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When you think of Gothic fiction, the image of a woman in a diaphanous nightgown, running from a sinister house might come to mind. A classic feature of paperback novels from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, these iconic covers convey several things at a glance: fear, sensuality, mystery. Words that, in a nutshell, help define Gothic fiction. Often denigrated as campy pulp fiction, these books and their covers, in my opinion, also serve to highlight the heroine’s agency against overwhelming odds. After all, she is willfully running from the haunted house—a powerful metaphor for patriarchal oppression in the genre. It’s no coincidence that Gothic horror enjoyed a renaissance during the early women’s rights movement, when women were feeling increasingly constrained by their domestic roles—something I explore at length in my upcoming novel, The Devil and Mrs. Davenport. But even with as far as we’ve come, we have a long way to go. With a nod to the traditions of the past, today’s Gothic fiction authors effectively employ the constructs of horror as feminist commentary. The books in this article—seven of them by contemporary authors, one by a classic icon of the genre—all serve to illustrate the dangers of misogyny while centering the power and resilience of all women. The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers When 1960s actress Gemma Turner mysteriously vanishes into the movie she’s filming, she must use her wits to survive the twisted world created by an obsessive auteur on the brink of madness. The dreamlike atmosphere Sayers conjures is reminiscent of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête but make no mistake—this is still Gothic horror, and Gemma’s repeated attempts to escape the surrealistic cursed film she’s imprisoned in convey a palpable sense of claustrophobic oppression. A captivating time-slip love story and a powerful celebration of feminine agency. The Village Healer’s Book of Cures by Jennifer Sherman Roberts In seventeenth-century England, Mary Fawcett refines the healing recipes she’s inherited from generations of women before her to better serve her community…until real-life witchfinder Matthew Hopkins arrives in her small village and the benevolent Mary finds herself under suspicion of witchcraft. In order to save her life and protect those she loves, Mary must use her talents to outsmart the devil himself. A compelling tale of retribution, revenge, and true justice. The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas Following the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz weds the dashing but distant Don Rodolfo to secure her future and build a new life for her family at his estate in the countryside. But the Hacienda San Isidro is hardly the sanctuary Beatriz imagined. As forces both supernatural and corporeal conspire against her, the once fiercely independent Beatriz faces certain doom unless she can break the sinister curse that binds her to the hacienda. With brilliantly layered subtext centering the evils of colonialism, Cañas’s groundbreaking debut is both timely and timelessly Gothic. The Last Heir to Blackwood Library by Hester Fox In post-World War I England, young Ivy Radcliffe unexpectedly inherits an estate on the Yorkshire moors, including a magnificent library containing strange, esoteric texts. But something isn’t right at Blackwood Abbey, and as events grow more sinister, it’s up to Ivy to uncover the library’s mysteries before it’s too late. A tale of the powerless reclaiming their power in the face of patriarchal and historical constraints, this is Hester Fox at her finest. The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson In the land of Bethel, the Prophet’s word is law, leaving women and girls under a heavy mantle of subjugation. Immanuelle Moore, the biracial daughter of a woman rumored to have consorted with witches, must follow Holy Protocol, and lead a life of submission and absolute conformity, like all the other women in the settlement. But when the spirits of four powerful witches bestow a gift on Immanuelle—her mother’s secret diary filled with arcane knowledge and the truth behind Bethel’s founding—she realizes her true calling. If Bethel is to change, it must begin with her. This novel is a visceral treatise on the dangers of unbridled religious control, racism, and misogyny with a strong, unforgettable heroine. A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland When village midwife Jean discovers a laboring mother outside her cabin one dark and stormy night, she falls into a web of dark secrets centering on her neighbor and his mysterious new wife in this sapphic retelling of The Selkie Wife folktale. While charming Muirin claims to be happy with her husband, Jean can’t overlook the fear in her new friend’s eyes. Her growing concern—and growing feelings—for Muirin means she can’t set her worries aside. But when the answers she’s seeking are more harrowing than she ever could have imagined, Jean finds herself in peril as she strives to save the woman she loves. The Madness by Dawn Kurtagich In this upcoming Dracula retelling set on the modern, windswept coast of Wales, Mina Murray at last gains the voice and agency she deserved in the original story. With her friend Lucy’s life on the line, Mina finds herself asking questions and being drawn ever deeper into a web of secrets, missing girls, and the powerful, nameless force that has been haunting her for years. As terrible, ancient truths begin to reveal themselves, Mina must confront her own darkest secrets, and with them, an evil beyond comprehension. The mental health representation in this novel is second to none—and the unity of women working together to defeat a truly monstrous enemy is inspiring. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier While this novel may seem an unlikely pairing with the others on this list, it’s my favorite by Du Maurier because it shines a subversive yet unflinching light on the dangers of misogyny. The unfortunate Rachel suffers under the weight of patriarchal objectification and the suspicion of every male character within the novel, but none more so than the callow narrator, Philip, who is besotted with the mysterious Rachel until she fails to meet his narcissistic expectations. When Rachel refuses to marry him, he dispenses with her, quite literally, in favor of his loyal childhood friend, Louise, who he once scathingly disdained as provincial. Du Maurier was writing about incel culture, the male gaze, slut-shaming, and toxic nice guys way before the terms ever existed. While Rebecca is an undeniable masterpiece, Rachel has as much social relevance today as it did when Du Maurier penned it. *** View the full article

I once attended a writing seminar that claimed the landscape of your childhood home informs the way you move, think, and talk. A rocky, mountainous place might shorten your sentences into a rhythm that makes room for quick bursts of speed; a hot and humid landscape might lead you to consider your thoughts slowly, without straining yourself. Embarrassingly, I have forgotten exactly who led this discussion (if you’ve attended something similar, please tell me!), but the idea has never left me—that, in the same way some people wind up looking exactly like their dogs, the place where you live can infect you to a deeper degree than you might have realized. It’s by turns a comforting notion, and a disturbing one. What might you be carrying with you, subconsciously influencing your choices? And what if your relationship to those childhood landscapes isn’t altogether positive? I think of my grandmother, who, when asked about this concept at a dinner not long after, visibly recoiled from the question. Her early memories of Mississippi river flats and anything that land might have imprinted on her were not welcome at our table. She spent much of her life traveling, finally landing in New York, and only conceded to move as far south as Virginia because my brothers and I were children there. My own work is deeply influenced by places I’ve lived and the way I felt being there, from the rolling fields and deciduous forests of the Blue Ridge foothills where I grew up and where my first book, What Grows in the Dark, is set, to the secretive wetlands and snow-capped peaks of the Pacific Northwest where I live currently. In the case of Virginia, I haven’t lived there in fifteen years but I could still tell you exactly what a hay barn smells like on a muggy summer day, or how it feels to walk barefoot on a gravel driveway; I could describe the silvery pain of getting a paint chip under your thumbnail while you sit on the roof of a run-down house while crickets chirp and fireflies dance. Or I could tell you how thick the woods feel at night, how those trees mat together, even in winter when they’re skinned and powerless. And I could certainly talk about how it felt to wonder how people were looking at me in high school, what they thought after I shaved my head that time in the park—not whether they thought I was losing it, but whether I was safe. For that first book, I drew on all of the above. Any precision of place I achieved came first from what had already worked its way under my skin. Think now of the snow crunching beneath Jade Daniels’ boots in Proofrock, Idaho, the setting of Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake trilogy, a beautiful, isolated petri dish turned pressure cooker for violence that hides in plain sight—and for bold swings against all flavors of evil. Or the parched, sun-baked expanse of Texas across which Julia Heaberlin’s thrillers unfurl, her characters lonesome and defensive, generally running to nowhere and eventually realizing just that. Here, “setting as character” takes on additional meaning: not only are these places specific and unique, able to transmit emotions and ideas to the reader as clearly as the best dialogue exchange, but they also infiltrate the people we’re reading about. When bad things happen and those people react with panic or confusion or in their own burst of violence, it’s not only the character work that makes us believe them, it’s the sense of place that sneaks past our defenses and tells us, “You can imagine what it’s like to be there, so come on. What would you do?” That kind of empathy is the bread and butter of horror authors. You can’t scare someone until you’ve made them think, “What if it was me?” This is not to argue that this is a new and exciting idea, or that only dark fiction authors benefit from immersive settings, but I am a horror author writing this, so here we are. Writing a setting that crawls from under your skin to under the reader’s requires the same dedication to specificity and nuance as good character work. It’s not just about visual description, but the smells, the way the air feels against skin—and of course, it’s about what fills that space that isn’t so tactile. What are the class dynamics that inform which part of town your basement monster lurks beneath? Who paid for the fancy alpine lodge someone’s about to get murdered in, and who was forced out to make room for it? What kind of laws were recently passed to protect (or remove protections from) whom? You don’t need to be from somewhere to consider these aspects, and if you’ve never visited your setting, I definitely recommend going hard on the research: find videos, read blogs, talk to people. Once you’ve answered those questions, imagine a few individuals: not your main characters just yet, but the tertiary people who make up their backdrop. Their grandfather who still lives in the same house he was born in; their high school classmate who’s famous in small circles for bucking the social norms. What about the barista they briefly encounter, or the guy who never pays his bar tab? How does living in this exact place change and define them? What fears does it engender in them, and what do they love about it? Of course not all of this will make it onto the page—but it’s the smallest, most precise details that will shift your setting from inert to alive. As a reader, I find atmosphere far more effective if I can imagine a place’s beauty along with its terrifying potential; this goes for secondary worlds and science fiction settings that are inherently unfamiliar as well. As a writer, I love to use that juxtaposition to explore the uncanny: make the reader feel like they know a place, and twist it just enough to steal their balance. Crucial to that twist are, finally, the main characters of your story. Just like those tertiary people who help make up the fabric of your setting, your main characters were either shaped early-on by this place, came to it later in life and brought their own experiences to it which were then infiltrated and morphed, or are experiencing it for the first time and are ready to be a window for the reader—both into first impressions, and into how staying in any given space for too long opens you up to its influence. These three broad buckets leave you with plenty of room to play around and bring your characters’ personalities and traumas into the mix, and allow place to inform how their mental state evolves over the course of the book. This can lead to a deeper, more immersive experience for the reader, which in turn gives you as the author an easier in when it comes to scaring the pants off them. After all, people come and go, but places last. So do whatever horrors they house—which, if you’ve done your job as an author, now live inside your reader as well. *** View the full article

I AM NOT AFRAID!

I’ve always liked my women a little bad. Give me the imperfect, the wrathful, the vindictive. In my opinion, those are the women who have the most fun. In my debut, Women of Good Fortune, three women decide to dismiss societal expectations and make their own fortunes. Reluctant bride Lulu cannot imagine herself marrying her bland, rich fiancé, and so she devises a heist with her best friends, luxury-chasing Jane and career-oriented Rina. If they can steal away the red envelopes that their well-to-do guests gift at Lulu’s wedding, then each of these women will get closer to the life she so desperately desires. As they get closer and closer to the wedding day, though, unforeseen obstacles appear, forcing the women to question their friendship and what they truly want. I’ve included some of my favorite books with women behaving badly. Be careful of these ladies—they have charming smiles, but they bite. Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Koller Croft Bea has seduction down to an art form, rigorously trained into her psyche by her equally crafty mother. But she’s ready to retire, and what better way than to marry an established blue-blood and have all his assets within her disposal? Told in Bea’s sarcastic, cutting voice, the story is full of twists and turns, along with an arresting cat-and-mouse game that Bea plays with her target’s lovelorn best friend. I was rooting for our intrepid conwoman to succeed the whole way. The Housekeepers by Alex Hay London, 1905. Mrs. King gets unceremoniously let go from her position as housekeeper of one of the grandest homes in Mayfair. After the wrongs that have been committed towards her, she pulls together a crew of skilled women to ransack her former place of employment during a grand costume ball. It’s always refreshing to watch the wronged take back power for themselves, especially during a period when social hierarchy was defined so rigidly. I can never resist a good heist, and this one was no exception. Yellowface by R. F. Kuang It doesn’t get worse than stealing the unpublished manuscript of the woman who was supposedly your friend, all while appropriating an identity that was never yours. Yellowface is an unsettling portrayal of the publishing world and the lengths one woman is willing to go for recognition and fame, helped along by the arbitrary opinions of a judgmental public. June Hayward’s transformation into Juniper Song is chilling, more so because it hits a bit too close to home. Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen We’re all looking for side hustles these days to diversify our revenue streams. Counterfeit introduces one that you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of: scamming greedy consumers with luxury replicas. The book switches between the perspectives of straight-laced Ava and her calculating college roommate Winnie. The two of them band together to execute on this bold con, but there’s plenty of mistrust and suspicion. Beyond its many insights into the luxury goods trade, the book also explores the model minority myth, our modern-day obsession with consumerism, and Western exceptionalism. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto There’s nothing like a dead body to ruin a wedding. So begin the trials and tribulations of our protagonist Meddy, who must team up with her nosy and distractible aunts to make it through a billionaire’s island wedding without letting anyone discover that there’s also a corpse onsite. The aunties steal the show—they’re equally as likely to shove a body in a trash bag as they are to peel you a mango. Layer on top an ex who happens to be the hotel manager and a bunch of unwieldy drunk groomsmen, and you’ve got unrelenting, hilarious chaos. Pick this up for a nonstop joyride. Every Last Secret by A. R. Torre Beautiful, stately Cat welcomes a new neighbor next door: ambitious, cunning Neena. Cat has everything, and Neena wants what Cat has. The stakes heighten as their lives becoming increasingly intertwined, and Neena meets Cat toe-to-toe in her efforts to lie, backstab, and assert her dominance. Unlikable as these women are, you have to respect their efforts. This is an exceedingly well-crafted tale of toxic friendship and a warning: you don’t know what these women are capable of. The Whispers by Audrey Audrain The Whispers starts with a child’s fall out of his bedroom window and brings us back in time to the events leading up to this fatal moment. At the center of this book are four women who live in the same neighborhood, but who lead very different lives. Over the course of the story, we learn about their struggles with self-doubt, perfectionism, and motherhood. There are plenty of secrets and betrayal, but the reason this story lingers is its raw, unapologetic look into womanhood. *** View the full article

If your last name was Farto, would you want people nicknaming you Bum? Evidently Joseph “Bum” Farto didn’t mind it a bit, and that alone probably hints at his being a person of interest. Born in 1919 across the street from the Key West Fire Department, Bum Farto hired on as a fireman in the 1940s and worked his way through the ranks until becoming the fire chief in 1964. Fate handed him that job thanks to a long tenure and an FBI investigation into corruption in both the island’s fire and police departments, the result of which entailed the resignation of then Fire Chief Charles Cremata and Police Chief George Gomez. Combined with a new police chief, Farto gave rise to hopes by the island’s residents that he would clean things up and restore order in the all-important fire department—most of Key West’s structures were made of wood. But that was a tall order. The already shaky reputation of Key West—referred to by some as Key Weird—as a bawdy, open town began in the late 1800s when the main business activity centered on salvaging wrecks. Suspicions ran high as to whether the wrecking crews in shallow-draft boats purposely misdirected large ships laden with goods onto jagged reefs. Many other wooden keels fell victim to faulty charts that misplaced reefs or lighthouses that often would mysteriously go dark on stormy nights. Although the Florida Keys consist of about 1,700 islands (keys), only 43 are connected south of the state’s mainland, from Key Largo to Key West via the bridges of U.S. Highway 1 that separates the Atlantic Ocean, Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Monroe County, the southernmost county in Florida, envelopes all of the Florida Keys and portions of Everglades National Park and the Big Cypress National Preserve. Since 1990 the entirety of the Keys and surrounding waters lie within a national marine sanctuary. Key West received national notoriety when Ernest Hemingway decided that the southernmost city suited him just fine. The novelist lived there in the 1930s, allocating plenty of time when not writing or fishing to haunting Duval Street’s sordid watering holes and brothels. Key West became a clique of fishermen, rum guzzlers, and folks who didn’t care much for outsiders meddling in their affairs. Nonetheless, by the 1950s word reached Florida’s capital city of Tallahassee that things smelled fishy in Key West, which by then had attracted all kinds of residents with liberal drinking habits and questionable character. The island became a frequent hangout for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator who, the feds knew, was playing ball with the Mafia. Even his future nemesis, Fidel Castro, dropped by the city to bask in capitalist-style leisure before he took to the mountains of Cuba to orchestrate a communist takeover. Besides part ownerships and investments in Havana casino hotels and other coastal resorts lying a mere 90 miles south of Key West, the Mafia operated with total impunity in Cuba, the Pearl of the Antilles. Reciprocally, Cuba became a Mafia business partner completely outside the reach of the U.S. government, and it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to recognize that this could not occur without complicity and total cooperation on the part of Batista. And the dictator sure wasn’t doing it for free. The Cuba-Mafia connection ran deep in Key West. Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante Jr., who inherited from his dad a bolita operation in Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Key West and later Cuba, undoubtedly crossed paths with Batista if not one of his henchmen. The common denominator: The popularity among the Latin community of bolita, which gained traction in the 1880s in Tampa and was enhanced in the 1920s by then Tampa mob boss Charlie Wall. Bolita involves an illegal form of gambling often referred to as a “numbers game.” It’s a daily game in which 100 numbered balls are placed into a bag, the bag is shaken a few times, and one of the balls is blindly drawn. If your ball gets picked, you win a portion of the money pooled and the rest goes to the sponsor—in this case, the Mafia. Although most individual bets are usually a dollar or less, the simplicity of it adds to the popularity and thus can enrich the winners and bring in a steady daily cash flow to the mob. Like all forms of gambling, it can be rigged in a variety of ways. The progression here is that keeping up the flow of illegal bolita money involves making sure palms get greased, and thus the corruption element also comes into play with law enforcement and the legal system. But essentially Batista made himself the legal system in Cuba, and he fed at the Mafia trough. Although Santo Trafficante Sr. died in 1954, as already mentioned his son—Luigi Santo Trafficante Jr.—inherited control of organized crime in Tampa with partnerships in Cuba and South Florida. Through the Trafficante connections and coordination of organized crime with Mafia families in New York City and New Orleans, business in Cuba flourished under the protection of Batista’s dictatorship. And hence all other aspects of Mafia dealings besides bolita sprouted openly in Cuba and also in Florida: casino skimming, prostitution, extortion, loan sharking, insurance fraud, and with it numerous corrupted officials. Those who tried to stand in the way quite often disappeared when fishing or on Everglades hunting trips. In the late 1950s heroin became of interest to the Trafficantes, even though the NYC families—still controlled by old-school La Cosa Nostra bosses—eschewed it. A perfect conduit for heroin and later other narcotics into the U.S. involved Havana serving as the hemisphere’s distribution center. After Cuba received flights and shipments from various countries like Colombia and Turkey, speedboats had their hulls laden with heroin and marijuana and sped unfettered over the 90 miles across the Gulf Stream to Key West. The web of organization included the timing of trucks at the docks to haul the illicit drugs to Miami under the auspices of Trafficante mobsters and drug dealers. Despite Key West’s diminutive dimensions of 1.25 miles at its widest point and four miles long, its population still represented the largest concentration of residents and businesses scattered throughout the chain of islands that make up the Florida Keys. In a crowded little town like Key West, rumors became facts and facts became rumors, particularly as they pertained to Mafia presence. FBI files on Key West Mafia ties and activities were opened in the 1950s and swelled through the 1960s. That was when names started turning up in those reports like Farto, Trafficante, Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa and Teamsters operatives Sam “The Fat Man” Cagnina and Raimundo Beiro. As in all small communities, a web of connections existed. Allegedly, Cagnina was a nephew of Santo Trafficante, and besides doing the bidding of the Teamsters Union he ran a crew in Key West involved in all aspects of organized crime. One law enforcement source listed Cagnina and his accomplice Beiro as cousins. Bum Farto, a lifelong Conch—the moniker bestowed on native Key Westers—could not have been ignorant of all these happenings and familial relationships, particularly considering that in 1955 he’d married Beiro’s sister, Estelle. Even in the southernmost city of the Lower 48 states, deep dark secrets could not be hidden from the rest of the world forever, and Florida’s Governor LeRoy Collins would soon take action. But before that hammer fell, other events shook the island and the world. First, Batista fled Cuba on January 1, 1959, before Castro could arrest him. Since the inevitable defeat of Batista’s troops could be foretold months previously, he flew out of Havana to Portugal, likely with enough cash to last four or five lifetimes (he died in 1973). Castro immediately shut down the Mafia operations and nationalized everything in the mold of the Soviet Union, which had been secretly funding and abetting his revolution. Not surprisingly and yet to Eisenhower’s horror, Castro publicly declared his allegiance to communism. The start of the Castro dictatorship also meant that the Havana to Key West to Miami drug artery no longer flowed. The Mafia was none too happy to lose such a perfect setup. Nevertheless, things went on as usual in Key West with shipments of narcotics coming from ports other than Havana to the city and other drop points up the line of islands. But the mob’s troubles in Key West took another hit on January 1, 1961. Governor Collins made his move—the “Bubba Bust,” consisting of 40 arrests. That included local bolita kingpin Louis “Blackie” Fernandez along with his coterie of ticket sellers and accomplices; undercover cops packed up and left for home. Undaunted, once the dust had cleared Trafficante restarted bolita operations and took control of the island’s police and fire departments. The Tampa Mafia did the same with Key West’s commission and the trucking and construction unions—the latter orchestrated by frequent Key West visitor Jimmy Hoffa. By controlling shipments of goods to Key West via U.S. 1—the only road connecting Key West with Florida’s mainland—the mob could extort local businesses. Teamsters’ money flowed into ownership of Key West resorts, a shopping center, and, as a PR gesture, a seven-figure check was donated to the local hospital. Bum Farto weathered the storms. In 1964 as the new fire chief, he set out to prove he wasn’t merely going to keep the seat warm. With fervor and bravado, he upgraded the fire department’s trucks and gear, boosted the staff’s morale, provided free safety inspections, quickened notifications when a fire was reported, and improved fire truck response time. To feed his ego, Farto proudly referred to himself as “El Jefe,” Spanish for The Chief. Over the next 12 years he helped rescue Cuban refugees and provided them safety and comfort—hey, not even bad people are all bad. But one thing Farto didn’t know: He and his fire department were on the feds’ radar screen. One such investigation—Operation Conch—would prove to be his Waterloo. On September 9, 1975, state and federal law enforcement authorities made their move, resulting in Farto’s arrest. He’d been caught red-handed selling drugs to an undercover agent. Besides Farto, the city attorney and 27 others went down as well—mostly those with Miami drug ties. As further details emerged, Farto was accused of using the fire station as a base of operations to sell cocaine. The news created shock waves throughout Key West and resurrected persistent rumors about Farto’s coziness with organized crime figures. His reputation and many good works spiraled down the drain. As quickly as the ink dried on Farto’s arrest warrant, whispers centered on who else he and the others might take down with them. Sentenced to 30 years, Farto damn sure knew the fate of potential squealers facing long prison terms. The news about Operation Conch immediately spread, reaching the ears of Santo Trafficante, New York Mafiosi, and drug kingpins in Miami and Colombia. Facing either decades of decay in a cell or his corpse being eaten by sharks, on February 16, 1976, Farto put his taillights to Key West and likely drove exactly at the speed limit to Miami—his car was discovered there two months later. He’d jumped bail, a real Farto vanishing in the wind. Did he go on the lam to another country? No records suggested such. Did he get silenced by the Mafia or drug lords? No proof of that exists. In fact, his body—like that of Jimmy Hoffa, who coincidentally disappeared five weeks prior to Farto’s arrest—has never been found. An all-points bulletin and periodic manhunts proved fruitless. The years peeled off the calendar. Anyone who knew anything about the whereabouts or getaway plans or death of Bum Farto kept mum. Finally, he was declared dead. Whether he passed away long ago (he’d now be over 100) or made it to a safe haven is anyone’s guess. But I’ll state my theory. It’s likely that Farto was the driver of his car to Miami, where drug contacts lived. The fact that he jumped bail signaled his intent never to cooperate with law enforcement, which the Mafia realized. But at the same time, they knew if he got caught he could still do a plea deal. In other words, Farto reckoned that he needed to escape to a place offering a decent lifestyle with a new identity where no one could finger him. The Bahamian and Caribbean islands were too small to remain incognito. He wouldn’t go to Cuba because while he may have been chummy with Castro during his visits to Key West over a decade earlier, Farto realized that the new Cuban dictator wouldn’t be keen harboring an American drug fugitive. In fact, Castro might even use Farto as trade bait with the U.S. Ergo, I believe that a former drug contact in Miami helped Farto obtain forged ID and concealed him for a few weeks. Farto then hopped aboard a private plane or boat and hightailed it across the Gulf of Mexico. I conclude that Farto ended up in Costa Rica for two reasons: It’s one of the more pleasant and stable countries in Central America, and in 1976 living outside the capital city of San Jose pretty much assured anonymity. Guesswork aside, Joseph “Bum” Farto’s disappearance remains a mystery over 50 years later. But the evolving lure of drug money in the Florida Keys hardly ceased. In fact, it escalated, and if the players weren’t quite as colorful in name or action as Farto, the fever from suitcases stuffed with Ben Franklins infected the hearts of many notable Keys figures. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Sunshine State Mafia: A History of Florida’s Mobsters, Hit Men, and Wise Guys by Doug Kelly. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, March 2024. Reprinted with permission of University Press of Florida. View the full article

A town of seemingly perfect housewives. A severed ear in a patch of green grass. The last man alive hiding from his monstrous neighbors. A family ostracized from the community after their sugar bowl is poisoned. From Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and most of Shirley Jackson’s body of work, there’s something about the suburban gothic that keeps us coming back for more. It’s creepy, it’s familiar, and it’s omnipresent. A broad and rather elusive subcategory, the suburban gothic focuses on the existential horror that lurks in small towns, close-knit communities, and suburban neighborhoods. These locales might not have been the original source of gothic terror, but in our modern landscape, they’ve become some of the most recognizable places in our lives—and even the most ominous. # When I was writing the first draft of what would become my novel, The Haunting of Velkwood, the concept of suburbia was front and center in my mind. In fact, I literally used the photography book, Suburbia, by Bill Owens as part of my mood board for the novel. (Suburbia, it should be noted, also served as the inspiration for the Detroit suburb in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, the candy-coated neighborhood in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, and the 1970s costume aesthetic in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If there has ever been some kind of arcane magic in a book of photographs, then Suburbia has most definitely got it.) So what is it about Bill Owens’ photography and the seemingly ordinary neighborhoods and families in his work that have captured so many storytellers’ imaginations? Part of the answer lies in the way the gothic has always focused on a sense of place. It has a long tradition of depicting its physical locations as almost mystical and sentient. After all, what would Wuthering Heights be without the brooding moors, or Jane Eyre without Thornfield and all the secrets locked away in the attic? Dracula thrives off the terror of Carfax Abbey and Castle Dracula, and it’s virtually impossible to remember The Picture of Dorian Gray without his mansion and its hidden room and hidden portrait. These locales are filled with just as much nuance and complexity as the characters that dwell within them. They’re strange and dark and haunted, untold dangers lurking at every turn. But while traditional gothic settings tend to include ancestral estates and vast, foreboding landscapes exposed to the ravages of nature, the neighborhoods of the suburban gothic don’t seem nearly as threatening. They’re so new, so brightly lit, as to appear perfectly normal. Sprinklers in well-manicured lawns, ice cream trucks on summertime corners, allotments arranged in neat rows with identical houses peering back at you. Whether in daylight or moonlight, it feels like we should be safe here. And that’s exactly where the horror thrives. David Lynch knows all too well the terror of suburbia and small towns. The opening of Blue Velvet literally digs deep into the mythos of suburban life, exposing the unseemly underbelly waiting there. Early on in the film, the camera focuses on a bright blue sky and a literal white picket fence with beautiful red roses growing in front of it. From there, we see respectable houses and a line of schoolchildren placidly crossing the street. But nothing is as it seems. A man watering his grass is suddenly stricken and collapses without anyone else noticing, his body left shaking on the ground. That’s when the camera descends into the earth, the dirt rising up around us like we’re a corpse, as we see the darkness and the rot and the hungry insects lurking beneath us all the time. Before long, our protagonist will inadvertently come across the single object that sets the whole film into motion: a severed ear. Blue Velvet might begin with a sunny day in suburbia, but it knows where this all ends: in devastating secrets and unspeakable violence. We want to believe terrible things only happen if you find yourself in a dim alley among nefarious strangers, but the truth is if you have something to fear in life, it’s almost certainly going to happen in a place you recognize among people you know well. This ubiquitous danger of suburbia has permeated other famous media of the last half century. The town of Stepford appears to be a wonderful place to raise your kids; that is, until you realize all the women are strangely glassy-eyed and robotic, thanks to the cruel appetites of their narcissistic husbands. The Lisbon family in The Virgin Suicides are an apparently idyllic family—and then the bereft daughters begin to kill themselves while the befuddled neighborhood watches, unable or unwilling to do anything to stop it. While the suburban gothic can be set anywhere, it’s sometimes seen as a subsection of the American gothic, and maybe there’s a good reason for that. The so-called American Dream promises us a life of comfort and stability and bright-eyed happiness (so long as you commit to a life of drudgery to a corporate overlord). But as the suburban gothic so adeptly explores, any alleged promises are only an illusion. No matter where you go, the terror is sure to follow. # Gothic literature has long been a reflection of our collective fears, and the stories have evolved over the decades to convey that. With the suburban gothic, it asks a fundamental question that haunts our modern lives: is home a haven or a hellscape? Can the friendly smiles of our neighbors keep us safe from the outside world? Or are we simply creating our own prisons? If there was ever a writer who didn’t trust her small-town neighbors, it was no doubt Shirley Jackson. Look no further than her classic short story, “The Lottery,” if you want to see what people will do to maintain their beloved traditions. Jackson understood better than most that the places that should keep us safe often become the most unsettling and dangerous settings in our lives. While The Haunting of Hill House is often described as Jackson’s crowning achievement, her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, perhaps succeeds even better at capturing the dread of insular communities. After most of the Blackwood family is poisoned, sisters Constance and Merricat live an isolated existence away from the townspeople who despise them. The locals assume Constance is a murder, though most readers will quickly deduce that younger sister Merricat is clearly the culprit. Although the book never explicitly explores the reasons for Merricat’s hatred of her family, there are intimations of her father’s abusive nature as well as mysterious arguments that hint at deeper secrets that are never revealed to the reader. Whatever the motive, in Merricat’s eyes, there was no safety for her within or without, not in the village and not in her own family, at least until she took matters into her own bloodthirsty hands. Only then did her house become a sanctuary for her. # Home. It’s a simple word but such a tricky notion. It’s much easier to describe a house itself—the physical dimensions of a literal space with a roof and rooms and a mortgage to pay. But a home is something we each learn to define through our own eyes and our own experiences. Your memories growing up might be all about comfort food and Christmas mornings and togetherness. Or maybe it was screaming matches and latch keys and loneliness. Perhaps it was all of those things or none of them at all. The suburban gothic manages to encapsulate all those perspectives while also acknowledging that in one way or another, every house is a haunted house. And it doesn’t have to be one that’s filled with ghosts; plenty of haunted houses are occupied solely by the living. Returning once more to the work of Shirley Jackson, her lonely protagonist Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House is a woman without a home and without a future. After dedicating her whole life to her hateful mother, there’s not much left of the hopes and dreams she once had. With Eleanor, Shirley Jackson asked a question that still gnaws at me years after I first read Hill House: what if a haunting isn’t only a place, but also a person? What if your trauma and all the pain of your past have turned you into a living, breathing haunted house? Because while you might be able to flee Hill House, there’s no way to escape yourself. And as the suburban gothic proves, perhaps we’re the most frightening phantoms of all. *** View the full article

My latest novel Finding Sophie is a crime novel about a teenager (Sophie) who goes missing one seemingly uneventful day. That simple but monumental event rips open the lives of her parents, Harry and Zara and sends them spiraling in opposite directions. Where one lives in hope, the other clings to despair. When one finds strength to commit to a search, the other seeks answers internally—in a search of the soul. They each want to find truth but to do that they have to learn to understand and navigate a path between hope and grief. Missing persons stories are usually told from the lens of the police or a private detective—a dispassionate investigator who can leave emotions behind in order to get to answers. But I chose to tell the story from the perspectives of the missing girl’s parents because I wanted to get closer to their emotions and their internal worlds. I wanted to feel as well as to discover. There are many ways to tell the missing person story but this, to me is by far the most dramatic and heart-engaging one. The stakes are personal and for that reason, I think, all the more thrilling. In my job as a criminal barrister I have dealt with missing persons cases, in the context of murder cases. Judges and juries try cases together, the one dealing with the law and the other with the facts. But together they try the case as impartial actors. They don’t have any personal skin in the game beyond doing what is right and just. However, these kinds of trials are usually highly emotional. There are families and whose futures and whose need for resolution are at stake. A missing person case is a special kind of case precisely because so much hangs in the balance. It is literally a case of life and death. Is the missing person alive and well carefully holding the dreams of those who love her and await her return or have those dreams withered and been buried with her? Parents seem to have a conjoined identity in dramas and novels involving their children. They act as a unit. They feel the same things. They often have the same thoughts. But I wanted tell this story in the separated voices of Sophie’s parents, Harry and Zara. I felt it important to give equal weight to their stories because they react to Sophie’s disappearance in such different ways. To understand them as individuals and to appreciate the depth and variety of their feelings it’s necessary to unstitch them from one another. To see how they deal with their challenges and their obstacles as individuals. To examine how particularly they meet with and absorb their grief. Grief. That is the beating heart of a missing person case. It is often said that the depth of a person’s grief, is in direct proportion to the depth of the love they have lost. Grief is the testimony of love, its twin and its mirror. We know grief just as surely as we know love. But in the same way that love might be unrequited, so too can loss be inchoate. There is a liminal state, I think, that is produced by incomplete grief. When the person for whom you grieve isn’t definitely dead, but is missing, how do you process that? What do you do when, in Schrodinger-speak, you have a cat that is both alive and dead at the same time? How do you rationalize and then deal with a possible loss, in a way that is authentic to both outcomes? To feel grief feels disloyal to hope. And feeling hope feels like a treason to loss. For me this conflict was the natural place to begin. But then as I drew further into the novel, I found I had to tackle something more practical. Justice. In criminal cases, the absence of a body isn’t a bar to trying a defendant for murder. In some ways, a trial is more crucial in these cases than anywhere else because people need something to stand in place of the sickening labile uncertainty of a missing loved one. A trial in a kind of miraculous way can give you that something. You take the evidence and feed it through a court and wait for the dark magic to unfold. Because a verdict once it is given creates a truth out of thin air. Every criminal case is tried by a jury that didn’t witness the events in question. Nobody on that jury can know for sure whether X was acting in self-defence in the heat of the moment or if Y mistakenly identified X as the suspect. We only have the word of a witness or witnesses. A word based, even if honestly believed, on a memory that is dwindling as fast as time is moving on. But once the verdict is in, X is guilty. He is a murderer. Whether in reality he is or not. And so a verdict delivers certainty out of uncertainty, give closure where once there were only open wounds. Even if that verdict is nothing more than a fiction, in which twelve jurors have conspired. And that strange creation of truth was one of the reasons I wanted to splice a murder trial in between Harry and Zara’s alternating accounts. The drama in court is where we unearth the ‘truth’. I keep the courtroom scenes tense and unpredictable to replicate in some small way the feeling that Harry and Zara perhaps have of holding onto a hope that is liable to turn on them any second. And also court is tense. There are moments in every trial where it feels as though the world can just come tumbling down. We all, as courtroom advocates, hold our breaths for the answers to questions we are not sure we should have asked. But when all is said and done, a verdict is not a true substitute for truth. And no family was ever fully healed by a trial unless their loved one was found (dead or alive). We need to find answers as readers of crime fiction that leave us whatever the answer, in a state where we better understand the world. Because the world out there is a chaotic and dangerous place and the least we can do as writers is to restore some order. So I promise that at the end of Finding Sophie you will find out what happened to Sophie. And what became of Harry and Zara. And what this murder trial tells us about hope and grief. Because to leave you without that resolution would be to leave you with your own inchoate loss and liminal spaces. And frankly I never liked the idea of a cat that could be both dead and alive at the same time. *** View the full article

Clothes are a storyteller’s dream when it comes to showing, not telling. In Patricia Highsmith’s 1950s novel, The Price of Salt, Therese Belivet describes what Carol is wearing even before she mentions her future lover’s eyes, or mouth, or languorous walk. (“She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with her hand on her waist.”) Carol’s appearance as a centre of stillness within the frantic atmosphere of a Manhattan department store has a lot to do with her fabulous coat, and the way she models it, and yet her poise, though striking, is not durable. That’s how it goes with coats: they are easily removed, lost, stolen or damaged. A fictional character whose essence is symbolised by a coat is very vulnerable indeed, especially if she inhabits a Patricia Highsmith novel, where moral compromise and psychic disintegration are the order of the day. A coat without a wearer is an object of infinite possibility, begging to be filled, whether literally or imaginatively. The eponymous coat in Helen Dunmore’s, The Greatcoat, has lost its rightful owner, and when Isabel Carey finds it in the back of a cupboard, and takes to using in her freezing 1950s flat, she summons a ghost from Britain’s recent wartime past. Isabel’s airman is a dreamy and romantic apparition, unlike the red-coated figure in Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now. Tantalised by shadowy half-glimpses, John Baxter becomes convinced that the child in the hooded red coat is his dead daughter, and pursues her through the streets of Venice—only to discover, too late, that he has been misled by his own obsessive longings. I have forgotten the precise colour of my granny’s fur jacket, but it certainly wasn’t red; it had the natural tones of an animal pelt. My sister and I used to borrow it when we were playing ‘posh ladies.’ The fact that a living thing had been killed in order to create it contributed to its adult-ness: I couldn’t be sure whether the death of the mink (or fox, or rabbit, or whatever it was) made it more precious, or more creepy, or both. Certainly, if a grown-up woman in a children’s book is wearing furs, she is likely to be bad news: the link between fur coats and cruelty is made explicit in the character of Dodie Smith’s Cruella de Vil, and implicit in Philip Pulman’s Mrs. Coulter and C.S. Lewis’s White Witch. The message is much more ambivalent when Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy don furs in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as of course they do, when they climb inside the antique wardrobe and find themselves in Narnia. There are sound practical reasons for borrowing those oversized coats (it’s always winter in Narnia, under the witch’s reign), but the fact that these are adult clothes, and furs at that, is telling. They are exchanging their childhood innocence for a world of magic and violence, in which the boundaries will be blurred between wild and tame, animal and human, natural and unnatural. A blinkered refusal to countenance the blurring of any such boundaries is the error that dooms Captain Sir John Franklin and his men, in Dan Simmon’s gothic chiller, The Terror. Trapped in the Arctic wilderness, plagued by cold, hunger, mutiny—and a semi-mythological, man-eating monster—these nineteenth century adventurers hold on to their ‘civilised’ ways with a tragic zeal. Good old woollen coats, flannel underwear and dodgy tinned food will surely see them through: never mind that the indigenous Inuit people have fur clothing (much more water-resistant than wool, and with more internal layers for trapping and warming air) and a notably lower mortality rate. There’s a beautiful scene towards the end of the book, where Captain Francis Crozier emerges from unconsciousness, having been rescued from certain death by the Inuit woman whom he calls Lady Silence. She has removed all his useless woollies, and wrapped him in furs, and he is blissfully warm and safe for the first time in the course of this gruelling novel. Lady Silence nurses Crozier for days, while he lies naked inside those furs—and if that’s not erotic signalling, I don’t know what is, so it’s no surprise when the two become lovers. Dressing in someone else’s clothes is an intimate thing to do, and there’s a pivotal scene in Jane Eyre where our heroine stands shivering in her shawl, having rescued Mr. Rochester from his burning bed, and he offers her his cloak. It is their most intense encounter yet (“Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look”) and the complexities of their nascent romance are captured in the image of the “poor, obscure” governess wearing her wealthy employer’s clothing. Yes, it evokes eroticism (the cloak that usually wraps his body now wraps hers) and love (the cloak provides warmth and shelter), but it also speaks to the darker themes of the book. Rochester’s cloak doesn’t fit Jane; it swamps, captures and claims her. Through the course of the book she must, figuratively speaking, throw it off, refashioning Rochester’s autocratic passion into a love between equals. ~ “A thing is never just a thing in itself,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. Just like children playing “posh ladies” in their grandmother’s old furs, novelists love to build their stories around an allusive object. An airman’s woollen greatcoat, a little girl’s red overcoat, an Inuit’s sealskin parka, a Victorian gentleman’s cloak: on the one hand, they are just bits of fabric that have been pieced together to make outerwear; on the other, they are stories waiting to be told. Coats and cloaks will always be beloved by writers of gothic fiction, because they can speak so resonantly about the darker realities of life: absence, possession, vulnerability, desire, concealment, violence and—not least—a human dread of the cold, in all its forms. *** View the full article

“The trial of Polly Bodine will take place at Richmond, on Monday next, and will, no doubt, excite much interest,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe on June 18, 1844, for the Columbia Spy. Poe had recently moved to New York where, he declared, “I intend living for the future.” He got a temporary lift when he sold “The Balloon Hoax” story, a fictional account of the first transatlantic balloon crossing to Moses Yale Beach of the Sun. THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!! screamed the Sun in April 1844. James Gordon Bennett exposed Poe’s story as a hoax and Beach issued a retraction. Not even the Sun could hold its readers entirely on hoaxes. Soon, Poe was broke again. He found a city of strangers and ran up debts. Poe lamented that in America “to be poor is to be despised.” In May 1844, he got work as a correspondent for the Columbia Spy for which he wrote epistles on “the Doings of Gotham.” Poe spent that summer “roaming far and wide over this island of Mannahatta” to chronicle the city. But he kept pitching stories to magazines, always searching for the commercial success that had eluded him. For years, Poe had read with fascination the penny press’s reports on murder investigations, and this sparked a notion in him: perhaps he could solve cases through the newspapers? Indeed, he might even be better at crime-solving than the authorities. In 1841, Poe wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” his groundbreaking detective story featuring Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur sleuth in Paris who unravels crimes through “ratiocination,” the application of deductive logic to the clues. Monsieur Dupin reads in the newspapers about the savage murders of two women. He explains to his sidekick that the police focus too narrowly on the rules of evidence. “This may be the practice in law, but it is not the usage of reason. My ultimate object is only the truth,” he insists. Dupin deduces that the killer was . . . an orangutan that’d escaped from a sailor’s possession. The story concludes with Poe’s defense of amateur crime-solving. “The Chief of police was not happy that the answer to the mystery of the killings had been found by someone who was not a policeman,” says his sidekick. Dupin replies that while the chief is a “good fellow” he often misses “something which is there before his eyes.” Then a real murder captured Poe and the public’s imagination. On the sweltering morning of July 28, 1841, passersby spotted a woman’s corpse floating on the Hudson River. The victim was Mary Cecilia Rogers, a beautiful, twenty-one-year-old “cigar girl” at John Anderson’s tobacco emporium. The Herald speculated that she was killed by a “gang of negroes.” The Post reported that an Irish gang lured Mary Rogers to the shore where she was, “after the accomplishment of their hellish purposes, brutally murdered.” Dissatisfied, Poe did something audacious: he set out to publicly solve the Mary Rogers case while the investigation was ongoing. He pitched a new, thinly veiled Monsieur Dupin detective story in which he would reanalyze the Mary Rogers case and reveal the real killer. “I believe not only that I have demonstrated the fallacy of the general idea thinly-veiled—that the girl was the victim of a gang of ruffians—but have indicated the assassin in a manner which will give renewed impetus to the investigation,” he promised his editor. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was serialized in William Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion. Dupin explains to his sidekick how he intends to solve the crime. “Not the least usual error, in investigations such as this, is the limiting of inquiry to the immediate, with total disregard of the collateral or circumstantial events,” he explains. “It is the malpractice of the courts to confine evidence and discussion to the bounds of apparent relevancy.” While the prevailing theory was that Marie had been the victim of gang, Dupin deduces that the killer was a naval officer. Developments in the actual Mary Rogers case threatened to destroy Poe’s theory. Two sons of Mrs. Frederica Loss, an innkeeper, were arrested on suspicions that they’d murdered Mary Rogers at the inn. Mrs. Loss confessed on her deathbed that Mary had come to the inn with a physician for an abortion, but she died from the botched abortion. Neither scenario squared with Poe’s theory that it was a naval officer. Faced with public humiliation, Poe drank heavily. By the time of the final installment, he came up with a literary trick. Dupin debunks the gang theory. But just as he’s about to reveal the perpetrator, there is a supposed note from the editor which states that, for legal reasons, “we have taken the liberty of omitting” information about the real killer. Today, Poe is credited with establishing the modern detective genre in his Monsieur Dupin stories. But his stories celebrating amateur detectives portended something else as well. In trying to publicly “solve” the real Mary Rogers case through dramatic storytelling, Poe was the forerunner to the “true crime” documentarians of our own time. He believed that outsiders could solve cases which have baffled or misled the authorities. When he vowed to “give renewed impetus to the investigation,” we can hear echoes of documentarians of today who seek to reopen moribund cases, or to free those whom they believe were wrongfully convicted. Like Poe, they’ve had mixed success. By the time of the trial of Polly Bodine that summer of 1844, Poe was in full bloom as a crime writer. His classic short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Black Cat” (1843) imagined killers as unnamed narrators. The morbid details of “The Oblong Box” (1844) were inspired in part by John Colt’s attempt to ship the corpse of Samuel Adams. That summer, he also sold “The Purloined Letter” (1844), his third and final detective story featuring Monsieur Dupin. 8 So it was inevitable that Poe would weigh in on the real case that seized the nation that summer. “The trial of Polly Bodine will take place at Richmond, on Monday next, and will, no doubt, excite much interest. This woman may, possibly, escape; for they manage these matters wretchedly in New-York,” he wrote. Trial testimony hadn’t even begun. But the initial press reports were enough for him to deduce that Polly was plainly guilty. The Polly Bodine case had stirred up in him old feelings about the Mary Rogers debacle. “It is difficult to conceive anything more preposterous than the whole conduct, for example, of the Mary Rogers affair,” Poe wrote. “The police seemed blown about, in all directions, by every varying puff of the most unconsidered newspaper opinion,” he said. “The magistracy suffered the murderer to escape, while they amused themselves with playing court, and chopping the technicalities of jurisprudence.” His column also resurrected arguments from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” that “very much of what is rejected as evidence by a court, is the best of evidence to the intellect.” Poe ended with a tantalizing prediction about how the rules of evidence might affect the pending trial. “I have good reason to believe that it will do public mischief in the coming trial of Polly Bodine,” he wrote. What crucial evidence did Poe think would be excluded? What “mischief” did he think would occur in the coming trial? ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice, by Alex Hortis. Copyright 2024. Published by Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article

One time my brother almost saw a ghost. He was in New Orleans, in an ancient bar, during a bachelor party weekend, I think. To be honest, I can’t quite remember all the details because this story was very long and he clearly didn’t have an ending in mind when he began telling a room full of people about this spooky situation that culminated in a bathroom where he almost saw something. Something invisible, it turned out, almost became visible by the urinal. But in the end, he didn’t see it after all. The ghost. This payoff was met with derisive laughter, which is the normal response in my family if someone squanders your time with a bad story. I have three middle-aged brothers who like to roughhouse and my mom keeps a running tally of who’s the funniest Flaherty. She says she’s number one, and she’s probably right. But my brother who almost saw the ghost ranks high on that list, and he laughed at himself because he was hearing his tale for the first time too, as he was telling it. He’d started to say something about a weekend trip, when he realized that all side conversations had suddenly stopped and everyone was listening to him. A middle child, like me, he’s long known that attention can be hard to come by. So, rather than mention a strange bar and quit, he decided to go on and on. He’s a natural storyteller, after all, and in the past, he’d smoothly landed the plane after far shakier liftoffs than a freaky location in a city famous for voodoo and vampires. That night, though, he circled the runway until he ran crashed. But I understand now that there was more to his story than nothing. And it wasn’t that he didn’t almost see something. It was that he felt something. Some kind of strange energy there that he couldn’t explain. That happens in certain places. I once lived in Hawaii and did some camping on the Big Island, where new land is born every day. One night, I got lost hiking on a lava field and fell into a hole, the contents of which I’m still too frightened of to put into words here. But I felt an energy in that moment that wasn’t ghostly, per se, but like nothing I’d ever experienced. I knew there were unusual electromagnetic properties afoot because of the island’s volcanic activity, and maybe that’s what it was, but I don’t know. A friend there once told me that on a boat near Kaho‘olawe, an island the US military used as a bombing range, she suddenly just burst into tears and didn’t know why. It was some feeling from the land that just came over her, she said. The place that has always affected me the most like that are the woods in the town where I grew up in northern Connecticut, which is the inspiration for the setting of my debut novel, The Dredge. The house we lived in was built in the 1820s and we had old photographs in a bathroom of past owners who’d farmed there at the turn of the century. We shared a home with these dead. We saw their marks on floorboards and hand-hewn joists with old bark still on them. As a kid, I saw one of their apparitions in my bedroom one night. Not almost, actually saw it, I thought. This is the first time I’ve ever mentioned that. And though I can rationalize it away now as an adult, a waking dream or an unusual refraction of moonlight, I still spent the majority of my childhood in a room that I believed was haunted and never told anyone about it before you. Some of the details of that house and the surrounding woods I used in the The Dredge, including a tree along a brook bank where someone carved the highwater mark of the great flood of 1955, which killed nearly two hundred people in Connecticut. And there’s a version of a pond that I had a nightmare about nearly fifteen years ago. In its dark water, I saw a pale stick of birch that terrified me. Though it’s only a detail now, I felt the whole story in that image and it took me all this time to be rid of it. Most of us can probably name a place that does some kind of mysterious thing to us. New Orleans, Hawaii, my little hometown, everywhere you look, anywhere you really are, there is strange history, layers upon layers of it piled up endlessly, as you know. Bones in the ground, marked or not. Oddities created by people, by nature. And energies that can’t be fathomed, much less explained. Often, we cannot articulate what can’t be seen. All we know is that we felt something in that setting. Something so unusual that it seemed in the moment that the next logical step would be for it to reveal itself to us, but it just didn’t. And that’s all it becomes. A spooky little blip that lingers. Do you remember? Have you ever told anyone? It’s true, isn’t it? That one time you almost saw a ghost. View the full article

I started writing my second novel, Like It Never Happened, at the beginning of 2020. It started, as all stories do, with a handful of characters and an inciting incident. In this case, four eighteen-year-old boys get in a fight with two strangers in a parking lot. They kill one boy and incapacitate another. They get away with it, but they argue about what to do next. Their friendship shatters, and they lose touch. It usually takes a fair distance into a story—after I learn what happens—before I start to get a sense of what it’s about. As I churned out words and pages and chapters, Covid crept toward us and then engulfed us, and my story that began with violence drifted toward secrets and lies and blame. * From the beginning, we all searched for someone to blame for Covid and the way it upended our lives. The second semester of my son’s senior year of high school was effectively cancelled. His freshman year of college went online. My special needs daughter, who was living in a residential treatment center, was sent home just a little bit before she was ready. It became difficult to connect with family and friends, and like everyone else, we lost the illusion of control over our lives that we’d spent so much time and energy cultivating. As the pandemic lockdown stretched from weeks into months, I met some friends one evening in a park along the bike path. We stood six feet apart—eight middle-aged men drinking beer that we had pulled from our backpacks like teenagers. We quickly exhausted the few topics at hand—the fruitless search for toilet paper, remote work, too much time with our immediate families. The discussion turned toward who to blame. We cycled through the usual suspects from that time: China, the president, the CDC, Bill Gates even. We were all unsettled and uncertain and worried about what would come next. Some demanded accountability, even if they didn’t know exactly what that meant, or what that would get them, or from whom they were demanding it. * I open the novel when those four boys are approaching fifty, and they are all chafing against that night so many years ago, grasping for that sense of control we all crave so much. When the most troubled of the four dies, the other three see each other for the first time in thirty years at the funeral. They also meet the dead man’s wife. They learn that she’s a reporter, and that she knows everything. She blames them for her husband’s chaotic life and for his death, and she’s determined to make them pay, to hold them accountable. But what is accountability? I wrote Like it Never Happened in close third person with a rotating point of view. The story studies the same terrible event and, more importantly, its aftermath, from a variety of angles. That choice allows the reader to see how that night in the parking lot affected each of those men and how their lack of accountability damaged their families. Most importantly, it allows the reader to blame and then forgive each character as the story shifts from one subjectivity to the next. As I wrote, the pandemic wore on all of us, and we started to blame each other. Some of us blamed too few masks or vaccines or distance while others blamed shutdowns and vaccines and masks. Each according to their point of view, but we all found someone or something to blame. Too few of us held ourselves to account. What’s the difference between accountability and blame? They seem like twins at first, all but identical. But when you study them, subtle differences emerge. Blame leans toward accusation, the assignment of fault. It drives conflict, division, and polarization. Accountability, on the other hand, represents the acceptance of responsibility. It leads toward learning, and it implies a willingness to collaborate and to grow and to change. Viewed through this lens, demanding accountability seems a bit like demanding friendship. Examined closely, blame and accountability seem like distant cousins at best. * My daughter, who struggles with much, added online high school to her anxiety inventory when she came home at the beginning of Covid. Her anxiety often leads to crisis and sometimes violence. She sat at the dining room table in front of her laptop trying to hold it all together. I sat across from her at my own laptop wearing a set of noise-cancelling headphones so that I could get some words written, trying to move the story forward. Even as I worked, I watched her. I waited for the telltale signs that, if left unchecked, might throw our home into chaos. It was my responsibility to step in when she became overwhelmed and to help her deescalate. I took the headphones off to listen to the quadratic equation lessons, because I had forgotten anything that I had once learned about quadratic equations, and because helping her through her algebra homework was also my responsibility. We were still in lockdown the night that my son’s cancelled prom was supposed to take place. I heard him shouting to nobody in the basement, venting his frustrations like everyone. I went downstairs and asked him if he’d like to play cards. He shrugged, mumbled something that might have been the word Fine. I went back upstairs for the cards and a twelve-pack. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and responsibility takes many forms. Responsibility is certainly accountability’s sibling. Taking responsibility for our actions. Taking responsibility for the wellbeing of others. As the pandemic wore on, I realized that responsibility and accountability aren’t negative words, that they are filled with agency and possibility. They aren’t related in any way to blame—they aren’t even the same species. * When you read a novel with a crime at its core, you want to see justice served, the guilty punished. But I wanted more than that for my characters. It wasn’t enough for others to demand accountability from them. I wanted them to hold themselves accountable. I wanted to see them seize it and begin to repair their broken relationships. The pandemic got much more difficult before it became easier. Like everyone, I learned a lot from the experience—about patience and endurance and centering myself in stillness. I learned what I could reasonably expect from others and what I shouldn’t. I learned, both on the page and off, that accountability isn’t a punishment for a transgression, but a choice. If my characters damaged their relationships by dodging accountability, I could strengthen my own when I chose to embrace it. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Tana French, The Hunter (Viking) “Tana French has become her own reliable industry of top-shelf crime thrillers.” –The Washington Post Elizabeth Brooks, The Woman in the Sable Coat (Tin House) “Secrets, betrayals, and compromises abound as these very different women navigate treacherous relationships to find safe harbor in Brooks’ taut novel.” –Booklist Brendan Flaherty, The Dredge (Atlantic Monthly Press) “In this accomplished debut mystery, Flaherty revitalizes the familiar trope of old secrets threatening to resurface with sinewy prose and well-tooled suspense . . . The past and present unfold gradually from the vantage points of Flaherty’s well-drawn leads, keeping readers on a knife’s edge as the full scope of each character’s history clicks into place. Admirers of Eli Cranor’s Ozark Dogs will be riveted.” –Publishers Weekly Sophie Wan, Women of Good Fortune (Graydon House) “[A] crackling debut…. The novel moves along briskly while dutifully adhering to the tropes of the heist genre, but this stands out for its unexpected depth; Wan expertly delves into her protagonists’ emotional backstories and reveals their complexities…. Wan pulls this off without a hitch.” –Publishers Weekly Elle Cosimano, Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice (Minotaur) “Another rollicking round of high-speed felonies for mystery author Finlay Donovan and those unwary enough to get pulled into her orbit… perfect escapist fare.” –Kirkus Reviews Amy Tintera, Listen for the Lie (Celadon) “Listen for the Lie is a page-turner from the first sentence to the very last. In addition to being a world-class whodunit, full of carefully doled-out twists, Lucy is a terrific character, feisty and funny and, it turns out, brave as hell. It’s great fun. Readers will rip through this one.” –Stephen King Ben Winters, Big Time (Mulholland) “Big Time is a wild and wonderful trip, a kaleidoscope of mind-bending science, metaphysics, and good old-fashioned thrills. And most engaging of all are the characters Ben Winters creates: a hugely appealing Everywoman sleuth, a young woman struggling with a harrowing dilemma, and one of the scariest antagonists in recent memory.” –Lou Berney Ken Bruen, Galway Confidential (Mysterious Press) “The raffish hero’s world feels like an unusually sordid theme park attraction. Just be sure to wipe your hands when you exit.” –Kirkus Rob Osler, Cirque du Slay (Crooked Lane) “Chock full of unconventional characters, both LGBTQ+ and not, this entertaining cozy is heartwarming in the characters’ caring for one another.” —Booklist Alex Hortis, The Witch of New York (Pegasus) “In this excellent work of true crime, Hortis examines the case of Polly Bodine, who became infamous after she was accused of murdering her sister-in-law and infant niece. Hortis’s historical detail makes the episode come to life, and he successfully evokes contemporary tabloid scandals like the Amanda Knox trial. Fans of Daniel Stashower will love this.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article

The early 1980s were a crazy time for adventure movies. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” had come out in the summer of 1981 and was a huge box-office success, spawning sequels that would continue more than 40 years later and imitators that adapted old adventure tropes like “King Solomon’s Mines” in 1985 and “High Road to China” in 1983, the latter starring the man who might have been Indiana Jones if not for prior commitments, Tom Selleck. So it’s interesting that the best of the Indiana Jones follow-ups spun the story in a direction that was infrequently explored: what better plot than one revolving around a writer, and what better way to thrust a writer into action than thrusting them into one of their own stories? Released in 1984, “Romancing the Stone” beat by decades latter-day “authors in their own adventures” films like “The Lost City” and “Argylle.” “Romancing the Stone” – and its lesser-and-lesser-remembered sequel, “The Jewel of the Nile,” from 1985 – got there first, by decades. “Romancing the Stone” really perfected the formula. And – tragically – it is the fate of the film’s novice screenwriter, Diane Thomas, that is the strangest story connected to the film. Mudslides and arduous filming It’s honestly debatable how much “Raiders” influenced “Romancing the Stone” because both were in the works, at least in pre-production, years before Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders” came out. As early as May 1978, newspaper accounts noted that Spielberg and friend and “Star Wars” creator George Lucas were working on a project called “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” A California paper cited it as a project about which little was known. Then in September 1979, the Los Angeles Times published a profile of Diane Thomas, not long after she had been working as a waitress and after she had spent a year writing “Romancing the Stone,” “which neither she nor (producer and star Michael) Douglas nor her agent will say much about. The fear, as with many film ideas, is that someone will steal the idea and turn it into a quickie TV movie or low-budget feature.” “I’ll never sell my first screenplay again,” the 33-year-old Thomas is quoted as saying. “I know this is a Cinderella story, although I don’t have any glass slippers around my house. Maybe I should get a pair.” Thomas could afford them. She had famously been paid $250,000 for the screenplay for “Romancing.” The headline on the Times article: “A New Career with a Cinderella Ending.” “Romancing the Stone,” in the meantime, wouldn’t be released until the end of March 1984, when the competition at the box office included “Footloose,” “Splash,” “Against all Odds” and “Police Academy.” Even in April, the first full month “Romancing” was in release, it came in second in terms of tickets sold to “Police Academy.” It seemed like the immediate payoff was not there. After all, star and producer Michael Douglas had been working on the film for five years, nurturing Thomas’ script. And production in Mexico was arduous. “I had really underestimated the logistics of shooting a chase picture in the middle of the jungle in monsoon season in a foreign county,” Douglas said in an interview published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We were flying without a net a lot of the time. We were out on the edge.” While the movie probably got made through Douglas’ perseverance, it was director Robert Zemeckis who pulled off the film. Zemeckis had made three films, including the large-scale action comedy “1941,” before making “Romancing the Stone.” He was not yet the seasoned director who would later make “Back to the Future” and two sequels, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Forrest Gump,” “Castaway” and other, lesser films. Among Zemeckis, Douglas and Thomas, “Romancing” boasted memorable scenes, probably none as memorable as the mudslide scene, in which the leads slide down a steep hillside in the rain and mud. Douglas and Zemickis assembled a small but tight cast. Douglas played reluctant adventurer Jack Colton, but the standout was Kathleen Turner – who had a sensational debut in 1981 with “Body Heat” – playing successful romantic adventure novelist Joan Wilder. She’s a homebody – she has a cat, for goodness sakes, as if “Argylle” couldn’t find enough other plot points to cop – who goes to Colombia to help her sister and in the adventure becomes more confident, a woman able to stand up to gangsters and secret police and crocodiles. It’s not quite one of those woman-takes-her-glasses-off-and-is-a-beauty clichés, but Joan does reveal the beauty that is Turner. Other cast members include Danny DeVito as a small-time hood who helps to move the plot along and while the movie isn’t as dated as I was afraid it would be, there’s not the kind of depth of character that we’d see in a movie like this today. “Romancing the Stone” was a hit, though, grossing $115 million and Zemickis said the movie’s success ensured he could direct “Back to the Future.” But Diane Thomas, the screenwriter of “Romancing the Stone,” did not have the Cinderella-like ending the Los Angeles Times had wished for her back in 1979. Listening ‘while Diane saved the world’ After she wrote “Romancing the Stone,” Thomas co-wrote the Spielberg film “Always,” a romantic fantasy starring Richard Dreyfuss. She also finished a draft of a third Indiana Jones movie, which reportedly revolved around a haunted house. By some accounts, Spielberg decided against going forward with the idea because it reminded him too much of “Poltergeist,” which he had produced in 1982. In October 1985, Thomas died instantly when her Porsche Carrera, which was being driven by her boyfriend, spun out of control while traveling at speeds approaching 80 miles per hour on the Pacific Coast Highway. Thomas had been sitting in the backseat of the sportscar. Another passenger died of injuries from the crash. Thomas died six weeks before the “Romancing” sequel, “Jewel of the Nile,” was released. Aside from a few characters she worked on for Douglas, Thomas had not been able to pen the script for the sequel because she was busy with her work on “Always.” She is one of three writers credited with the script for “Jewel of the Nile.” A few weeks after her death, Betty Spence wrote about Thomas for the Los Angeles Times and the remembrance paints a picture of every writer ever – or at least who they’d like to be – and every writer who’s ever written themselves into their own story. “She worked relentlessly, with a discipline that amazed us. Her habitual eight hours at the typewriter might result in a dozen pages or only two, yet she persisted, even when writing on spec. One night before her movie was made, she showed her day’s output: a list of five neatly typed ideas. Eight hours’ thinking. “Wine glass in hand, legs akimbo on the couch, she pitched one to me, her dreamer’s mind unleashed as she unraveled an original saga of a girl with the secret of the philosopher’s stone. In awe, I listened while Diane saved the world as naturally as she might recount her own history.” View the full article

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

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

LOL! The last is my scary fav.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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