next. (In filmmaking we like to say the script is one thing, then during shooting it becomes something else, and then in editing it becomes something else, yet again.) But, I admit, this is only my hypothesis. So I asked a few colleagues, starting with my friend, best-selling author Alex Finlay, to weigh in. When asked if he tends to return to the same themes, he answered: “I don’t go into a novel with a theme in mind, but instead, I’m just hoping for characters and a story that will keep me motivated and interested enough to finish the damn thing. But at some point, I realized that all of my books – from Every Last Fear to my upcoming If Something Happens to Me – deal with the legacy of trauma, or, more accurately, people coming out on the other side. Not to get too insufferably literary, but a quote from Hemingway captures my recurring theme: ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’” Now, I won’t presume (nor will I ask) why Trauma has been a recurring theme for Alex, but having read all of his books (minus the yet-to-be-released title) I can easily see what he’s talking about. There is definitely something about trauma that threads throughout Alex’s work. But by his own admission, there is an even deeper angle, something at the end of the trauma: Survival. Writing is a journey of its own, and for Alex it also seems to be a journey through trauma to the ultimate destination of survival. Perhaps “survival” is a better word for what he’s exploring when he writes? That I will ask him. (And Alex, you could never be “insufferably literary”, only compellingly so.) Says #1 New York Times best-selling author Lisa Gardner, “For theme, I gotta go with Alex. I never plan a theme in advance. Most of my thrillers have been based around some central question from what would you do if you discovered you were married to a serial killer (my first novel The Perfect Husband) to what kind of person would dedicate her life to finding missing people the rest of the world has forgotten (the Frankie Elkin series). Having said that, many of my novels have shared similar themes which have evolved over time. For a bit, I was definitely exploring what does it mean to be a survivor (from surviving to thriving).” Ms. Gardner had more to say on the subject that I did not include here, but that also reflected her process of not identifying a theme when she writes, but rather a conscious exploration of her main character’s living condition within the context of a engrossing story (and I will point out there’s that survive/thrive thing again.) For Blake Crouch (Dark Matter, Recursion) he may be conscious of wrestling with something in his personal life while he’s writing his story but (like Alex and Lisa) he’s not chasing an identified theme as he writes: “In terms of the themes in my writing, I tend to gravitate toward issues I’m dealing with at the time. In this way, my writing becomes a kind of self-therapy. I discover and work through my issues with the characters in my book. However, I often don’t realize what theme/issue I’m tackling until the first draft of the book is finished.” I’ll make the claim that these three highly accomplished authors support my basic point; that there’s something elliptical within that drives us through the telling of our stories. I don’t sit down and say, “I’m going to write about redemption today,” any more than Alex declares he’s going to write about trauma. It just comes out that way. But I’ve learned what they share in their creative journeys is that they all tend to explore some theme that involves “overcoming.” So now I have to wonder if that is part of what we experience in the simple act of trying to write a complete story in novel form: Will I overcome this process of writing enough to survive … and thrive? I suppose my second novel will feature Redemption, as well, as will my (developing) third. But I won’t know for sure until the story dictates itself to me, tells me where it wants to go, dead bodies, and all. I do know that every time an author finishes a novel, they are better at it than they were on the previous one. Could that be the internal engine driving us? That if we complete this book, we have survived it … and thrived? And therefore, we are redeemed? I really don’t know, because I still don’t know where the hell it comes from. As Alex reminds us of what Hemingway said, I do know this, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” *** View the full article
  16. Pharaoh Ramesses II was an unrepentant warmonger and slaver, but he is also credited with building the earliest known library in the 1200s BCE. To paraphrase the equally problematic Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes. Inscribed in stone over the sacred library doors was a Greek phrase meaning “healing place of the soul.” Rather elegant for a man who almost certainly married at least four of his daughters, but I can’t argue the point. Stories heal. Books save lives. I’m proof, and odds are, some of you are too. The first book I remember finding myself in was Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Like Jonas, I had seen things I could never unsee, things I could not explain to other kids. Partly because I didn’t have the language, and partly because we never stayed in one place long enough. My protector was sometimes my predator, sometimes my best friend, sometimes in need of protection herself. I saw the system fail long before most kids my age knew that it could, and that knowing marks you. In Jonas I found a mirror. In his choice to use the very things that made him different to help others, I found hope. I found a paradigm where hurt kids could lead, inspire, and find their own way. Later, I would meet myself in the lunar-eyed girls of Francesca Lia Block’s achingly beautiful novels. I met girls who saw rainbows in oil-slicked puddles and cried at the beauty of music, and also sometimes cried for no reason at all. I met girls who sometimes stopped eating because it made them feel light and clean when nothing else could, and who sometimes loved people who didn’t come back and instead of growing numb, chose to love all the fiercer for it. In her books and others I found stories of kids who sometimes hurt themselves because watching the scabs form was the only thing that made them believe that someday they could heal from everything else. I found friendships that existed only in my heart, friendships that planted seeds where someday flowers would bloom into a path to the flesh-and-blood people who would become my chosen family. Writing is about telling a great story, sure. But for me, part of what gives those stories their glitter is the fairy dust of the writer’s own loves and hurts, their fears and furies woven into unforgettable characters. I owe everything to those who came before and put so much of their hearts into those stories. When I began writing Till Human Voices Wake Us, I knew who Cia was: a bold, clever girl who had survived this incredible tragedy determined that it wasn’t going to define her. But some ghosts refuse to stay buried, and trauma ignored always claims its due. I knew that Cia’s journey would be as much about having the courage to go back as it would be about the choices she would make moving forward. At the time I began writing this book, the world as I knew it was shifting. Maybe avalanching is a better word. Politicians began burning books on TikTok and xenophobia became resoundingly-endorsed policy. Hate speech was endorsed by global leaders as the hallmark of freedom, and the fragility of civil liberties already paid for in blood became heartbreakingly evident to those privileged enough to have taken them for granted. This book was born out of the question of who we will allow to chart our course from here: the dreamers or the fear-mongers? The builders of bridges or the builders of walls? And can anything correct our course if we choose wrong? Cia’s story is about finding your footing when the world drops its mask and stops pretending to be anything but a battlefield. It’s about the wounds we carry and what we choose to do with them. Do we love bigger and harder for the hurt that we’ve endured, or do we weaponize it to protect ourselves and those we care about? * View the full article
  17. Peg Tyre and Peter Blauner are New York Times bestselling authors who have over a dozen published novels and multiple awards between them. They’ve also been married for 34 years. Their novels STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT and THE INTRUDER, originally published in the 90s, are both being released for the first time in hardcover by Dead Sky Publishing. Peter Blauner: Most people these days mainly know you as a responsible and respectable journalist who writes very seriously about subjects like education. They have no idea you published a pair of funny, scary, sexy crime novels back in the 1990s. You want to tell them how that happened or should I spill the beans? Peg Tyre: Well, getting a book republished after all these years is like meeting an old version of yourself. I guess I’ve evolved. The newspaper business I was part of went away, and other opportunities in journalism came up, and then other opportunities outside of journalism. I’m the same person, just older. What do you think, Peter more mellow? PB: I don’t think people looking for “mellow” reach for the Peg Tyre shelf. I think people looking for excitement and scintillating ideas are more in your aisle. Anyway, when you wrote this book, you were already holding down a full-time job covering crime for a New York newspaper and raising a toddler. What on earth were you thinking? PT: Ha! From one point of view, it was a kind of madness. From another, it was just the writing life. Nobody ever says, “Ok, now the world is gonna just slow down for you so you can figure out how to write that novel.” You have to do it however you can. One thing about living with you, Peter, is that your work habits are like a metronome. Very steady. Very deliberate. Very unswerving. I absorbed some of that, which I needed to be productive. I’ve always had a lot of energy and a weird stubborn kind of stamina and focus but watching you defend your regular writing time helped. I also felt like these stories were bursting out of me and it was a great relief to sit down and try to get them on the page. PB: How weird was it that you went from writing about Donald Trump and these snooty society types in a New York magazine gossip column to covering down-and-dirty crime in the Bronx and Queens? Most people who went to the kind of colleges you went to didn’t really understand why you would want to do that. A lot of them might have thought that was deliberately stepping from the penthouse into the gutter. How can you explain that to “normal people”? PT: Honestly, it was such a step up. I mean, I took that society job because I needed the work but I hated that phony baloney ego stroking. I had a low opinion of journalists who covered rich people, hoping that some of their god-like aura that surrounds the wealthy would rub off on those ink stained schlubs.. It’s sad. Pathetic, really. I wasn’t raised around people who were wealthy and powerful and I guess I never got the memo that I was supposed to measure people for the size of their bank accounts. Covering crime, I learned a lot about people – and saw some pretty terrible things, brutal things, craven things but also situations in which people acted in a way that was amazing, astonishing, heroic and beautiful. Also, funny. It really helped me formulate a world view. PB: One thing I love about re-reading the nove—I should say one of the things that I love—is that it captures a particular time in the city and the romance of the Big City newspapers in what was probably their last great era. But there were also terrible things going on: rampant inequality, five or six murders a day, AIDS, and all the other hallmarks of the 80s and 90s?, Do you think younger readers will understand what was fun about being a reporter then? PT: Well, it wasn’t a desk job, that’s for sure, And every day, I felt like I was in it. Anything that was happening in this big wild pulsating chaotic city could randomly come careering into my life. And I never knew on Monday what Tuesday would look like. And it could be wildly frustrating—I mean, standing outside the yellow tape of a crime scene while the detectives talked to my (male) competition—ugh. And it also could be just wild. Like one time, a currency exchange place got robbed at JFK airport and I went out to figure out what had happened. On the face of it, it’s a dumb crime to follow up on. Reporters don’t spend too much time on bank robberies and the like because it’s all corporate PR people trying to prevent you from finding out what happened. But when I got to JFK, the people who worked at the currency exchange place couldn’t wait to talk to me. They were saying “It was Bernie! He robbed us! He’s the sweet old guy who has been sweeping the floors here for 20 years! He did it! But he loved us! He was like family, “What could have come over him?” It was unexpected. They gave me Bernie’s address and I went straight to his house and rang the doorbell. His adult son answered, and he told me this dad was a good man, the centerpiece and caretaker of his big extended family. The son shared that just five minutes ago, the son had found a shoe box of cash and a note, which he produced for me. The note recounts that Bernie, at the insistence of his family, had gone to the doctor for his longtime stomach ache and while he was waiting for the test results, he’d become convinced he was dying of cancer. He admitted, apologetically, that he’d robbed his old friends at the currency exchange place so his family would have some money after he was dead. And that he was going off to kill himself to save him and his family the agony of watching his slow painful death. Well, that’s a story, I thought. But it got crazier. The adult son tells me his dad doesn’t have cancer. The doctor called that morning, after Bernie had left for work, to say Bernie’s stomach pain was caused by an ulcer. Remember, this is before cell phones. So now Bernie is somewhere, believing he’s a wanted man, dying of cancer, getting ready to end his own life. And everyone—his son, his wife, the neighbors, the people he robbed—they all are like “BERNIE COME HOME! IT’S NOT CANCER!”—which of course, was my front page headline the next day. And then the local Tv stations picked it up. And it was the story of the week. I ended up finding Bernie a hot shot lawyer who I knew from another story I was working on, who brokered Bernie’s surrender to the District Attorney, who was totally charmed by the old man’s story. Bernie ended up getting Pepto Bismol and supervised release. I mean, that’s the kind of thing that could happen on a Tuesday. And who knows what Thursday would look like. PB: I still think the story of Bernie could be a novel as well. But there’s something I notice when you try to tell younger people these stories about the Bad Old Days in the city. They get this kind of petrified look. Sometimes I think they just don’t understand what it used to be like. And then other times, I think they’re just appalled that we were so into the mayhem of it. Especially when we’re trying to explain how things could be terrifying and funny at the same time. What do you think has changed? Could you write a book like Strangers in the Night or The Intruder now? PT: Some readers are looking for experiences—and stories—that are affirming and comfortable. I don’t think either of us could really relate to that when we were younger (although personally, I get it a little more now.) Generally, we have always put ourselves in weird situations for the sheer joy of hearing people’s stories. I mean, you were in Egypt during the Arab spring, and the West Bank and Gilgo Beach researching that serial killer. I think if you are up for engaging with the true panorama of human experience, the kind of books we’ve written could be for you. PB: When I look at the novel again, I remember how much I loved Kate Murray the reporter. But I also love all the funny little realistic details like the detectives watching the animal documentaries when they’re supposed to be working and the reporter who tries to curry favor by writing “Ode to Sparky,” about a dog who died. Somebody could describe the book as The Front Page meets Sex in the City, but Strangers in the Night is actually much more matter of fact than either of those. What parts stood out for you when you looked at it again? PT : Awww, Peter. You are too kind. You’ve always been my biggest cheerleader and I appreciate that about you. What stood out for me is the sheer level of energy in these books—and this was before Adderall. And how they are full of longing. I think a lot of people could still relate to that. *** Peg Tyre, the bestselling author of THE TROUBLE WITH BOYS, has written for Newsweek, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Fast Company and Scientific American. She has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Clarion Award, and a National Education Writers Association Award and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Tyre’s novel, STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT, was recently re-released by Dead Sky Publishing. She lives in New York City with her husband, novelist Peter Blauner, and their two sons. Peter Blauner is the author of nine novels, including THE INTRUDER, a New York Times bestseller and bestseller overseas that will soon be released for the first time in hardcover from Dead Sky Publishing. He first broke into print as a journalist, writing cover stories for New York magazine about crime and politics. He has written for numerous TV shows, his novels have been published in twenty-five languages and his short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and NPR’s Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, the bestselling author Peg Tyre. View the full article
  18. My debut novel is a tribute to my hero, Jane Austen, in the format of a murder mystery. It is fitting because Austen’s classic works are essentially mysteries where the heroine must uncover the true characters of those around her, especially the hero. In a world where a women’s entire future depends upon who she marries, it pays to investigates one’s love interest thoroughly. With that in mind, here are all six of Jane Austen’s heroines, ranked from worst to best for their detection skills. There is one young woman who combines all these qualities in abundance and whose prowess at sleuthing outshines even her greatest protagonist, and that’s Austen herself. Throughout her works and letters, she displays an innate understanding of human nature, a passion for justice, and an unflinching gaze at the mercenary society which she inhabits. That’s why, when I was looking for a way to tell Austen’s life story, I couldn’t resist making her the star of her very own murder mystery. In this first installment, Miss Austen Investigates, The Hapless Milliner, my Jane is very young and most definitely in her Catherine Morland era. However, when the body of a milliner is found bludgeoned to death at a ball, and Jane’s gentle brother Georgy is thrown into gaol, nothing will prevent her from using her sharp wit and fierce determination to uncover the true culprit and save Georgy from the gallows. Emma Woodhouse It’s ironic that Austen’s most lacklustre sleuth is the protagonist of her most perfect mystery, for Emma follows the conventions of a contemporary whodunnit. There’s no dead body, but Austen cleverly sprinkles the clues as to the real story, the secret engagement between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, throughout the narrative. Unfortunately, Emma is too self-absorbed to spot them. The sheltered life she’s endured trapped at Hartfield with her controlling father, combined with her extreme privilege, have left her bereft of insight. She really is clueless. Although Emma develops enough self-awareness to regret her terrible behavior and understand her romantic feelings for Mr Knightley by the end of the novel, in terms of sleuthing skills, I’m afraid it’s ‘badly done, indeed!’ Catherine Morland Catherine should be most suited to a life of solving cozy crime. The ‘horrid’ Gothic novels she’s read (the Regency equivalent of our true crime obsession?) make her an expert on dastardly deeds and she’s on the hunt for the truth about what happened to the former mistress of Northanger Abbey as soon as she arrives. At first, it might seem as if Austen is encouraging us to laugh at Catherine’s wild imagination when she accuses General Tilney of murdering his wife. Catherine is certainly mortified and allows herself to be persuaded out of her convictions by Henry Tilney’s pompous sermon. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that Catherine turns out to be right – there is something monstrously callous about General Tilney, who throws teenage Catherine out of his house, at a moment’s notice and with no protection, for not being as rich as he thought she was. Excellent instincts Catherine. Fanny Price Unlike Emma and Catherine, poor Fanny doesn’t have the luxury of complacency. Having been ripped away from her family and emotionally abused by her wealthy relations, Fanny is constantly on her guard. Rightfully so, as one wrong move and she’s sent back to her negligent parents as punishment for refusing a socially and financially advantageous match in Henry Crawford. But Fanny won’t bend. She saw through Henry’s roguish charms the moment he arrived on the scene. Her lowly status and her own timidity leave her powerless to prevent the corruption wreaking havoc at Mansfield Park—from the inappropriate choice of amateur dramatics to the slavery it’s built on—but she sees everything, and, through her, we see it too. In Fanny’s own words: ‘I was quiet, but I was not blind.’ Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot Joint runners up are ‘sensible’ Elinor and ‘capable’ Anne. Their steady temperaments mean others are constantly confiding in them, even when Elinor and Anne would rather they did not. Colonel Brandon trusts Elinor with the tragic tale of Eliza Williams because, unlike the emotionally incontinent Marianne, he knows she can govern her response to it. Lucy Steele forces Elinor into her confidence to warn her off her fiancé, and even Willoughby has the gall to make Elinor his confessor. Rather than collapsing under the burden of everyone else’s admissions, Elinor discretely uses this knowledge to navigate towards a satisfactory conclusion. Similarly, Anne’s legendary tact means she’s forced to listen to the complaints of her various acquaintances and given the task of babysitting the insufferable. While Anne may not relish an evening of Benwick’s mournful poetry, it is her gentle probing of the melancholy captain which causes Wentworth to realise he’s still in with a chance. Nice work ladies. Elizabeth Bennet Mr Darcy accuses Lizzy of setting out ‘wilfully to misunderstand’ everyone she meets, but he’s as wrong about her as she was about him. When Lizzy realises the discrepancy between Wickham and Darcy’s accounts of their prior relationship, she proactively sets out to investigate by questioning the witnesses (including Aunt Gardiner and Pemberley’s housekeeper) and weighing up the probability of one man’s version of events against the other’s. It is to Lizzy’s credit that she’s ever willing to be proved wrong and, even better, to examine why she might have let herself be deceived. She can even laugh at her foibles. This delightful humility throughout her epic journey of self-discovery is what makes Lizzy not only Austen’s best detective, but also her most beloved heroine of all. *** View the full article
  19. Spenser’s Boston, Temperance Brennan’s North Carolina, Dave Robicheaux’s New Iberia…real places with fictional detectives. The setting is an important part of any series of books and is often informed by a deep connection the author has with the location they have chosen. Robert B. Parker spent his whole life living and writing in Boston. Kathy Reichs, like her protagonist, is a forensic investigator based out of Charlotte who also worked in Quebec, both locations brought vividly to life in her novels, and James Lee Burke sets the majority of his work in his hometown, except when he occasionally detours to place a mystery in Montana. When we were coming up with the character of Miranda Abbott, we knew she had to start off in Los Angeles. Or Hollywood, to be precise. What better location for someone who was once the star of a network television series playing the crime-solving, karate chopping, bikini-wearing Pastor Fran in Pastor Fran Investigates, a show we like to think of as a cross between Murder She Wrote, Father Brown, and Charlie’s Angels. Of course, it’s been 15 years since Miranda’s series was unceremoniously cancelled, she’s living in what Armand Gamache (as written by Louise Penny) would refer to as “reduced circumstances,” and she’s blissfully unaware that she’s no longer famous. Miranda gets turned down for a role on the reality series The Real Has-Beens of Beverly Hills, her agent fires her, and she gets evicted from her run-down apartment. Just when things seem dire to the point of catastrophe, a mysterious postcard arrives, summoning her to…well, where exactly? We wanted Miranda to be a fish out of water, wherever we sent her, and we knew that we wanted her new location to be a permanent relocation, and the setting of the series. We do not live in the same city. One of us (that would be Will) lives in Calgary, a modern metropolis of over a million people, and the other one (that would be Ian) lives in Victoria on Vancouver Island, which could – if you stretched the point – be described as “an exotic town on an island in the Pacific Ocean,” but is certainly no Montego Bay, which already has Raythan Preddy and Sean Harris wandering around solving crimes. So, no point in using a location we were familiar with as the setting. We also wanted a small town, but not too small, with the ability to bring in characters from other locations just to keep the local body count to a manageable number. We decided on a west coast location and thought Oregon would work best. Portland, possibly? Too large. And Joe Burgess has that town covered. Maybe Ashland? Too small. And we don’t know much about Ashland, other than what we could glean from the Jules Capshaw mysteries, and the one time one of us (Ian) attended their Shakespeare festival. We decided to make up our location. A fictional place with a fictional detective. We wanted a town that was not too big, not too small, but just the right size. We thought about calling it Goldilocks, briefly, but common sense prevailed, and instead we invented Happy Rock, Oregon, which is a fictitious town, indeed, but which is located on the very real Tillamook Bay. Look it up. Happy Rock is like Ed McBain’s gritty Isola, or the Hardy Boys fictional Bayport, or the idyllic Cabot Cove, which is also completely imaginary, a fact one of us (Will) was completely surprised by. The best part of creating a completely imaginary made-up location for the Miranda Abbott mysteries? Freedom. Glorious, glorious freedom. We can do anything we want. If we want Happy Rock to have a historic Opera House, done. Do we need a stately hotel? Boom. How about a lighthouse? Why not? We’re only limited by our imaginations and the requirements of the story. We created a town with a handful of businesses sprinkled along a small coastline. A three-person police force. A weekly newspaper. Everything we might need. The worst part of creating a completely imaginary made-up location? Also freedom. Horrible, horrible freedom. We must, from book to book, keep the geography and layout of the town consistent. If Happy Rock was, you know, a real community, although it certainly feels real enough to us, we’d probably have to deal with the odd reader correcting or contradicting us. “You can’t actually make a left turn out of the entrance to the Duchess Hotel,” “The Cozy Diner doesn’t actually share a parking lot with Tanvir’s Bait & Hardware,” “Actually the Opera House actually faces to the southeast.” We just assume they would overuse the word “actually.” Since Happy Rock isn’t a real place, and we can’t consult a map or look for information about it online, we have to make sure a reader doesn’t point out “in the previous book Harpreet’s store wasn’t across the street from the bookstore.” This reader wouldn’t use “actually,” of course, but they’d be right, dammit. So, we not only write the books, but we also have to read them. Writing the Miranda Abbott mysteries is a lot of fun. We’ve just finished the first draft of the third book in the series, and as long as readers keep enjoying them, we’re going to keep writing them. However, before a manuscript gets to be a book, we’ve read it edited, copy edited, line edited…we’ve reviewed the typeset and advanced reader copies, listened to the audio version…frankly by the time it hits the bookstore it’s not quite as much fun for us to read. Besides, we already know who the killer is. The best thing about Happy Rock? Location, location, location. Happy Rock is just far enough off the beaten track to be isolated but not so much that we can’t bring in outsiders or tourist or, most importantly, victims and/or suspects. When we finished the first Miranda Abott mystery, we realized that a few of the characters we created would not be able to appear in subsequent novels. Someone revealed as a murderer would be noticeable by their absence in a later book, and a character who is a suspect in one shouldn’t probably appear in another book since some readers have the annoying habit of reading books in a series out of order. However, as long as we’re careful in our writing (and our reading) we’ll be able to keep Happy Rock as real as possible. No matter what order you read the books in. * View the full article
  20. The hero of Leave No Trace, Michael Walker, is a former park ranger and current special agent for the Investigative Services Branch (ISB) of the National Park Service (the park service’s version of the FBI). So to celebrate the upcoming publication of Michael’s inaugural adventure (February 27 from Minotaur Books), I thought I’d provide some context for the role park rangers have played in pop culture, specifically film and television: Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear (1964) Of course, we had to start with the animated film that was based upon the syndicated TV show “The Yogi Bear Show.” Ranger Smith, Yogi’s perpetual, decades-long nemesis in Jellystone National Park, was very likely an entire generation’s introduction to the very existence of park rangers. Yogi and Boo-Boo were every bit as good here as in their shorter form tales, sure to be appreciated by purists while others may prefer the 2010 live action (more or less) version featuring Tom Cavanaugh as Ranger Smith with Dan Aykroyd voicing Yogi and Justin Timberlake voicing Boo-Boo. Flipper (1964-1967) Ranger Porter Ricks is responsible for preserving the safety of animal and human alike in Coral Key Park, Florida while raising two sons. In addition to foiling poachers and protecting marine and mammal life, Ricks portrayed one of the first single fathers ever on television. One of his sons, Sandy, was played by blond-haired, blue-eyed Luke Halpin who became one of the original teen TV pinups. But the real star of the show, of course, was the domesticated dolphin who played the role of a water-dwelling Lassie in adventures amid a beautiful setting. Gentle Ben (1967-1969) After “Gunsmoke” and before “McCloud,” Dennis Weaver played a park ranger assigned to Everglades National Park, while also raising a family that includes the tame bear of the title. Clint Howard famously played the boy, alternately rescuing and being rescued from trouble by his pet bear. “Gentle Ben” was pretty much the same show as “Flipper,” minus Luke Halpin’s blond locks—no coincidence since both shows were made by Ivan Tors and were filmed on location in Florida. Grizzly (1976) Speaking of bears, the not-so-tame, eighteen-foot monster who is kind of “Jaws,” only with paws, quickly dissolves into an inadvertent spin into camp. Tom Wedloe steps into the Roy Scheider role of the Spielberg classic, playing another park ranger in Everglades National Park, where the giant bear has staked its claim. As a homage to its forebear, the hero’s wife is similarly named “Ellen.” Don’t look for a Quint-like bear hunter, unless you count a helicopter pilot who assists the ranger’s efforts to restore the natural order. The River Wild (1994) Played with rugged machismo, Benjamin Bratt’s stalwart Montana park ranger is nonetheless unable to save a white-water rafting guide played by Meryl Street from killers who’ve taken her family hostage amid the rapids. Streep did a number of her own stunts, but there was a scare at the end of one day of filming when Hanson asked Streep to shoot one more scene, even though she was exhausted. Street eventually gave in and ended up getting swept off the raft into the river and had to be saved by a river rescue team. Broken Arrow (1996) Pilot Christian Slater joins forces with Park Ranger Samantha Mathis to take on nuclear terrorists who’ve managed to steal two atomic bombs off a disabled stealth bomber. This thriller helped define an era that also spawned other action-dominated films like “The Rock” and “Con Air,” but failed to turn Slater into an action star on the level of Nicolas Cage. Slater might know his nukes in the movie, but it’s Mathis’ knowledge of the rough terrain of Utah’s Glen Canyon National Recreation Area that ultimately saves the day. Cocaine Bear (2023) We saved the best, and most recent, for last. The always great Margo Martindale plays a park ranger named Liz whose worst day ever confronts her with yet another bear who is not a monster, but a cocaine addict—well, at least user in that he’s consumed enough of the drug to get a small country high. Appearing terrified even though she never actually worked with a live bear during the shoot posed little problem. “It was easy,” the Emmy Award-winning actress told “Entertainment Weekly. “I’m easily frightened. And I’ve had a big bear right on our property, right out in front of our house, several times.” *** View the full article
  21. Various medical phenomena have shocked, surprised and fascinated us since the dawn of time. From the terrifyingly named Alien Hand Syndrome to alleged accounts of spontaneous human combustion, we are insatiable for stories which slip outside our realm of understanding. We are driven—be it through empathy, morbid curiosity, fear or intellectual interest—to ponder the meaning of our existence, and wonder: what does this mean? why does this happen? how can we feel safe, when our field of knowledge is incomplete? In If I Die Before I Wake, the protagonist suffers a fall which leaves him in a coma, suffering from locked-in syndrome. However, the realization quickly dawns that this was not an accident but attempted murder. How can he find the perpetrator and potentially save his life, when he cannot communicate with the outside world? It’s an interesting premise. Here’s another: in The Silent Patient, a woman with apparently no motive kills her husband and has never spoken since. Can her new therapist unlock the puzzle of her elective mutism and find the truth? Interesting, right? Crime fiction invites readers to peer into the mind of criminals and turn a mirror to their own darker instincts and desires, and there are countless other examples of medical riddles being used in this genre, from amnesia – explored in S.J. Watson’s unforgettable Before I Go to Sleep—to Munchausen’s by proxy in Gillian Flynn’s incisive thriller, Sharp Objects. Done well, they can draw attention to a condition or disorder, raising awareness as well as providing an interesting and engaging story. Done badly, they can damage your reputation as a writer, offend sufferers of the condition and spread misinformation. So, think about why this particular medical phenomenon interests you. Why do you want to tell this story? The disorder or condition should not be there as a convenient device or deux ex machina to solve plot or character issues. Neither should it be the sole focus of the story, but it will almost certainly shape the individual’s perceptions of life. How do friends and family see this person? How does their condition change the way they see themselves? How do people relate to them? Is someone secretly jealous of the attention they receive? I was inspired to write My Name Was Eden after being diagnosed with Vanishing Twin Syndrome: one of my twins had literally vanished in the womb and become absorbed by its sibling. The surviving twin – my son – was born, and as he grew, so did my curiosity about what happened to the other. There were more questions than answers, however: upon researching the condition, I was surprised to discover that little had been documented about Vanishing Twin Syndrome, despite it happening in approximately 1 in 5 twin pregnancies. Stranger still, there were stories of the surviving twin absorbing the vanished twin’s DNA, others where they reported feeling “different”, and I thought this raised some interesting questions – not only about genetics, but also about personality, the formation of identity and the debate surrounding nature and nurture. My Name Was Eden is a story about vanishing twin syndrome, yes, but beyond that, it’s about the conflicting forces which act upon a family and how these can drive a person (or people) to commit acts of crime. In short, it is not the medical phenomenon that pushes the story forward, it’s the characters and their responses to change. When writing about medical phenomena, research is essential, but if there is limited information available, read articles, blog posts, forums. Be sensitive. If possible, talk to sufferers of the condition or their relatives/caregivers and find out how it impacts them on a day-to-day basis. This is key to understanding the condition from a personal perspective. Where do they live? How much support do they receive? Can they afford the treatment they require? Consider the time period that your crime fiction is set in. Early medical treatments such as bloodletting and lobotomy were once accepted medical procedures, and while it’s true that we now have a much greater understanding of the human body and have come a long way in terms of scientific advancements, there is still much that continues to confound and defy medical expectations. Take Stone Man Syndrome, a genetic condition whereby muscle and connective tissue regenerate as bone in response to damage, gradually forming a second skeleton. Or Walking Corpse Syndrome: a mental disorder whereby a person believes they are missing body parts, or even that they have lost their soul or died. Luckily, our job as fiction writers is not to cure, but to explore. Could my experience of Vanishing Twin Syndrome have been triggered by anxiety or stress? Possibly. Or maybe it was caused by something unknown to medical science at this time. Paradoxically, without modern technology to enable earlier and more sophisticated scanning, I would not have known about the vanished twin at all. It begs the question: what else can’t we see? Sometimes, we’d just kill for answers. *** View the full article
  22. Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Rebecca Roque, Till Human Voices Wake Us (Blackstone) “Debut author Roque confidently weaves together dynamic characters with complex histories to riveting effect.” –Publishers Weekly Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson, I Only Read Murder (MIRA) “The brothers Ferguson pull out all the comedic stops, taking on Hollywood elitism, community theater, and small-town quirkiness in a fast-paced, lighthearted murder mystery…readers will enjoy following the hilariously inept Miranda as she tries to solve the crime in this promising series starter.” –Booklist Christoffer Carlsson, Under the Storm (Hogarth) “When the body of a young woman was discovered in an incinerated farmhouse in 1994, resolution was swift—it was murder, her boyfriend did it, case closed. But for the boyfriend’s nephew, Isak; the arresting officer, Vidar Jörgensson; and the entire community of Marbäck, closure is a myth about to be shattered.” –Sarah Weinman, The New York Times C.J. Cooke, A Haunting in the Arctic (Berkley) “An unnerving tale full of ghosts, selkies and plenty of mystery, which Cooke deploys not only to craft the novel’s frights but also to probe ideas of grief and retribution…haunting.” –The New York Times CJ Box, Three-Inch Teeth (G.P. Putnams) “Franchise fans will appreciate new details about Joe’s complicated family, the obligatory high-country landscapes, and yet another corrupt law enforcer… [E]asy to swallow in a single gulp.” –Kirkus Reviews Thomas Mullen, The Rumor Game (Minotaur) “Time and again, Mullen’s suspenseful storytelling pulls us forward.” –The New York Times Book Review Jessica Bull, Miss Austen Investigates (Union Square) “Bull’s Jane is an endearingly clumsy detective, equal parts clever and impulsive, and the investigation contains the kind of high stakes that similar breezy historicals often lack. This series seems destined for a long run.” –Publishers Weekly Maurice Carlos Ruffin, The American Daughters (One World) “A high adventure, a revealing history, and a chronicle of one woman’s self-realization. Ruffin also displays some of the cunning imagination and caustic wit he showed in his previous work by interspersing his narrative with imagined transcripts from the past, present, and even the future. Black women as agents—literally—of their own liberation. Who wouldn’t be inspired?” –Kirkus Reviews A.J. Tata, The Phalanx Code (St. Martin’s) “Lots of credible action, plenty of government traitors, and shocking losses fuel the action. Tata continues to rise among the ranks of today’s top military action writers.” –Publishers Weekly A.J. Landau, Leave No Trace (Minotaur) “Leave No Trace is an expertly crafted gut-punch thriller. The action leaves you aghast, always guessing and very glad you read it. A.J. Landau takes no prisoners when it comes to high octane, fast moving storytelling.” –Michael Connelly View the full article
  23. The city of the Highlands, located on Scotland’s dramatic northeast coast, where the River Ness meets the Moray Firth. 65,000 or so folk but apparently one of northern Europe’s fastest growing cities that gets consistently ranked in the top five UK cities for quality of life. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a few murders to write about though in this northeastern outpost of Tartan Noir…. GR Halliday’s trilogy features Detective Inspector Monica Kennedy. In book one, From the Shadows (2019), Kennedy teams up with Inverness-based social worker Michael Bach. Sixteen-year-old Robert arrives home late. Without a word to his dad, he goes up to his bedroom. Robert is never seen alive again. A body is soon found on the coast of the Scottish Highlands. Then another boy goes missing…. DI Kennedy is back in Dark Waters (2020) where tourists to the Highlands seem to be getting abducted. Meanwhile Monica has been called from Inverness to her first Serious Crimes case in six months – a dismembered body has been discovered, abandoned in a dam. A killer is on the loose in the Highlands. And finally, in Under the Marsh (2022) Kennedy receives a call to visit Pauline Tosh in the remote Highlands Carselang prison. Twelve years ago Kennedy caught Tosh, a serial killer and sent her to prison for life. In the jail Tosh hands Monica a hand-drawn map with a cross marking the desolate marsh lands near Inverness and other bodies. JD Kirk’s Detective Chief Inspector Jack Logan series (19 books in total) also takes place in and around Inverness and that part of the Highlands and are all steeped in Highland locations and famous sites. We’ll focus on the 14th book in the series City of Scars (2022) where Logan tracks a sadistic killer who begins picking off victims on the streets of Inverness. The body count grows alarmingly fast, Logan is getting nowhere while his personal life is taking a beating. Some nice atmospherics around Inverness and its back streets. Margaret Kirk writes ‘Highland Noir’ Scottish crime fiction in the DI Lukas Mahler trilogy, all set in and around her hometown of Inverness. Her debut novel, Shadow Man, won the Good Housekeeping First Novel Competition in 2016 and comes highly recommended by any number of the luminaries of the Tartan/|Highland noir scene (Val McDermid et al). Shadow Man (2016) introduces ex-ex-London Metropolitan police Detective Inspector Lukas Mahler, now based out of Inverness. The day before her wedding the queen of Scottish daytime TV is found murdered. On the other side of Inverness, police informant Kevin Ramsay is killed in a gangland-style execution. Are the two killings related and is the Inverness underworld involved? Mahler is back in What Lies Buried (2019) – an abducted local kid and the discovery of human remains on a construction site near Inverness which reignites a cold case from the 1940s. And lastly, In the Blood (2021) a corpse in Orkney, a cluster of islands off the northeastern coast of Scotland leads back to a case Mahler handled back in his London days with the Met Police. Helen Forbes is another Inverness based crime writer and sets her Detective Sergeant Joe Galbraith series in her hometown. Shadow of the Hill (2014) starts in Inverness where an elderly woman is found battered to death in the common stairwell of an Inverness apartment building. But then the investigation spreads across Scotland as far as the Hebridean island of Harris, where Galbraith spent his childhood. Galbraith returns in Madness Lies (2017) with a murder in the centre of Inverness in broad daylight. It’s a high-profile case – such a random act of violence rarely seen in the city and, in this case, a high-profile Inverness city Councillor. Everyone tells Galbraith he had no enemies, but someone clearly wanted him dead. The action roams across Inverness with side trips to the Hebridean island of North Uist and down to London. One more contemporary Inverness novel. And this one from Scottish Tartan Noir legend Christopher Brookmyre, best known perhaps for his Jack Parlabane novels. Parlabane is an investigative journalist who, in order to do his job as he sees it, is not above breaking a few trespassing and burglary laws. In Black Widow, the seventh Paralbane book, Jack is investigating an Inverness surgeon suspected of her husband’s murder following a car accident in the Highlands. Black Widow was the Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2016, an award now named after the late and very great Scottish crime writer (and generally regarded as the founding father of Tartan Noir) William McIlvanney. And finally, SG Maclean is an Inverness writer who has written a brilliant historical mystery, The Bookseller of Inverness (2022). It’s worth laying out the plot in some detail for those not necessarily au fait with Scottish eighteenth century history. After the Battle of Culloden (the final confrontation of the Jacobite rising of 1745), Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drummossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades. Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he’s searching for and only leaves when Iain closes for the night. The next morning Iain opens up shop and finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon laid out in front of him – a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. With no sign of the killer, Iain wonders whether the stranger discovered what he was looking for – and whether he paid for it with his life. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war. The Bookseller of Inverness is a great historical crime novel that takes you into old Inverness and a deep dive of Scottish history too. Perhaps the ideal place to start reading about the capital of the Highlands. And perhaps finally, finally…. As we mentioned Culloden…Douglas Skelton’s The Blood is Still (2020) should get a mention. When the body of a man in eighteenth-century Highland dress is discovered on the site of the Battle of Culloden, journalist Rebecca Connolly takes up the story for her newspaper. Meanwhile, a film being made about the 1745 Rebellion has enraged the right-wing group Spirit of the Gael which is connected to a shadowy group called Black Dawn linked to death threats and fake anthrax deliveries to Downing Street and Holyrood (the Scottish parliament building). When a second body – this time in the Redcoat uniform of the government army – is found in Inverness, Rebecca finds herself drawn ever deeper into the mystery. View the full article
  24. As a licensed psychotherapist, I can attest to the importance of mirroring in therapy when a patient shares their feelings, thoughts, and experiences, and the clinician mirrors them back in a supportive way. For example, if a patient discloses something they’ve never shared with anyone before due to a fear of being judged, and the clinician applauds the bravery of their disclosure, the patient has the opportunity to feel seen for the first time. The act of mirroring affirms their experience and may leave them feeling less alone, as one of the antidotes to despair is human connection. The same can be said and has been said about books—novels in particular: “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.” ― Rudine Sims Bishop, professor emerita at Ohio State University Because books are often used as mirrors by readers for their own experiences, mental health representation in fiction is especially important. Adult contemporary fiction, including the crime fiction space, has long featured characters with various mental health issues. Some examples include addiction (alcohol use disorder) in The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, self-harming (non-suicidal self-injury disorder) in Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, and domestic violence (post-traumatic stress disorder) in The Last Flight by Julie Clark. While eating disorders have been represented in young adult and, more recently, in new adult books, they have been largely left out of adult contemporary fiction. That is one of the reasons I set out to write a thriller featuring a protagonist in eating disorder recovery. Since She’s Been Gone is about a psychologist, Beatrice, known to loved ones as Beans, who lost her mom to a hit-and-run twenty-six years ago. When a mysterious woman shows up at her office and tells her that her mother is still alive and in danger, Beans embarks on a heart-pounding journey to uncover the truth about what really happened to her mother. Don’t worry, I’m not giving anything away—this happens in the book’s first few pages! It’s a dual-timeline thriller that shows how an eating disorder affected Beans beginning at the age of fifteen in the aftermath of her mother’s death and how it resurfaces later in her adult life, first during her marriage when she was pregnant and later when the bombshell news is dropped on her that her mother may still be alive. One of the many misconceptions about eating disorders is that they only affect young, thin, white women. Recently, a national book club turned down my book, stating their readership skewed older and that books featuring eating disorders are better suited for a younger readership. In fact, eating disorders impact people of all ages, genders, races, and body types, affecting roughly 10% of the population. They also thrive in secrecy and shame, which is why representation in books matters so much. People are less likely to seek help if they carry shame due to false beliefs that they are the only ones impacted by something like being an adult with an eating disorder. I’ve received messages from a wide range of readers who read advanced copies of my book, including but not limited to a nurse, a librarian, and a mother of a toddler, thanking me for writing it and explaining how an eating disorder has personally impacted them. Some of the most moving messages I’ve received have been from parents with children in eating disorder recovery thanking me for writing my book, stating it helped them better understand what their children are experiencing and up against. Just as importantly, I have received messages from readers stating everything they had learned and thought about eating disorders from the media was incorrect and that they now have more compassion for those struggling with eating disorders. Let’s face it: the media has historically done a terrible job of portraying eating disorders as glamorous and aspirational due to the fat-phobic society we live in. My hope is that publishing Since She’s Been Gone, which I view as a form of advocacy, will help destigmatize this illness so those impacted will reach out, open up, and seek treatment as needed. Being diagnosed with an eating disorder is not a choice. It is a disease. But the message in my book is clear: there is hope for recovery. * View the full article
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