My father grew up in a small lumber mill town in Idaho called Potlatch, where the panhandle meets the pan. In 1953, Potlatch High School won the state championship in Track & Field. How’s that for a school with a graduating class of seven? How’s that for a school whose Track and Field team consisted of one person? My father! (Not at the time. Later. Dad didn’t even know Mom yet.) He won every event except the relay and that was only because the rules stipulated that a relay must consist of a minimum of three participants — or, in Dad’s case, 42.857143 % of his entire graduating class! My grandparents boasted a lot about that accomplishment, but my father did not. When I asked him why, he said it was because real sports meant being part of a team. I have always been terrible at team sports – unlike my father, I never knew what I was doing, what my teammates were doing, what they were going to do, or what they expected me to do. In high school I wrestled (sucked on offense, but hard to pin) and distance swimming. For me, the difference between writing for TV and writing books comes down to the difference between me and my father. Not in a Freudian sense — which applies to every writer in every discipline — but in the pursuit of my writing-as-sports-analogy as applicable to my early writing career when I had to choose between putting the bulk of my writing efforts into scripts or books. My natural inclination (long distance swimmer) suggested books, but … my wife, Brigitte, and I had a baby on the way and, in theory, script writing promised to generate income faster. So, I asked Dad what internal judo move he’d utilized on his team-player mentality that allowed him to triumph in a string of solo efforts to heroically win State. Dad said, “Ah, it’s all athletics. Just throw your body at it as hard as you can.” I translated that into the following advice: It’s all writing. Just throw your (fingers? eyeballs? head?) at (the blank page) as hard as you can. All writers face the blank page. That’s what makes us heroes. But where book-writers face that blank page in a vertiginous endless-void-like silence, scriptwriters face it engulfed by a deafening sonic tsunami of clamor. To me that clamor sounds like a pack of hyenas at dinner. A movie-writer friend describes a subsonic groan; another a banshee shriek; another his mother banging on his bedroom door and asking what he’s doing in there. Even before typing “Fade In” script writers hear that noise, and no matter the individual manifestation, like, we know the source: pre-existing demands by a Host of Others. These “Others” are not the amorphous and elusive “audience” that all writers — book and script alike — hope to reach. That audience can be muted in the same way that — depending upon our belief system — we scrape through the day in denial that gods, aliens, God, or whoever is running the computer simulation in which we all live is watching our every move. Scriptwriters face additional Others. Other Others. Flesh-and-blood human beings with faces — producers, directors, actors, etc. Not just indivduals but groups. Nay! Teams of people who, in the best-case scenario will partner up with the script writer to produce the script in its final form. Book-writers have only ourselves to please because the book is its own final form. Scripts are not their own final form. It is only the foundation upon which its final form can be realized: a moving picture. To become a moving picture, scripts require allies, colleagues, compatriots, partners, patrons, comrades, collaborators, co-conspirators, and friends. All of whom will turn on us like hyenas (which is why I hear hyenas) if we don’t deliver what they want, need, and desire. Which is why scriptwriters appear waving a script, saying, “Hey, everybody! What do you think of this?” Looking for affirmation. Book-writers appear, waving books, saying “Hey, everybody! Look what I did!” Presenting the book as an affirmation. To get the Host of Others on board, a script is required to prioritize story above all else. Starting with the person/studio/production company that is paying for the script and expects profits in return. Books can prioritize story if they want — but books have the option to dwell and ruminate, to stop and smell the roses, without causing a ruckus. When scripts ruminate and poeticize, story steps back, crosses its arms, and awaits its cue to take center stage. Meanwhile, the audience checks their phones, or leaves, and the writer is labeled “self-indulgent” or — rarely, but it happens — a “genius”. In a script, it’s easy-peasy in a script to show a character thinking. The scriptwriter simply types: The character thinks — but it’s nearly impossible to show what they’re thinking. We can help by typing: The character thinks about that distant afternoon when their father took them to discover ice. At which point the actor — quite rightly — protests, “How the hell am I supposed to convey that? Shiver? All that shows is that I’m chilly.” The camera can always luxuriate on an expressive face with eyes that reflect the universe. Just not for too long. What counts as “too long” has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with whose face we’re luxuriating upon. Scripts face outward. All the internal longings and thoughts must be dramatized. Books can look both outward but also inward — telling us in poetic prose all about those longings in ways that get readers to highlight the lines and dog-ear the page. Scripts are about doing. Books are about being. Ask a script writer, “What is your script about?” and we should be able to do so in a sentence or two. Ask a book writer the same question and we usually start with, “Well, it’s about a quite a few things, actually…” Scripts tend to be centered around somebody who wants a tangible something. A thing or an event. Motivated by an internal, universal longing which must be made clear through dramatization. Because not everything in a book requires dramatization, a book can afford to, as an old professor of mine once said, “Dance around the shithouse.” A book doesn’t have to dance, but it can. Which sounds easier until the writer recognizes that, at every step, there are so many options for getting where we want to go. It’s easier to go wrong in a book and there’s nobody but the writer to take the blame. When a moving picture goes wrong, the script writer has lots of people to help fix it — and even more to take the blame. We can blame studio execs: “It would have been great if the script hadn’t been dumbed down for the audience!” We can blame directors: “It would have been great if you’d moved the camera more (or less) gotten some close-ups (or beauty shots).” We can blame editors: “It would have been great if the right image had been on the screen at the right time.” We can blame composers: “It would have been great if the score was sad during the sad times and exciting during the exciting times.” We can blame actors: “It would have been great if it hadn’t been for all that improvisation!” We can blame cinematographers: “It would have been great if you’d been able to see it!” We can blame Locations: “It would have been great if the mansion scene hadn’t been shot in a shed.” We can blame Sound: see cinematographers but substitute “hear” for “see”. We sound terrible but please, remember, when the project is a success, all those same people will take credit — a waste of time because only the director will be successful. Book writers have no one else to blame. At least not for the content. We are reduced to blaming — or praising — marketing. And the narrator of the audiobook. In any case, all a writer can do is learn from my father: Throw yourself at it. Give it your all. Leave the boasting to your parents and offspring. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Bennett, Return to Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Bennett highlights Hana’s struggle to reconcile the pull of her Māori roots against her inner cop, a struggle that serves as a compelling backdrop for this twisty, well-crafted mystery.” –Booklist Swan Huntley, I Want You More (Zibby) “Deliciously disquieting…strikes a delicate tonal balance between seductive and serious…Readers who have ever wondered, ‘Do I want to be her or be with her?’ will feel a chill up their spines.” –Publishers Weekly Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent (Flatiron) “Auspicious debut alert: Fiona McPhillips’ When We Were Silent is the strongest first novel I have read in ages.” –BookPage Jaclyn Goldis, The Main Character (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Delicious tension and drama. Grab your suitcase and board the Orient Express for a trip you won’t soon forget.” –Kirkus Reviews L.M. Chilton, Swiped (Gallery/Scout) “Chilton shines a blackly humorous light on male misbehavior and love in the age of the internet—plus the timeless and ridiculous societal pressure of finding “the one.” Bound to become a classic of the singles scene.” –Kirkus Reviews Stuart Turton, The Last Murder at the End of the World (Sourcebooks) “Don’t go in the water” takes on new meaning in Turton’s brainy thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews Ruth Ware, One Perfect Couple (Gallery/Scout Press) “Ware once again delivers the literary goods, with a cheeky sense of wit (including a “blink and you’ll miss it” nod to one of her own books), a propulsive sense of pacing, and a fiendishly clever conclusion.” –Library Journal Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader) “[Bradley’s] utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre. Imagine if The Time Traveler’s Wife had an affair with A Gentleman in Moscow. . . You’d need a nuclear-powered flux capacitor to generate more charisma than Gore. . . His banter with the narrator crackles off the page . . . Readers, I envy you: There’s a smart, witty novel in your future.” –Ron Charles, The Washington Post Hart Hanson, The Seminarian (Blackstone) “A study in contrasts, this book is by turns bloody, gritty, and violent, heartwarming, thought-provoking, and laugh-out-loud funny. An unusual, inventive, unforgettable read that will appeal to mystery aficionados looking for something different.” –Booklist Graham Moore, The Wealth of Shadows (Random House) “Based on astonishing true events, The Wealth of Shadows is both a gripping, cinematic story of wartime subterfuge, and a powerful reminder of how even the most unlikely people can become resistance fighters during times of crisis.” –Flynn Berry View the full article

The first time I went to Adelaide the first thing everybody told me about the city was its specifically non-criminal antecedents. Adelaide, I was repeatedly told, is the major Australian city not originally established as a penal colony by the British. Today Adelaide is a jewel of Victoriana and art-deco architecture, enjoys a close proximity to serious wine making country, and is home to a slew of fantastic arts and literary festivals. But it does have a rather interesting crime history too – particularly true crime. In 1948, a well-dressed, seemingly undamaged, male corpse was discovered on a beach in Adelaide with a half-smoked cigarette left by his side. It became known as the Tamam Shud Case, after a tiny piece of rolled-up paper with these words printed on it was found sewn into the dead man’s pocket – words from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Suicide or a particularly clever murder? And if so, who was killed, who was the murderer, and what was the motive? It’s Adelaide’s longest running unsolved case. Kerry Greenwood’s Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery (2012) reinvestigates the case. Now those in the know will realise that Greenwood is also the author of the bestselling Miss Phryne Fisher books (and the hit TV show). And so her interest in the Tamam Shud case had tipped over into fiction – Tamam Shud (2021) – with a returning Phryne Fisher (who is usually Melbourne-based) in 1948 (rather than her usual Jazz Age persona) returning to Australia having served with the French Resistance during the Second World War. She stumbles upon the Tamam Shud man on Somerton Beach. The Adelaide police are baffled, and Phryne recognises the Tamam Shud clue as a coded message. Then there is the Beaumont Children mystery, three kids that disappeared from Glenelg beach, near Adelaide in January 1966. The three siblings had left their Adelaide home on Australia Day and set off for the beach. By the end of the day, none of the children had returned home and the case remains unsolved. Suspects, physics, baffled cops, and obviously distraught parents ensued. But all to no avail. There are a number of books on the case, the most famous and well-known probably being Alan Whiticker’s Searching for the Beaumont Children: Australia’s Most Famous Unsolved Mystery (2011). And even now, nearly 60 years after the children’s disappearance, new evidence, ideas and books keep appearing, most recently author Stuart Mullins and former South Australian police detective Bill Hayes’s Unmasking the Killer of the Missing Beaumont Children (2023). There’s also a good novel loosely based on the case by Stephen Orr, Time’s Long Ruin (2011). And a final true crime linked to Adelaide – the infamous Snowtown murders. In 1999, several bodies were discovered in barrels inside at bank vault in the South Australian town of Snowtown, up the coast from Adelaide. The Snowtown murders were Australia’s most horrific and sustained serial killing. Again the case has led to a number of books (and a very good 2012 movie by Justin Kurzel). Former police reporter, Jeremy Pudney, covered the case and wrote The Bodies in Barrels Murders (2005). Pudney investigates those who were caught and jailed (after a prolonged investigation), but asks why they committed the horrific crimes they did and just why South Australia has a reputation for producing the country’s highest number of serial killers? A question, incidentally, also posed by Stephen Orr (see above) in his book, The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the murder capital of Australia? (2011) that looks at some of the city’s most infamous crimes and asks why Adelaide? Enough true crime. Let’s look at some crime fiction set in Adelaide and South Australia. Best selling Australian author Jane Harper found success with The Dry (2016) featuring her character Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk. He reappeared in Force of Nature (2017) and then, though perhaps Harper is better known for setting her novels in the remote Australian Outback, heads into South Australian wine country in book three of the Aaron Falk series, Exiles (2023). A mother disappears from a busy festival on a warm spring night. Her baby lies alone in the pram, her mother’s possessions surrounding her, waiting for a return which never comes. A year later Aaron Falk begins his investigation of the disappearance. Garry (yes with two ‘r’s) Dicher is a household name to Australian crime writing fans and a South Australian. Among his many books and various series are the Constable Paul Hirschhausen novels. The series starts with Bitter Wash Road (2013) – published as Hell to Pay in the USA – featuring Hirschhausen, a whistleblowing cop forced out of the Adelaide force and posted to a remote one-cop station in the Flinders Ranges, the South Australian wheatbelt. Thrill killers on the loose prove quite a challenge, but it’s not as simple as that. Meanwhile Hirschhausen has his own problems – he’s called a “dog” (serious Australian insult) by his fellow officers as he receives pistol cartridges in his mailbox. Paul Hirschhausen returns in Peace (2019). It’s Christmas and he walks in on a a strange and vicious attack that sickens the community while Sydney Police are asking his help looking into a family living. on a long forgotten back road. There’s more Hirschhausen in Consolation (2021) and Day’s End (2023), both set in rural South Australia. Gill D Anderson was born in Edinburgh and immigrated to Adelaide where she set her novel Hidden From View (2019) featuring Police Sergeant Lynn Gough investigating domestic abuse cases. Something Anderson knows about given her background in social work background and the field of Child Protection. And finally, as ever something a bit different and highly recommended. This time a Young Adult novel – Adelaide foothills resident Vikki Wakefield’s All I Ever Wanted, which won the 2012 Adelaide Festival Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction. Mim knows what she wants, and where she wants to go. Anywhere but home-in a dead suburb and with a mother who won’t get off the couch. Her two older brothers are in prison, so now Mim has to retrieve a lost package for her mother. Does this make her a drug runner? She’s set herself rules to live by, but she’s starting to break them. All I Ever Wanted is both a thriller and a gritty romance and though it’s a grim world Mim inhabits her character is uplifting. A great Young Adult find from South Australia. Despite the true crimes we’ve noted above, Adelaide is a great city – the sun shines bright, and the wines are great. But like everywhere this slice of South Australian paradise also has its dark side and that’s where Crime and the City inevitably goes! View the full article

“Aunt Betsy, what do we do with these boxes? They’re filled with paper,” my nephew shouted across the large playroom. In preparation for the estate sale, we were cleaning out my mother’s office, something that hadn’t been done in 32 years. We’d sorted through medical files, personal diaries, books, magazines, photographs and even empty wine crates. The only paper that we’d found to date was in boxes that contained unused stationery—engraved with her name and address. I looked at the boxes. They were the same vanilla-colored glossy cardboard that held letter-size stationery. “Bring it here so I can look at it.” I opened the first box. The top sheet was typewritten with the words Dune House by Eunice Mays Boyd. I thumbed through the perfectly clean manuscript set in San Francisco. The second page read, “Dedicated to Marilyn Reed Roberts”. My mother. It was finished sometime between 1948 and 1950 when she was married to my father. The second box was much lighter. I opened it. Slay Bells, a Christmas murder mystery also set in San Francisco. The third box looked more worn and held, One Paw Was Red. I flipped the pages in this last box and saw a familiar name, F. Millard Smythe. I understood, it was the fourth mystery set in Alaska. Her three published mysteries took place in Alaska, featuring a small, unassuming grocer and amateur sleuth. Eunice won awards and received accolades for her Alaska cozy mysteries Murder Breaks Trail, Doom in the Midnight Sun, and Murder Wears Mukluks. In my hands, I held the fourth book in this series. The last of the Alaska mysteries. Eunice Mays Boyd was my godmother and I called her Nana. I knew she had written a book set in Europe which she began when she retired from the University of California; I’d read that manuscript when I was twenty years old and in college. The plot was clever with numerous twists and red herrings—a classic Christie-style “whodunit”. I read the manuscript, typed on yellow draft paper with penciled-in corrections, in one sitting. Her last five years were filled with travel to Europe and this mystery was set in France with a bus tour traveling from the Roman ruins of Nîmes to the medieval walled city of Carcassonne. She died soon after I read the book. When her house was cleared, my mother rescued that manuscript and gave it to me. The 250 pages were held together on a brown pressboard clipboard. For forty-five years I kept that manuscript in its clipboard. When my time became more flexible, I thought it would be fun to see some of the sites she described in A Vacation to Kill For. In 2014, I spent five days in Carcassonne where I re-read the book, walked the places she described, and confirmed her descriptions. At the end of the trip, I wondered what might be involved to publish this murder mystery. That was as far as I got…a thought. But that all changed when I discovered the other three unpublished murder mysteries. I read them. I knew the timeframe for Dune House. Slay Bells, also set in San Francisco was near the Stonestown shopping center, where we lived between 1957 and 1963. One Paw Was Red had to have been written after Murder Wears Mukluks (1945) and before Dune House between 1945 and 1947. Eunice had lived in Fairbanks, Alaska for twelve years. She began to write as a way to pass the long winter nights and dark winter days. She wrote about the Alaska she knew—the Alaska of the 1930’s and early 1940’s just before the United States entered World War II, when she divorced and returned to her family’s home in Berkeley, California. Murder Breaks Trail (1943) was followed by Doom in the Midnight Sun (1944) then Murder Wears Mukluks. Nana regularly participated in the Berkeley Writers Circle. I remember her going to meetings on Saturdays then coming home enthused with ideas and new, clever ways to murder. She read two to three cozy mysteries a week and prided herself on identifying the killer well in advance of the denouement. With her bed-ridden mother, Mabel Ainsworth Mays, we watched Perry Mason and I would engage in the conversation and try to find the guilty party—Nana always won! One day, when I came to her home for a routine bi-monthly weekend, she gave me a Nancy Drew mystery. I finished it that night and the next morning she pulled three small leather bound books out of the bookcase. Her books. She said the publisher, Farrer Rinehart, had given her these special copies. Next, she brought out a hardback book with a red and white cover—The Marble Forest (1950). She proudly opened the book to the first page filled with signatures. “Nana, what’s this? Why are there so many signatures,” I asked. “A group of us decided to write a mystery together. Each of us wrote at least one chapter. We were all members of the San Francisco chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Twelve of us participated and I wrote the third chapter, which is why I am third in sequence.” I counted the autographs, “But there are only eleven autographs.” I looked at the book’s cover and saw the author was Theo Durrant. “Okay, but who’s the author?” “All of us but one. Virginia Rath (The Dark Cavalier) died in 1950 before we got copies of the book and couldn’t sign. Her health was failing so we decided to use letters from the healthy eleven, so…Theo Durrant has eleven letters. The name was created by using one letter from each of our names. I am the “E”, Anthony Boucher is the “H”. Look.” It wasn’t obvious. Then she scribbled on a piece of paper how the name was derived: Terry Adler (On Murder’s Skirts) AntHony Boucher (The Case of the Seven of Calvary) Eunice Mays Boyd (Murder Breaks Trail) Lenore Glen Offord (Murder on Russian Hill) Dana Lyon (The House on Telegraph Hill) Cary LUcas (Unfinished Business) Richard Shattuck (The Wedding Guest Sat on a Stone) William WoRley (My Dead Wife) Allen Hymson (San Francisco writer) Florence OsterN Faulkner (Wedding for Three) Darwin Teilhet (Death Flies High) I opened the book to the blurb which began, “How long could a four-year old girl live buried in a casket?” It scared me so I closed the book but never forgot the opening. The Marble Forest (1953) became the basis for the move Macabre (1955) starring Jim Bacchus. When I was older, we watched it on television with my godmother. Although proud of her accomplishment, she pointed out all the places the film either cut corners or didn’t follow the book. The result—we saw the movie at least two more times with and without commentary. Later I discovered that three of the authors used pseudonyms. Anthony Boucher (or William White) was a well-known local author, writer and critic. The other pseudonyms belonged to women who wrote under men’s names (Allen Hymson = Alma Hymson, Richard Shattuck = Dora Richard Shattuck). These writers were born in the first decade of the twentieth century and were avid readers during the Golden Age of Mystery Writing dominated by the British authors Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. The SF Bay Area writers were all in their forties, had honed their skills and created clever whodunnits in local venues. They were part of the Golden Age of American Cozy Mystery Writers. In all those years, after the success of The Marble Forest/Macabre, she wrote but seemingly stopped in the early 1960’s. She never mentioned her unpublished manuscripts. It wasn’t until she retired that she put fingers to keys. *** What to do? I now had a critical mass of manuscripts. I felt an obligation to honor Eunice’s memory and to let others enjoy her skillful, intelligent writing. Thus began my journey. First step was to convert the typed pages into a Word document—Done. The next step was a manual edit. Then, a local editor suggested, why not get the rights to her published books and ensure I had the literary rights. I thought I had these rights, but couldn’t find a copy of her will so a literary lawyer pointed out that possession didn’t count for nine-tenths of anything. Fortunately, I grew up knowing members of my godmother’s extended family. Even though Nana had no children, her niece, Nancy, and family visited the Berkeley home frequently. Nancy was also friends with my mother and they kept in contact through the years. Well, up to a point. Nancy died decades ago and I’d lost touch with her children after Eunice’s death in 1971. Enter LinkedIn. I found her grandnephew and sent him a note. We connected online. He suggested I get in touch with his brother who was the keeper of their family’s pioneer history. I did. With their help, I was able to identify her surviving heirs: their sister and Eunice’s nephew, Harry. Back to the internet. I spent hours figuring out which Harry Mays it was, deduced the email, then bingo, found the phone number. I dialed it and miraculously a woman answered the landline. “Hi, I’m Eunice Mays Boyd’s goddaughter. My mother was Mal Matys. I knew Harry’s parents George and Harriett and I was the little girl at the house on Forest Avenue.” “I remember Mal well,” she replied. We chatted for a while and she told me Harry wasn’t very well. She put Harry on the phone and I told him about the books and my desire to publish them. “So, would you like me to sign a release?” “Yes!” I replied. The lawyer wrote a release and I sent it immediately to Harry with two copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. Ten days later I had his signature. Two weeks later the grandnephews and grandniece gave their permission and six weeks later Harry was dead. Whew—just in the nick of time. I had what I needed to publish the new books, and, decided to republish her “classic” works. My task escalated from four books to seven. But…I needed the rights to republish her Alaska mysteries. The internet came to the rescue with a copy of the standard Farrar & Rinehart contract from 1943 which required giving them 90-day notice. Notification—done. I was good to go. Next step…find a publisher. I contacted two publishers who reviewed books submitted directly by authors. Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press wrote back immediately saying that he remembered reading Murder Wears Mukluks and found it delightful. He would be happy to republish her Alaska mysteries and maybe One Paw Was Red. Remarkably, the next day I received a reply from Level Best Books wanting to learn more. Verena Rose was intrigued because Eunice had written during the Golden Age. After reading Dune House, Level Best agreed to publish all seven books. Dune House and Slay Bells were published in December, 2021 and A Vacation to Kill For was published in 2023. Murder Breaks Trail will be republished in 2024 followed by Doom in the Midnight Sun. Murder Wears Mukluks and One Paw Was Red are in the future queue. It was a great way to pass time during the Pandemic lockdowns. My journey has refreshed many memories and reconnected me with Eunice’s family. It also introduced me to the world of writing and publishing. At the time, the Level Best team ran Malice Domestic. I decided to attend and had no idea of what to expect. I was overwhelmed by the availability of free mysteries, the ease of meeting and talking with accomplished writers. Maureen Jennings (Murdock Mysteries) even suggested that F. Millard Smyth’s series could become a television series set in 1940s Alaska. I was asked to participate as a last minute replacement on a panel to talk about what makes a good cozy—some internet research and Nana’s books helped me survive the experience. It was fun to meet other Level Best authors and be part of a group. I am proud to have undertaken this journey. It has been hard work, but I’ve learned. It is an adventure to enter into an entirely new discipline. Nana inspired me to write my own books. My medical thriller The Goldilocks Genome (May 21, 2024 publication date) and HEPATITIS Beach, a non-fiction coming-of-age adventure about my doctoral fieldwork experience studying hepatitis B virus in Melanesia. The lessons I’ve gleaned for my own literary estate include the importance of filing a copy of all book-related contracts with one’s lawyer and specifically gifting one’s literary rights. I am grateful for the experience of bringing Eunice’s “lost” murder mysteries to life and for the time I spent with her. A time capsule is a gift too precious to ignore. *** View the full article

It’s that time of year again. There’s a new Guy Ritchie film in theaters. Last year, I went to the movies and experienced the soul-warming balm of the nearly-incoherent heist movie Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and this year, I wanted to experience that again. So, I took myself to see Ritchie’s new film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which seemed like it would be a heist story set during World War II. When the movie began, a title card flashed that said the film was based on true events, and I was like, right, it’s based on the factual event of World War II. But I wasn’t open-minded enough. Turns out, the film is specifically based on a real-life and very cockamamie WWII mission called “Operation Postmaster” that was only declassified in 2016. Upon learning that, I wondered for a moment why Ritchie had not called the film “Operation Postmaster,” but then I remembered that his movie last year was called “Operation Fortune,” and it’s a known fact that you can’t have two operations so close together. Speaking of which… I was surprised to hear about the existence of “Operation Postmaster” because of that very rule! The British are already known for an absolutely bananas, top-secret WWII mission to turn the tide of the war: Operation Mincemeat. I have read the book Operation Mincemeat, seen the movie Operation Mincemeat, and seen the West End stage musical Operation Mincemeat, and I thought that this was the only absolutely insane, t0tally confidential war operation that the British had pulled off. But no, turns out there’s another one, too. And that’s the one this movie is about. Clearly, the educational merits of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare are manifold. I was surprised to learn anything from this movie because, truthfully, I’ve never learned anything from a mid-career Guy Ritchie movie besides the fact that I really like a movie in which bad guys carrying guns have slower reaction times than the good guy who is carrying just one knife. I like a movie about a heist team made up of several hulking, wisecracking men and a single cool woman! I like a movie where something goes wrong with the plan that a crew has meticulously worked out to the very last detail and now they have to improvise a whole new plan and it works anyway. I want a large body count provided by the same stuntmen over and over and you can actually tell, you’re like “oh that’s the guy who got nailed with the fishhook in the opening” or whatever. I like a movie where people are so British, they can barely speak English. I like a movie with a cast that includes Cary Elwes. I like all this, and Guy Ritchie has never not given it all to me. What is The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare about? It almost doesn’t matter! But I’ll explain anyway. Henry Cavill plays G.H. “Gus” March-Phillips, a military officer of some kind who’s currently serving jail time because he doesn’t play by the rules. This is great news. I also love a movie in which no one follows the rules. If someone follows the rules, I will walk out. Anyway, Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear, only I didn’t realize that he was supposed to be Winston Churchill for like 2/3rds of the movie because he doesn’t look or sound like Winston Churchill and why would you cast Rory Kinnear as Winston Churchill?) and Cary Elwes, who plays a military commander they call “M,” want March-Phillips to lead a secret, unofficial, unsanctioned, and illegal renegade mission. It’s very cool. He has to take a crew down to the Atlantic-side African island of Fernando Po, where the Nazis are keeping a giant ship that they use to store all their equipment to maintain the U-boats which patrol the Atlantic Ocean. The plethora of U-boats has been preventing American ships from bringing aid to Britain and the Allies. So, if March-Phillips blows up that ship, the Brits will basically stymie the Nazi control over the Atlantic. Sounds like a plan! March-Phillips says he’s down to help, but he needs a badass crew. He has a few guys in mind: an Irish firearms virtuoso who hates the Nazis (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), an explosives weirdo (Henry Golding), a Swedish one-man-killing-machine (Alan Ritchson), and his best friend, Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), I guess because they’re best friends. So, the British government is like, hm okay, we’ll let you include these guys as long as you add to your team 1.) this really cool agent (Babs Olusanmokun) who has set up a contact in Fernando Po already, and 2.) a very sexy woman (Eiza Gonzalez) who knows how to do everything and who will have a million costume changes despite traveling with only one small valise. March-Phillips is like, you drive a hard bargain, but you’ve got a deal. So then, yeah, they all go to Fernando Po and pull off the mission. Eventually, March-Phillips recruits another cool guy, Kambili “Billy” Kalu (Danny Sapani), who has his own crew of cool guys, and they all join in together. There are snags that require some fancy-footwork, and a Nazi or two that Eiza Gonzalez has to seduce, but they all overcome all these obstacles. Honestly, it doesn’t even seem that hard. And that’s it, that’s the whole movie. There is no complicated multi-act structure. There are no sophisticated themes. There is absolutely no character development. And that’s fine! Who needs character development? This is a movie about several tough men and a very cool woman who go on a journey to kill Nazis and sabotage their large-scale plans for World Domination. I fail to see how anyone could develop character beyond that, anyway! And sure, sometimes the action scenes are a little confusing, like it’s hard to know where the characters are, exactly, in relation to each other. But you know what, that’s also fine! They know! The characters know. When I watch a Guy Ritchie movie, I’m not going to backseat drive. I know we’re going to get where we’re supposed to go and I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. Everyone involved appears to be having a bloody great time, and so am I. The only thing that would have made this movie more enjoyable is if I were also eating an entire family-size bag of Doritos. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a chipper extravaganza of nonsense black-ops, a jolly-diverting entrant in the canon of “Nazi killing” movies. It’s like if The Dirty Dozen weren’t gritty or unhinged. Actually, it is a great movie for people who wanted to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds but were worried that it might be too shocking and bloody. And, you know what? I learned stuff from this movie. One thing I’ll say seriously is that we as a country are not taught enough about the Nazi occupation of Africa and this movie reminded me to go do more research on that topic. But, and I’m returning to being unserious now, perhaps the thing I learned the most from The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is that the guys who ran MI5 or whatever during the 1940s probably had the same psychological profile as Guy Ritchie—a flair for dramatic narrative and a devil-may-care attitude about the finer points of execution. It all checks out. Overall, I had a great time. I do have a few questions, though. I’ve laid them out as follows. There are a million scenes of people being obsessed with their gold cigarette lighters. British brigadiers, scrappy agents, Nazi scum… they’re all yanking out and flicking open their cigarette lighters, even when no one is lighting anything. Why is that? Literally, though, why did they cast Rory Kinnear as Winston Churchill? Actually, let me rephrase this. Why did they cast Rory Kinnear, a man who doesn’t look a thing like Winston Churchill, as Winston Churchill and not Darkest Hour-the hell out of him, prosthetics-wise? He’s clearly wearing some makeup, but it is not enough and therefore doesn’t work. Why would they not lean into the physical “Winston Churchill”-ness of the character of Winston Churchill? Aren’t there like six hundred Winston Churchill-looking actors just walking around London? Why wasn’t one of them captured and brought to set? Honestly, “Rory Kinnear” is an even weirder cast because (while he’s a talented actor and deserves widespread recognition), he’s not famous enough for this to be some fun, forgivable stunt casting. You know who they should have cast, if they wanted to do stunt casting for Winston Churchill? Mike Myers. I think that would have been great. At one point in the film, Eiza Gonzalez wears this denim outfit that appears to be a tight-fitting romper, but is revealed to be a set of separates; a tiny, midriff-bearing jacket and high-waisted pants. Is this outfit historically accurate? I’m not being an asshole; I really want to know. Because it’s really cool. When does it come out on DVD? View the full article

“I gave her my ugliness.” This is what I said to my editor when we first spoke about El, the protagonist of my debut novel Man’s Best Friend. El’s issues—her selfishness, her unavailability—were very much my issues in my early twenties. I was the friend who dodged phone calls, the employee who might not make it in on Monday, the girlfriend of questionable loyalty. In my attempt to be no one to anyone, to outrun the potential for abandonment, I hurt the people in my life, myself most of all. El is much more destructive than I was: my own misadventures were hardly pulse-pounding. I walked so El could run, deep into her darkness. She was never written to be aspirational. Novels about destructive women have always been my favorites. In the lead up to the release of Man’s Best Friend, I’ve been thinking about fiction in this tradition, and wondering why it is that problematic female protagonists inspire such love/hate reactions from readers, why I fall so firmly on the love side. I had my theories, but I decided to start by looking at the science. Women are, surprise surprise, the safer sex. “Few… have examined gender as a potential moderator of the emotional dysregulation associated with violence,” one study points out, though it asserts that men are more likely to exhibit violent behavior than women. Another study confirms that women “more rarely and/or less intensely” behave in a self-destructive manner than men i.e. are less likely to binge drink or drive recklessly. What these studies could not answer for me is why women cause less harm, on average, than men. It’s a question of nature or nurture: are women less destructive because of some genetic predisposition, or because we’re coached into compliance? [A]re women less destructive because of some genetic predisposition, or because we’re coached into compliance? When I read novels that center destructive women I feel a pulse beneath the words, a dark song of repressed despair that resonates in my body. If women ruminate on the harmful and the selfish, if the darkness is within us, can we really chalk it up to evolution that it’s less likely to express itself outwardly? Much more convincing to me is the idea that, within the confines of the patriarchy, women behave in accordance with cultural expectation because it’s the only way to be acceptable, likeable, loveable. This goes doubly for women of color, who are saddled not only with the burden of patriarchy but of white supremacy, too. As Raven Leilani has said, “Unlikeablility is a very different thing to navigate for Black women… What we call unlikeability in white women, I think Black women feel, but have to suppress in order to survive.” Yes, there are many excellent novels by women of color with unlikeable or destructive female protagonists, Leilani’s Luster among them, but I doubt anyone would argue that women of color author and successfully publish such novels more than white women do. All this to say, it’s my belief that oppressive social constructs are deeply entangled with women’s decreased potentiality for destruction, self-centered or otherwise, and thus the destructive woman on the page (particularly if she isn’t white) feels transgressive—and, for some readers, unsettling and unwelcome. On Goodreads or Bookstagram, critiques of harmful female protagonists aren’t often fleshed out. You’ll see something like: insufferable whiny DNF’d at 15% or I’m all for a complicated MC but this?? Sometimes, though, the takes are sweeping, full of observations about how “unhinged” characters are all well and good, but this character felt unhinged for unhinged’s sake. Don’t even get me started on the readers who rate American Psycho five stars but need their destructive women to have some spelled out tragic #MeToo or capital T trauma backstory to justify their wrongdoing. And then there are those readers like myself, who love a destructive female protagonist. It would be nice if this were a reflection of progressive values, but really it’s just my taste, informed, I suppose, by my own life experience. It’s taken a lot of time and effort to cultivate compassion for my past self, the twenty-two year old whose abandonment issues and untreated alcoholism made her a not so great roommate, daughter, friend. When I see pieces of my self-destructive past glimmering like shards of glass through someone else’s prose, I feel a certain comfort, a gratitude that I’m not in that broken place anymore. And even when I don’t identify, even when I confront a violent and irredeemable protagonist who I don’t love but love to hate, I am riveted by the author’s transgressive act in portraying such a woman. I present to you now a list of excellent novels about destructive women. These authors use the page to liberate woman from the constraints of culture, allowing her to be what is not allowed or not anticipated, and in doing so don’t condone harm but expand our understanding of the human condition. Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier One of my favorite reads in recent years, this novel tells the story of Jane, a pregnant 18-year old pizza joint employee who becomes obsessed with a female customer. Jane neglects every caring person in her life as well as her unborn child (she drinks throughout her pregnancy), instead focusing her attention and empathy on the customer. The sophistication of Frazier’s narration is especially impressive; she has a gift for demystifying Jane for the reader while allowing Jane to remain eighteen, barely adult, a mystery to herself. Wideacre by Philippa Gregory Back in the mid-2000s everyone read The Other Boleyn Girl in anticipation of the Natalie Portman/Scarlett Johanssen feature adaptation, but Wideacre is Gregory’s debut novel. The protagonist is a squire’s daughter, Beatrice Lacey, and she is queen of the Faustian bargain. I won’t spoil all the twists and turns, but be forewarned: nothing taboo is off the table in this novel. Beatrice graduates from one heinous act to the next, all to keep hold of her beloved land, the locus of her identity. The Pisces by Melissa Broder Lucy, a PhD student reeling from a break-up, moves to Venice Beach for the summer and, while coming to terms with her love addiction, becomes infatuated with a merman. The vulnerability of this protagonist is so acute it will no doubt inspire skin-crawling discomfort for those who haven’t become acquainted with their shadow selves. I love this book: you might, too, if descriptions of U.T.I.s after hotel bathroom anal sex are your thing. My Men by Victoria Kielland (translated by Damion Searls) The torrent of stunning prose in this novel is almost as violent as the protagonist, Belle, herself. Belle Gunness was a real-life American (Norwegian-born) serial killer. In Kielland’s telling, Belle’s darkness incubated for a long time before she graduated to murder. When Belle’s behavior does escalate, Kielland draws us into Belle’s confusion: “The face the mirror, which image should she believe in?” Kielland paints her protagonist with such a human brush that the ending, where we learn the unspeakable horror Belle is responsible for, gives the reader a taste of serious whiplash. I dare anyone with a little life experience not to relate to this passage: “[I]t really hurt to love, it was like being skinned alive, and yet everyone took every chance they could get, every time. Full-grown adults, it was absolutely insane.” I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel In the immortal words of David Fincher, “I like characters who don’t change, who don’t learn from their mistakes.” In her debut, Patel’s first person (unnamed) narrator shares one damning insight after another about the age of social media, white privilege and sexual power dynamics, but while she confesses her personal missteps in full, all her powers of insight don’t save her, in the end, from the kind of delusional thinking that got her into trouble in the first place. Many readers have been and will continue to be hooked by the premise of I’m A Fan—a young woman, infatuated with a married man, online stalks his more prized mistress—but the book is so much more than a pulpy premise. For me, Patel achieves the thing all storytellers aim for, creating the universal within the specific, mirroring back to her reader the prison we create for ourselves when, as creatures of capitalism, we harm ourselves and others in pursuit of a life that only looks Good and Right. The Guest by Emma Cline The guest of The Guest is Alex, a twenty-two year old sex worker who has conned her way into a relationship with Simon, an older guy, and the owner of a sumptuous Hamptons summer home. But after a dinner party faux pas Alex is exiled from Eden, and for the rest of the novel she’s in survival mode, counting the days until she can see Simon again, using anyone and everyone in her path so she can remain in the Hamptons, away from New York City and Dom, a dangerous man she’s stolen from. Each of Alex’s victims is such a desperate character (an uptight house manager is a secret cokehead; a rich young woman, a literal member of the club, has no friends) that Cline distracts us, for most of the narrative, from Alex’s psychological desperation. The reader is put in the same position as Alex herself, who’s held her emotions at a distance for a long time. Cline doesn’t use Alex’s hidden fragility to excuse her bad behavior, nor does she force Alex into an ethical makeover after some dark night of the soul: redemption is not necessary because Alex is no hero. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark Irina, the protagonist of Boy Parts, initially comes across like a version of Lisbeth Salander, a sharp, incisive and hard to know bisexual woman with obscure taste. She’s revealed, however, to be someone Lisbeth might target, a sexual sadist harboring a deep dark secret. Clark assigns Irina problems that haunt many women, including an eating disorder and more than one experience of sexual assault. Irina grapples for control behind the camera, photographing men, the would-be predators, just as she seeks control around her appetite, planning to vomit whenever she consumes something apart from bagged salad. Readers who struggle with the problematic female protagonist will no doubt stumble (among other things) over Irina’s poor treatment of her closest friend, but it’s this relationship that really allowed me to fall in love with this book. This is not simply, as some have suggested, a “female” American Psycho: it read to me like a story about one woman’s profound struggle with attachment—attachment to love, attachment to success, attachment to reality. Luster by Raven Leilani Some might take issue with Edie’s inclusion in the destructive female protagonist tradition, because Edie is not all that hard to love, ultimately. This is a main character who does graduate to a more mature perspective in the end (literally as well as figuratively—her painting improves over the course of the novel). That said, Edie’s behavior in the early chapters of Luster is problematic and frustrating, and in my view firmly cements her in the transgressive canon. A Black woman in her early twenties, Edie is fired from her publishing job for inappropriate sexual behavior. She’s been involved with so many colleagues, men and women, she’s not even sure who brought her behavior to the attention of HR. Edie compares herself unfavorably to another Black female colleague: “She plays the game well… She is Black and dogged and inoffensive… I’d like to think the reason I’m not more dogged is because I know better, but sometimes I look at her and I wonder if the problem isn’t her but me. Maybe the problem is that I’m weak and overly sensitive. Maybe the problem is that I am an office slut.” Leilani’s choice to have Edie address us in the first person present makes the narration inherently unreliable, so we don’t know, after this admission of Edie’s, how much we should forgive and how much we should judge. Should we be understanding that Edie is not more dogged? Should we think she’s weak? Both, I think. Most of the novel is the story of Edie’s entanglement with Eric, an older, alcoholic white man, and how she comes to move in with Eric and his wife, Rebecca, and their adoptive daughter Akila. Edie’s sexual relationship with Eric is fine by Rebecca until it is not, at which point Edie carries on with Eric anyway, for a time. More interesting than this, however, is the fact that Edie allows, even encourages, Eric to hurt her, hit her. At a certain point, Eric leaves Edie a remorseful, drunk voicemail saying something about how he knows she’s a human being. It’s not terribly relevant whether Eric knows this or not—the only relevant question is whether Edie knows who she is, what she deserves. Will I continue in this pattern of destruction, or won’t I? These are the worthy stakes of this novel. *** View the full article

July 5, 1915 Police headquarters, Centre Street, Manhattan The bombs came in all kinds of packages. Often they arrived in tin cans, emptied of the olive oil or soap or preserves the cans had originally been manufactured to contain, now wedged tight with sticks of dynamite. Sometimes they were wrapped with an outer band of iron slugs, designed to maximize the destruction, conveyed to their target location in a satchel or suitcase, “accidentally” left behind in the courthouse, or the train station, or the cathedral. Many of those devices were time bombs running on clockwork mechanisms. The more inventive ones utilized a kind of hourglass device, releasing sulfuric acid into a piece of cork, the timing determined by chemistry, not mechanics: how long the acid took to eat its way through the cork, until it began dripping onto the blasting cap below. Many were swaddled in old newspaper pages. One of the most notorious bombing campaigns sent the devices through the mail, dressed up in department- store wrapping. And sometimes the bomb was just a naked stick of dynamite, with a fuse simple enough to be lit with the strike of a match, ready to be flung into an unsuspecting crowd. Many bombs were delivered anonymously. But others were accompanied by missives sent to a local paper, or left on a doorstep: threats, intimations of further violence, delusional rants, and more than a few manifestos. The smaller bombs— the ones detonated by a storefront, a few notches up from fireworks— were the mobster version of an “account overdue” mailing: the big stick of the extortion business. A few came from clinically insane individuals without a cause, propelled toward the terrible violence of dynamite by their own private demons. But most of the explosions that made the national news during those years were expressions, implicit or explicit, of a political worldview. The political bombers were a diverse bunch: socialist agitators, Russian Nihilists, Irish republicans, German saboteurs. But of all the bomb throwers of the period, no group was more closely associated with the infernal machines—as the press came to call the bombs—than the anarchists. The forty-year period during which anarchism rose to prominence as one of the most important political worldviews in Europe and the United States—roughly from 1880 to 1920— happened to correspond precisely with the single most devastating stretch of political bombings in the history of the West. Indeed, the whole modern practice of terrorism— advancing a political agenda through acts of spectacular violence, often targeting civilians— began with the anarchists. What was anarchism, really? Start with the word itself. Today the word anarchy almost exclusively carries negative connotations of chaos and disorder. But when the political movement first emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, the word’s meaning was much more closely grounded in its etymological roots: an-, meaning no, and -archos, the Latin word for “ruler.” The anarchists believed that a world without rulers was possible. At times, they convinced themselves that such a society was inevitable; imminent, even. The anarchists maintained that there was something fundamentally corrosive about organizing society around large, top- down organizations. Human beings, its advocates explained, oftentimes at gunpoint, had evolved in smaller, more egalitarian units, and some of the most exemplary communities of recent life—the guild-based free cities of Renaissance Europe, the farming communes of Asia, watchmaking collectives in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland—had followed a comparable template, at a slightly larger scale. These leaderless societies were the natural order of things, the default state for Homo sapiens. Taking humans out of those human-scale communities and thrusting them into vast militaries or industrial factories, building a society based on competitive struggle and authority from above, betrayed some of our deepest instincts. At its finest moments, anarchism was a scientific argument as much as it was a political one. It had deep ties to the new science that Darwin had introduced, only it emphasized a side of natural selection that is often neglected in popular accounts: the way in which evolution selects for cooperative behavior between organisms, what Peter Kropotkin—anarchism’s most elegant advocate—called “mutual aid.” As a theory of social organization, anarchism was equally opposed to the hierarchies of capitalism and the hierarchies of what we would now call Big Government. For this reason, it lacks an intuitive address on the conventional left-right map of contemporary politics, which partly explains why the movement can seem perplexing to us today. Whatever you might say about Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Peter Kropotkin—the three main anarchists in this book—they should never be mistaken for free-market libertarians. They wanted to smash the corporate regime as much as they wanted to smash the state. But the other confusion about the movement lies in the language itself. The main reason that the word anarchy now carries the implicit connotation of troublesome disorder is because a century ago, a wave of anarchists insisted on blowing things up, again and again and again, in the name of the movement. That sense of unruly chaos that the word anarchy triggers in our mind today is the aftershock of all those explosions, part of the debris field they left behind. For the anarchists, it was arguably one of the most disastrous branding strategies in political history. They turned a word against their cause. Why exactly were the anarchists so intent on blowing things up? That is, by definition, a technological and scientific question as much as it is a question about radical ideologies: How did anarchism and dynamite—born in the same decade but otherwise unrelated—come to be so closely intertwined? Dynamite gave small bands of humans command of more energy per person than they had ever dreamed of having before. Dynamite, quite literally, gave them power. The anarchists happened to be the first political movement to embrace that new power. But why were they compelled to make that choice? Could they have made a more persuasive case through less destructive means? To even begin to answer those questions, we need to understand where the anarchist’s appetite for political violence originally came from, its complex symbiosis with the everyday violence that industrialization had unleashed into the world. For every death at the hand of a bomb-wielding anarchist, a hundred or more would die from factory accidents. We also need to understand what that appetite for violence—enabled by the energy density of the dynamite-based explosion—helped bring into the world. When the anarchists began dreaming of a society unfettered by institutional authority, there were no forensic detectives, no biometric databases of identity, no anti-terror agencies. Where official police forces did exist, they were usually in bed with urban crime syndicates and political machines; national and international investigatory bodies like Interpol or the FBI or the CIA were decades from being created. But in the end it turned out to be those institutions that triumphed over the stateless dream of the anarchists. In many key respects these techniques and organizations were prodded into being by the emerging threat of the infernal machines, like an immune response to an invading virus. The innovation of dynamite-driven political terrorism created a counterreaction from the forces of top-down authority, one of those stretches of history where some of the most powerful institutions in the world are shaped by the activities of marginal groups, working outside the dominant channels of power. In this case, though, the legacy of the anarchist movement ultimately possessed a kind of tragic irony: the dream of smashing the state helping to give birth to a regime of state surveillance that would become nearly ubiquitous by the middle of the twentieth century. In the summer of 1915, the site in the United States that best represented that new regime was the Identification Bureau of the New York Police Department, created originally by a cerebral detective, Joseph Faurot, and eventually overseen by Commissioner Arthur Woods, a well-born Bostonian turned social reformer. The bureau was on the ground floor of the NYPD headquarters in Lower Manhattan, lined with file cabinets containing tens of thousands of photographs and fingerprints, organized by intricate classification schemes. In a predigital era, the Identification Bureau was the closest thing imaginable to the U.S. government’s plan for “Total Information Awareness” that would become so controversial in the months after 9/11. The Identification Bureau had an equally revolutionary idea at its core, one that had first developed in Paris and London at the end of the nineteenth century before Faurot and Woods brought it state-side: the idea that crime and sedition were fundamentally problems that could be solved with data. The way to combat individuals or groups who were intent on disrupting society was not to overwhelm them with physical force. Such naked expressions of power only inflamed the passions of the radicals. It was better to contain dissent through more subtle means: file cabinets filled with information, undercover operations, a web of invisible oversight stretching across the country and, increasingly, across the world. This book, then, is the story of two ideas, ideas that first took root in Europe before arriving on American soil at the end of the nineteenth century, where they locked into an existential struggle that lasted three decades. One idea was the radical vision of a society with no rules—and a new tactic of dynamite-driven terrorism deployed to advance that vision. The other idea—crime fighting as an information science—took longer to take shape, and for a good stretch of the early twentieth century, it seemed like it was losing its struggle against the anarchists. But it won out in the end. How did that come to happen? And could the story have played out differently? The history of the struggle between those two ideas involves a global cast of some of the most fascinating characters of the age: most of all Berkman, Goldman, Kropotkin, Woods, and Faurot. But doing justice to that story demands that we take a wider view of the historical timeline: venturing back to the original invention of dynamite itself and its first deployments as a political weapon in czarist Russia, the growth of anarchism as a political worldview in the late 1800s, the pioneering innovations of forensic science in Paris that evolved in part to counter that growth—all the way up to a terrifying, but now mostly forgotten, stretch of New York City’s history in the early twentieth century, when the metropolis experienced thousands of bombings over the course of just two decades. If you had to select the one point on that timeline that marked the apex of the struggle between anarchism and the surveillance state, the point where you might get even odds as to how it was all going to turn out, you could make a good case for the night of July 5, 1915. Despite the late hour, the Identification Bureau was bustling with activity. A bomb had detonated two days earlier in the U.S. Capitol building; the financier J. P. Morgan, Jr., had been at-tacked at his home in suburban Long Island the following morning; and the detectives had just discovered that the suspect in both crimes had recently purchased two hundred sticks of dynamite in New York, only six of which had been accounted for. For weeks Joseph Faurot had been receiving death threats in the mail from anarchist groups, reminding the detective of the fast approaching one- year anniversary of one of the most devastating explosions in the city’s history, a blast that destroyed an entire apartment building on the East Side, the work of anarchists plotting an attack on an-other titan of industry. That damage had been wrought with only a few sticks of dynamite. The trove of explosives currently missing threatened to make the previous year’s blast look like a bottle rocket by comparison. But the clash between the anarchists and the NYPD was not only visible in the frenetic activity inside the Identification Bureau itself. To see it in its full scope, you needed to leave the file cabinets and the fingerprint studios behind, walk out the plate glass doors into the hall, venture down a set of fire stairs into the darkened hallways of the basement. There you would have seen a cheap suit-case, leaning against a doorway. Below the muffled hum of activity in the Identification Bureau directly above, if you listened very in-tently, you might just have heard the quiet metronome of a ticking clock. ___________________________________ Excerpted from the book THE INFERNAL MACHINE by Steven Johnson. Copyright © 2024 by Steven Johnson. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. View the full article

The incredibly successful suspense author Harlan Coben once told me—with a chuckle—that he thought conducting research for a book was just another form of procrastination. Guilty as charged on some occasions, but in most instances the research I’ve done for all nineteen of my mysteries and psychological thrillers has been extremely beneficial to the process. First and foremost, it helps me get my facts straight. Readers can be forgiving—to a point. They assume that as an author you might need to take some poetic license to move the plot along, but they also want to know that details you provide about everything from locales to characters’ jobs to crime scenes make sense. But that’s not the only reason I do it. When I’m digging, I often come across information that inspires a great plot development, or even a killer plot twist. Much of the research I do these days is online, but I also visit locations I’m writing about and talk to lots of experts, mostly on the phone, but sometimes in person if they can spare the time. I’ve not only interviewed plenty of cops, forensic experts, criminal profilers, lawyers, doctors, EMT workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, and real estate agents but also the occasional acting coach, magician, electrocution expert, and dog whisperer. When I’m researching, I’m mostly concentrating on what details can be used for background and what can come out of characters’ mouths, but later, away from my computer, I often realize that something I came across was just plain fascinating to have learned. I’ve even ended up using a few nuggets of wisdom in my own life. Here are some of the most intriguing, weird, and/or quirky things I’ve discovered along the way. 1) DNA evidence has become an important tool in solving homicides, but here’s a point that’s been driven home for me during the dozens of interviews I’ve done with former death scene investigator Barbara Butcher, author of What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator: Many homicides are solved today not because of DNA but thanks to CCTV footage and/or cell phone data. 2) I’ve never featured a body language expert as a character in any of my books (hmm, maybe I should, though), but I’ve interviewed a few because I’ve found their research helpful when describing how characters move and gesture during conversations. Something I learned while writing The Fiancée: One way to convey power through body language isn’t with a particular gesture or facial expression but with stillness. When you move your head and arms too much (something acting teachers call “becoming entangled”), your body leaks energy and you come across as nervous and unsure. 3) Speaking of energy leaks, one supposed indication of a poltergeist, beyond the commonly cited “bumps in the night,” are unexplained cold spots. Because, according to one so-called expert, spirits draw heat and energy from a room. I don’t believe in ghosts, but cold spots now make me nervous. 4) In Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Detective Scottie Ferguson suffers from acrophobia, an extreme fear of heights, which I’m sure you’ve heard of or might even experience yourself. And you’re probably also aware that some people have a fear of snakes, or spiders or flying. But in researching phobias for my next book, I learned that there are hundreds of them, including, koumpounophobia (fear of buttons), lachanophobia (fear of vegetables), octophobia (fear of the letter eight) and philemaphobia (fear of kissing). 5) The protagonist in my 2020 novel, Have You Seen Me, is a personal finance writer, so for background I interviewed financial expert Jean Chatzky, CEO of HerMoney. During one of our conversations, she told me about a field of study I’d never heard of called behavioral finance, which examines why smart people do stupid things with their money. Chatzky says that the reason for a lot of stupid money behavior is that we’re wired for instant gratification, which can be hard to override. One coping strategy, she says, is to “trick yourself by setting up artificial roadblocks, such as unsubscribing from shopping emails, taking your credit card number out of the automatic one-click ordering, and using cash, which is psychologically harder to part with.” 6) If you’ve ever gone to the ER with a relative or friend who needed stitches, you were probably told to take a seat rather than stand by the person’s side. You might have protested initially, especially if the patient was your child, perhaps promising the doctor or P.A. that you wouldn’t be in the way and guaranteeing them that the sight of blood didn’t bother you. But what I learned from Paul Paganelli, M.D., a retired ER chief I’ve interviewed for almost every book, is that it’s not unusual for someone who swears he or she isn’t squeamish to actually pass out while watching stitches being done. Until the “take a seat” rule became commonplace, parents would frequently hit the ground, sometimes sustaining serious, life-altering head injuries. 7) According to some estimates, between twenty-five and fifty percent of people have experienced at least one episode of a distressing condition called sleep paralysis, which occurs most frequently as someone is either falling asleep or waking up. It involves a feeling of being conscious but at the same time unable to move or speak. For some it can include a feeling of extreme pressure on the body or a sense of being choked. Some have even reported having a sense of a witch-like creature perched on their chest. That’s why this phenomenon is referred to in someplaces, including Canada, as “old hag syndrome.” 8) In my 2022 novel, The Second Husband, the protagonist is a trend forecaster, and I interviewed several for background. Trend forecasters do research and surveys, but some of them also like to follow what trend forecaster Jane Buckingham calls “the rule of three:” If something catches your attention once, it’s chance; if you see it twice, it’s coincidence or a curiosity; but if you see it three times, it could very well signal a trend worth paying attention to. 9) I never stop having my eyes opened by Barbara Butcher, who during her years with the NYC Medical Examiner’s office investigated over five thousand death scenes. Here’s another insight from her, an observation about death scenes that I try to remember for real life: “What we need to know is around us for the taking as long as we are truly taking it in. The biggest mistake a death scene investigator can make is going in with a pre-conceived idea. Take your hands off your ears and put them over your mouth. Learn to listen, see, smell, and absorb everything around you without speaking your thoughts first.” 10) The protagonist in my current psychological thriller, The Last Time She Saw Him, is a career coach named Kiki Reed, and though I’ve written several books on career success myself, I touched base with several career coaches while writing the book. One expert, Eliot Kaplan, former VP in charge of talent acquisition at Hearst Magazines, told me that one of the biggest complaints interviewers have about job candidates is that they don’t seem enthusiastic enough (which is probably a result of nerves or trying too hard to seem professional and buttoned up). “Don’t be afraid to show how much you want a job,” he told me. In fact, he suggested, it doesn’t hurt to sit a little bit on the edge of your chair. I have Kiki suggest this to one of her clients. 11) A couple of books ago, I was writing a scene where the protagonist sat down with an attorney after she sensed she’d fallen under suspicion with the police for a homicide. To better write the scene, I asked acclaimed white collar defense attorney Susan Brune how she would advise my character. One piece of wisdom she says she offers defendants early on is: “research yourself, just as the police will be doing.” That way a client becomes aware in advance of what will be turned up. This would mean not only Googling yourself, but reviewing your online search history, phone logs, texts, emails, calendar, credit card statements, and E-Zpass history. Even if we aren’t under suspicion, it’s probably not a bad idea to occasionally check out the information that’s available about ourselves. 12) You’ve probably read or heard the wonderful Maya Angelou quote, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” Forensic psychiatrist Karen Rosenbaum says that’s good advice, but so is a common misquote of the comment: “When people tell you who they are, believe them.” People, she explained to me, have blind spots when it comes to their own personality and motives and sometimes don’t realize that others may be put off by the truth of who they are. “They might blurt out things that are at the core of who they are,” she adds, “without realizing the impact it may have on the listener or audience. Like a governor who brags about shooting her dog.” 13) Here’s another other piece of information I learned researching and have tried to use in my own life. It came from a detective supervisor in a police department’s mental evaluation unit, whose job was to respond to people having mental breakdowns or threatening suicide: “In a crisis, we often have a little more time to react than we realize,” she told me. She said that in her career it had made all the difference to count to ten before acting in a crisis, using that time to think through the best strategy before responding, rather than just letting her adrenalin guide her actions. *** View the full article

Assignment 1: Act of Story Statement To save humanity aboard the spaceship Igaia Assignment 2: The Antagonist Senator Aules sponsored Guadalupé to join the ruling Corporation’s religious Order. Her meteoric success is a point of both pride and envy for him. The Senator is the architect of a secret Corporation plan to enslave the farming community who joined Igaia to escape oppression on Earth. When Sister Guadalupé learns she has been his unwitting accomplice, she must face the true nature of their relationship and the mission. Aules reports to Patron Jones, the charming Elite funder of Igaia’s mission, virtually present on board via Walker Jones. Neurological alterations and implants allow Walkers to link to their Patrons, so that the reclusive ultra-rich can experience what their Walkers do. Guadalupé has ‘served’ Patron Jones regularly through Walker Jones, and has strong affection for both. When Aules’ secret plot is revealed, we learn that the Patron has a contingency plan to destroy Igaia and all on board, thus enabling a new narrative on Earth in which the Patron is the hero who safely disposed of Earth's greatest enemies. Revealed now as the greater antagonist, the Patron sexualizes the countdown, demanding Guadalupé’s presence as he links to his heartbroken Walker, to extract the ‘Ultimate Gift’ climax at the moment of death. Assignment 3: Breakout Title Dea ex Machina Hymn to our Stars Semper Supra Assignment 4: Genre and Comparables Genre: Sci-Fi In a bold sound byte: Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls) meets Brave New World, an eco-feminist 2001: A Space Odyssey Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki Similar in bringing to life complex characters, centering women and LGBTQ+, driven by love and adventure and conspiring to help each other in impossible circumstances and a speculative context - whose joyous, page-turning story also invites us to forgive and better ourselves and our society. Cloud Cuckooland by Anthony Doerr Similar themes of future climate crisis and institutional/governmental use of technology to ‘get us through’ the trauma of a dystopian future, with a story of surprising hope driven by complex, highly intelligent characters willing to sacrifice for love, our planet, our future and as atonement. Assignment 5: Hook Line (logline) Spiritual leader to a colony bound for a distant planet, Sister Guadalupé must face the truth that her religion has been weaponized to impose the destructive social order that is dooming humanity. Assignment 6: Inner Conflict and Secondary Conflict Inner Conflict Sister Guadalupé is a High Priestess of the Order, pop-star meets preacher meets sex worker in the new religion of ‘self love’. Kind and friendly, she struggles with the selfishness her role is intended to promote. She believes in the tenet of Free Love, and wrestles with the degradation she feels in some contexts of this ‘service’. Lupé has been admonished for her intellectual pursuits and reprimanded for pushing the boundaries of spiritual-societal concepts of the Order. Igaia’s mission gives the priestess the freedom to live into her potential and beliefs, more than she expects or may be ready for. Scenario 1: We meet Senator Aules As Guadalupé revels in the spectacular journey through space and in meeting the ship’s crew on the bridge, Senator Aules arrives and interrupts. He jovially insists on a hug, while Sister Guadalupé is ‘intensely aware of the crew's eyes on them, as she was of the Senator's hand sliding rapidly down her back to a less avuncular position. The priestess skillfully slipped back and held the older man's hands at arm's length, masking the defensive move with a coquettish smile.’ Lupe tries but ultimately fails to cover her embarrassment at his repeated broadcasting of sexual and social ownership of her. They leave together, taking a circuitous public route, his ‘pet priestess on parade’, as usual. In the end, she’s grateful for the extra time for her Service Pill to take effect, so that by the time they reach his chambers, she’s ready and willing to service him as expected. Secondary Conflict People all around Lupé underestimate and demean her because of her appeal and her role in the very religion they all subscribe to. Whether it’s Aules treating her like his property, Lieutenant Kali assuming she has no understanding of science or technology and is a tool of the Corporation at best, or the Patron angrily reprimanding her for daring to think she has the ability to understand much less the status to question the plans of the Corporation. Yet Guadalupé, to a fault, responds by trying to connect, however she can. Scenario 2: Kali uncovers a sinister connection Lieutenant Kali is a top coder with the Military Protectors, on board with a tight group of friends and a Captain she’d follow anywhere. Following the trail of barely detectable aberrant code, Kali and her friend Will uncover Aules’ plot and a connection in it to Guadalupé. Immediately suspicious, Kali then stumbles upon Lupé leaving Will’s quarters. Spurred on by jealousy, the coder ignores facts and gaps in data to assume that Guadalupé is a collaborator in the plot with Aules. Assignment 7: The Incredible Importance of Setting Dea ex Machina opens with an unattributed letter to an unidentified friend. In it, the writer proclaims, ‘The Mars colony failed. Catastrophically. This is the truth the world must believe.’ Our story begins some twenty years later, aboard the first interplanetary colonization expedition since. On Earth, humans live in an Epoch of Distance, characterized by an extreme caste system, with the reclusive ultra-rich Elite at the top. In the words of Creator Duanna, ‘We looked away as laws were re-written to turn billionaires to trillionaires, and the rest of humanity to an indentured workforce. We cleaved that caste chasm with our own labor, feeding it with our colonized data and debt and selling our voices in government. Elected officials and judges became corporate hires. Pop stars became sex idols, sex became religion, and religion married business. Together they embraced and excelled at disseminating opiates to the masses of the ever poorer global working class. Daily life went on. And the earth was slowly consumed.’ Our story occurs on board the spaceship Igaia, transporting a complete colony and all necessary equipment to a distant planet, to begin the extraction of fuel resources desperately needed back on Earth. Among the passengers, the Agrarians aim to learn from terraforming the new planet so that they can return to Earth with new advancements in adaptive regeneration. The Corporate Senators speak in other rooms of the planet as a possible new home for humanity, should efforts to rehabitize Earth to our needs fail. Igaia is the AI running the eponymous ship, in partnership with its inventor, Creator Duanna. The spaceship’s adaptive intelligence, revolutionary regenerative fuel use, and iterative well-care for passengers, all while moving beyond the speed of light, make the expedition possible. We learn that the AI was born of necessity, designed by Duanna to save her own life. The two function symbiotically, as both aggressively evolve. Duanna wrote our opening letter, and at the moment of crisis and opportunity on the ship, she exposes the annihilation of the Mars colony by the Corporation. In the final chapters of the book, we discover that Duanna secretly assembled her most beloved people on Igaia, so that they all might escape Earth to create a new kind of society.

At Night Court one Christmas, John Larroquette gave me a sofa pillow embroidered with: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Larroquette, who makes the work of acting comedy and drama look effortless, gave it to me knowing it also crystalized the struggle of a writer. The real battle isn’t writing comedy or drama. It’s mixing the two. In crime and thriller novels, it’s murder. But not impossible. There’s simply a high degree of difficulty. Yet, when it works, it’s freaking magical. I’m talking about you, Mick Herron. Your Slow Horses series crackles with mystery and tension. But what elevates it is the humor. Reviewers call it dark comedy. I call it human comedy because it comes out of characters responding like real people to real situations. Sometimes with fright, horror, violence, or tears. Other times, with a wisecrack or an insult. Or, when one of them is Jackson Lamb, the world-weary den father of MI5’s dumpster, with a loud, prolonged, public passing of gas. Reading Herron, you let out shock laughter in the backwash of tragedy. His novels are a must-study for a tone balance that’s pitch perfect. Why? I worked on Nurse Jackie, a dark comedy TV series. That meant we wore the twin masks of drama and comedy. Like I said, a high degree of difficulty. So, beginning each year, I made a speech to the writers’ room that, to pull off this feat, comedy and drama need to be good roommates. It’s that simple and that complex. Let’s stick with books. Let’s celebrate the alchemists—authors who forged tense mysteries and thrillers where humor also thrives. Like Janet Evanovich, right from the gate, in 1 for the Money. Elmore Leonard, who mined humor with hapless strivers in Swag, Get Shorty, and more. Then there’s Carl Hiaasen and the recently departed Tim Dorsey, both making Florida seem like a fun place to take a beating. Rachel Howzell Hall brings the funny amid tragedy through her LA homicide detective, Elouise Norton. Can’t leave off Robert Crais, Joe R. Lansdale, or Gregory McDonald. And then there’s the master, Donald E. Westlake, who consistently staged a Cirque du Soleil balancing act in The Ax, The Hook, and his intimidatingly sublime Dortmunder series. These top-flight authors took me to school. I’ve not only studied how they crafted a story, I’ve marveled at the ways they threaded the needle between laughter and slaughter. They helped me find my hybrid voice in my first novel, The Trigger Episode, and all seven of my Nikki Heat series, writing as Richard Castle. I’m still learning from them. What have I learned? If you’re looking for rules, I’m not your guy. In his essay, “Ten Rules of Writing,” Elmore Leonard’s first rule was never open a book with weather. My first Nikki Heat novel was entitled Heat Wave, and guess what I opened with? Yup. Elmore Leonard, you were a god to me but, sorry, Dutch, that book went to number six on the New York Times list. Then there’s “Mario Puzo’s Godfatherly Rules for Writing a Bestselling Novel.” First rule: “Never write in the first person.” Huh. My latest spy thriller, The Accidental Joe, had difficulty getting traction at first, a euphemism for WTF?! At the risk of finding a horse’s head in my bed, I undertook a page-one rewrite, changing to…the first person. The process was scary, but the upshot was a fresher book with a singular voice, some healthy swagger, and a fat dollop of organic humor. It sold immediately. So, let’s not talk rules; let’s talk considerations. First off, why use humor? You may have your own reasons. One of mine is to use it with protagonists who are new to a world so I can have them draw on sarcasm, irony, and wisecracks to expose truth and react to norms without going all earnest. Not a fan of earnest. What about jokes? Consider that a no. It’s a mystery or thriller, not open-mic night at the Chuckle Hut. The minute you start writing in joke forms (A hitman walks into a bar…) do some hard thinking. The best comedy comes from character, attitude, and point of view, not one liners. Save the banana peels. As above, slapstick and pratfalls are red flags. Just like joke-jokes, extreme physical comedy smacks of contrivance and tone breakage. Be honest. Does your humor play real? Put yourself in the situation. Whatever action is going on around you, would you really say or do this? Really? Are you trying to wear two masks at once? Humor works if it’s well placed. Sometimes the perfect lighthearted dialogue collides with darker action or slows the pace. Remember that thing about comedy and drama being good roommates? Be careful not to shoehorn in humor where it becomes a distraction or an obstacle. A life-death chase or your climax is not the time to bring out the laugh track. I try to spot it where the readers can catch their breath after I’ve just taken it away. Character will make humor work for you. The key is to make it organic. If it’s something only this one person could say or do and only in this moment, your chances are good. Be consistent. Establish your tone and stick with it. The sudden appearance or disappearance of humor is as jarring as a POV swap. Finally, trust your gut. If the funny is funny but feels “off,” don’t force it. Basic as it sounds, humor works when it works. If it’s not right, don’t deny your feelings. Adjust or cut. If in doubt, walk away and grab one of those above books. You may come back inspired. Or at least have a good laugh. *** View the full article

Chicago has produced more than a few successful African-American writers, in both the literary and sales sense, including Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Willard Motley and Sam Greenlee. Inspired greatly by Richard Wright, whose classic texts Native Son and Black Boy helped create a literary path for many Black boys with a pen and a headful of ideas, novelist Ronald L. Fair isn’t as well known as his textual contemporaries, but he was another wonderful writer who emerged from that hard city. Fighting every step of the way as he embarked on the revolutionary road of creating literature on his own terms, he had a bigger mission in mind than just fame and fortune. “I doubted that I would ever make any money as a writer of this kind of fiction, but that didn’t matter because I would be telling it like it is,” Fair wrote in an essay published in the April, 1965 issue of Negro Digest. “No more polite lies. No more biting of the tongue or twisting of truths. Richard Wright’s death would mean something, because I would keep him in mind and swing away.” According to “Bearing Witness in Black Chicago” by Maryemma Graham (1990), “Fair began writing in high school in order to provide an outlet for his own developing and inquiring mind. Like Red Top, a character in the novella ‘World of Nothing,’ writing was a mental and spiritual exercise. But the path that led to a literary career was interrupted by three years in the Navy and two years at a Chicago business college. Then Fair spent ten years as a court reporter for the city of Chicago.” Fair’s 1963 debut was the slim Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable. A dark satire in more ways than one (it was reissued last year from the Library of America), the book depicts a fictional Mississippi town called Jacobs County that neglects to tell their local “colored folks” that slavery is over. After a few of the slaves, most notably Jacobs County elders Granny Jacobs and Preacher Harris (the only Black person in town who could read) discover that there exists a free world beyond their plantations, they became fixated on getting their families to the Negro Promised Land they believe Chicago to be. When a copy of the Black-owned/Chicago based Ebony magazine is mailed to the town, word gets out that there was a place where they could live as nicely as white people and keep a few dollars in their pockets. When Fair decided to satirize slavery it could have gone all wrong, but, as Negro World (owned by Ebony’s parent company Johnson Publications) observed in 1965: “It is a measure of Mr. Fair’s artistry that the pain and fury behind the laughter is always finely felt.” Yet, while the golden streets of Chicago and other northern wonderlands (Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York) served as the perfect strivers’ fantasy, the reality of those harsh, cold cities was quite different than expected: shabby tenements, and later housing projects, replaced the plantations and the laws of justice still weren’t balanced. Fair, whose own parents made the sojourn from Mississippi, was born and raised in Chicago and knew very well the levels of race inequality that were prevalent in housing, schooling, banking, salaries paid and the policing of Black communities. These heavy subjects are tackled in Fair’s powerful and naturalistic second novel Hog Butcher (1966). This told the story of a college-bound Chi-Town high school basketball champion headed for college named Nathaniel Hamilton, whom everyone calls Cornbread. A neighborhood hero, Cornbread is gunned down by a white policeman who mistook him for a thief as he ran home in the rain holding a bottle of orange soda. The policeman, half an interracial duo of blue boys, thought Cornbread was the burglar they had been pursuing minutes before, but his deadly mistake causes the community and “the system” to explode. A small riot breaks out minutes after Cornbread is slain and the mayor’s sends in a task force of, “twelve officers, all over six feet, cruising slowly down the block on motorcycles. They were so big the motorcycles looked like children’s toys under them,” to occupy the neighborhood like a military force.” With the only witness to their senseless crime being a ten-year old kid, Wilford Robinson, who along with his buddy Earl, idolized every cool Cornbread made on the battlegrounds of the basketball courts, the goal of everyone including civic leaders, the welfare agency and violent cops, one who beats-up Wilford’s mother, is to make the boy be quiet. As the state builds their web of lies, the truth becomes the scariest enemy. Negro Digest editor Hoyt W. Fuller wrote in the October, 1966 issue of that publication, “Hog Butcher is…a sharp portrayal of a diseased city. That the picture might fit any American city is merely coincidental.” Author Richard Guzman, editor of Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It?, wrote a 2015 essay on Fair and Hog Butcher, “Though some have commented on the novel’s humor and, in particular, on the energy and courage of the two adolescent protagonists through whom some of the action is seen, the novel is a sobering exploration of social class … and, of course, police violence.” In The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches (2005) author Bernard W. Bell wrote that Fair borrowed the term “hog butcher” from Carl Sandburg’s 1914 poem “Chicago” (‘Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders…’), but also believed that “the white Chicago system is the hog butcher that cuts out the souls of blacks.” Maryemma Graham notes, “Hog Butcher, considered by most critics to be (Fair’s) best, drew heavily upon his intimate knowledge of Chicago’s legal system. Fair sets up the oppositional forces in Hog Butcher on several levels… Fair is quite detailed in his descriptions about how the police department and the court systems work with regard to black people and the black community, obviously drawing upon his years of experience as a courtroom reporter. This necessarily leads to a focus on the social dynamics of the black urban experience, a fact which invited some very negative reviews from Fair’s critics.” “Hog Butcher was different from any novel I had ever read,” novelist Cecil Brown wrote in a 2020 essay. Brown, who considered Fair one of his literary heroes, met him in 1966. “His prose was exciting and infectious; you could not begin reading one sentence without reading the next sentence. But the most important thing was it was about police brutality. The story was set right in Chicago where we were having riots.” When Hog Butcher was reissued in 2014 from Northwestern University Press, Brown wrote the forward, In 1975, during the height of the Blaxploitation movement that was going down in American movies, Hog Butcher was adapted by screenwriter Leonard Lamensdorf and director Joe Mandrake. Released under the title Cornbread, Earl and Me, the picture was an American International Picture release that starred thirteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne in his film debut as Wilford. There was also NBA star Keith Wilkes as Cornbread, Rosalind Cash as Wilford’s mother and Bernie Casey playing the other policeman. Soul-jazz unit The Blackbyrds did the soundtrack. Though not as brilliant as the funky scores composed by Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield, leader Donald Byrd created a serviceable soundtrack. While filming the adaption, considered a classic in some quarters, told the story from Wilford’s point of view, Fair used the third-person omniscient that showed readers how Cornbread’s murder affected each side from the Black cop and the frightened grocery store owner to the uncaring Deputy Coroner and the knight in shining armor lawyer Benjamin Blackwell, who was working for Cornbread’s family. In Cecil Brown’s forward to the 2014 edition, he wrote, “Mr. Fair presented a new style of writing in Hog Butcher. The story is told not in a traditional narrative mode, but in an impressionistic style that relies heavily on interior monologue. The style enables Fair to move into and out of the minds of different characters and back and forth between past and present. Along with Richard Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! (published posthumously in 1963), Hog Butcher can be seen as a milestone in the use of interior monologue to portray the consciousness of African American characters.” Although Fair never claimed that Hog Butcher was based on a specific case, almost sixty years after its initial publication the novel serves as a reminder that American police brutality in the Black community wasn’t something that began in the age of cell phone cameras, police dashcam footage and surveillance monitors. Four years before the film version was released, Fair was encouraged by writer Chester Himes to flee the racism of Chicago in 1971; he lived in various European countries before finally settling in Finland in 1972. Since Hog Butcher was reissued in 2014, more writers and critics have embraced the book, including a chapter I wrote for Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 and an essay by writer Kathleen Rooney, who stated in 2022, “I would like to nominate Fair’s novel to appear alongside To Kill a Mockingbird on syllabi everywhere because instead of exceptionalism and white saviors, Fair’s story depicts—with a cast of lovable, hateable, believable characters from the young man who gets murdered to the cops who murder him—how power’s highest aim is always to preserve itself and how collective action is the best hope anyone can have against systemic injustice.” Though his work is important, Fair didn’t think America appreciated Black writers. “Being a Black writer was a dead end,” Fair told Cecil Brown in 2010. Eight years later, in February, 2018, Fair died from a a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 86. According to his widow Hannele, though he stopped publishing, Ronald L. Fair never stopped writing. “I have many of his unpublished manuscripts with me that deserve to be published,” she wrote Cecil Brown in 2018. Hopefully one day those works will be shared with the world. View the full article

El Nino-induced flooding of biblical proportions has inundated my home this year, which can mean only one possible thing: TIME TO READ SOME GOTHIC FICTION! It’s giving damp. It’s giving mold. It’s giving drip-drip-drip on the window pane. And the weather event causing me personal misery is also a perfect in-road to highlighting one of the greatest years yet in the Great Gothic Fiction revival. It could have been a great moment for fungal fiction, but we already covered that trend in Lit Hub with this fantastic list for lovers (and haters) of The Last of Us. Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria) All is not what it seems in this lush and twist-filled tale. Two spiritualist sisters, famed in their teen years for their convincing seances, must come together for one last con. Spitting Gold is carefully plotted, fully characterized, and incredibly satisfying. Let the ectoplasm flow! L.S. Stratton, Do What Godmother Says (Union Square, June 11) L.S. Stratton’s new gothic thriller is divided between the Harlem Renaissance past and a writer in D.C.’s present. In the past, a young painter is taken under the wing of a mysterious socialite; her new hopes for the security to pursue artistic freedom are quickly dashed as she learns how controlling her new patron can be. In the present, a journalist comes into possession of a valuable painting, only to find herself beset by collectors who seem ready to engage in unscrupulous methods in order to get their hands on the piece of art. Do What Godmother Says is both a prescient critique of artistic appropriation and a darn good mystery—in short, an immensely satisfying read. Donyae Coles, Midnight Rooms (Amistad, July 2) Never. Eat. What. The. Fairies. Give. You. Especially if it’s as disgusting as what’s consumed at the wedding feast in this atmospheric gothic (complete with strong folk horror elements). Donyae Coles’ plucky heroine is surprised to receive a later-in-life proposal from a mysterious gentleman. Their connection is genuine, but his family is off-putting, his manor house is crumbling, and for some reason, he keeps getting her drunk on honey wine while feeding her bloody meat and little cakes. What does he want, and what will she have to sacrifice to give it to him? Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (Avid Reader Press, July 23) While debatably gothic, this novel set in 17th century ancien regime France is most certainly suited to the damp—after all, it was an era long before dehumidifiers (of which I now possess four). The Modern Fairies features the great historical salons of Paris, in which literary luminaries mingled with the demimonde and mixed witty repartee with inventive storytelling. Pollard’s characters are reinventing their nation’s traditional stories and creating the modern fairy tale, even as the details of their lives show the the rot of French society before the Revolution. John Fram, No Road Home (Atria, July 23) A wealthy preacher’s compound is the setting for this gothic parable from the author of The Bright Lands. The narrator of No Road Home, newly wedded to the beautiful scion of a megachurch pastor, is visiting his wife’s family for the first time when a storm closes them off from the rest of the world just as their patriarch is found dead. Even before the disturbing demise, Fram’s hero is already having second thoughts about the marriage: her relatives keep making snide remarks about his gender nonconforming son, it turns out his wife only married him to unlock her own inheritance, every family member appears to be keeping secrets, and someone’s been painting threatening messages warning of vengeance to come. Oh, and there’s also a ghost and some very disturbing paintings… Del Sandeen, This Cursed House (Berkley, October 8) Jemma Barker is broke and newly single when a strange offer comes in: a lucrative position has opened up with a wealthy family on their Louisiana plantation, and Jemma needs to get out of Chicago, fast. It’s 1962 and the world is changing, but for the family on the plantation, things appear to be frozen in time, as the family is still stuck in the colorism that allows them to feel superior to the darker-skinned Jemma. Sandeen’s heroine soon learns that the family has summoned her for a very particular purpose: they are cursed, and they believe her to be the only one who can save them from future calamity. View the full article