Early on in the process of writing my first book about axe murder, I took a job working in an after-school program. I was twenty-six and I’d recently figured out a new answer to the hundred-year-old mystery of the murder of eight people in Villisca, Iowa. I needed a day job, and the children at the nearby elementary school I had once attended myself were a bright counterpoint to the grim work of researching true crime. Mornings spent mired in awful murders were balanced by cheerful afternoons in sunny playgrounds and colorful classrooms, mediating disputes over nothing more serious than iPad time. At Pinckney Elementary, my job working in after-school care with the Boys & Girls Club was both more and less important than my work unearthing major connections between horrific tragedies. These kindergarteners had real struggles too, but I wasn’t a teacher or their parents. Anything major was above my pay grade. I had to make sure that the kids didn’t die, but only in the two or three hours they were in my care. One day a little boy said something that struck me. The setting was the gym, a routine safety assembly. Fire was banal as a threat, routine, done to death. But in 2013, the possibility of a mass shooter was still novel and exciting enough to make the kids antsy. Especially since we were talking about school shootings like they were some forbidden R-rated movie. Barricading doors, running away, hiding, all of those things were covered—but we avoided mentioning the actual threat, the weapon, the gun. The boy, a fifth grader, raised his hand, blurting out, “WHAT IF IT WAS AN AXE MURDERER?” He accompanied the question with a mimed motion and sound effect that was somewhere between light saber and baseball bat. We just moved on without reacting—you can’t rise to the bait that way when you’re trying to get children to take something seriously. But the incident stuck with me. How did this child, born into the age of touch screens, have a reference point for “axe murderer”? It makes sense that he wouldn’t say “what about a SCHOOL SHOOTER?” since that was the source of the very tension that the joke intended to relieve. Instead, he reached into his imagination and came up with a tool. Axes are a big deal in Minecraft, so I have no doubt that he understood that their primary purpose as a tool is to cut down trees. Axe murder, though, seemed a joke too dark for such a tender age. How was the violence of an axe murderer remote enough to be funny and yet familiar enough for a ten-year-old to invoke? The boy’s antics stuck with me throughout the process of writing and promoting my book The Man from the Train. Like this book, it is a work of nonfiction. The man in question would ride the rails to a community where he had no ties, pick up an axe left outside in a woodpile, break into a house, and kill everyone inside; he especially targeted households with children. The book makes the argument that this pattern repeated dozens of times nationwide over about fifteen years and can be traced back to a man who evaded capture after murdering the family he lived with and worked for on a small farm in Massachusetts. From the beginning of my research process, the idea of the axe murderer as opposed to a murderer who used an axe was central to my understanding of these tragedies. Newspapers embraced the grabby compound phrase slowly: in 1890, the term was almost never used, but by 1920 it was used frequently. Our fiend in The Man from the Train killed perhaps as many as a hundred people beginning in 1898. He began relatively slowly, slaying one or two families a year, choosing rural communities and leaving geographic distance between his attacks. We believe that he was following work opportunities—especially the chance to use the axe to fell trees as a lumberjack. In 1909, he ramped up the bloodshed and the events became more frequent and more tightly spaced. Though the idea of serial killers wouldn’t be formalized for decades to come, awareness of them was dawning among the crime-obsessed public. After the man killed two Colorado Springs families on a September night in 1911, headlines about the “axe-murder” began to take root in newspaper pages, especially in the Midwest. The coverage of that event died out, but the phrase took hold with the trial of Clementine Barnabet. She was a young black woman in Lafayette, Louisiana, a troubled eighteen-year-old obsessed with cults and true crime who confessed to a series of murders in Louisiana and Texas—horrible crimes she (in my firm opinion) did not commit. Her vivid court statement involving voodoo rituals grabbed headlines across the country; white journalists found it easy to exploit their readers’ racism by placing exaggerated and obvious rumors into print. By the time the man from the train made his infamous trip to Villisca in June 1912, the phrase “axe murder” was a well-established part of the crime-writing lexicon, never to exit it again. It stuck to the Villisca event so firmly that when I first started research in 2012, the Wikipedia page for it was the first Google result for the phrase “axe murder.” I once believed that the emergence of this wording in newspaper headlines also mirrored a surge in the use of axes themselves as a weapon, but now, having tracked the axe over so long a period throughout human history, I don’t think that’s true. Axes are at their core utterly common, and so they have been as ubiquitous as weapons as they have been as tools. They are everywhere in our story of violence, so much a part of the texture of our conflicts that they become banal, unworthy of note. What made the phrase “axe murder” so charged in the 1910s was a clash of cutting-edge technology with ancient traditions in toolmaking over the previous sixty years. Industrialization would eventually make the axe fall out of daily use, but for a moment the new machinery made the humble axe omnipresent. Battleaxes were thoroughly outdated by the Civil War, but in military and domestic settings there were more axes than perhaps at any other point before in history. Steel tool use proliferated after 1856, when a man named Henry Bessemer devised a new method of purifying iron quickly and inexpensively by oxidizing iron with pressurized air to remove carbon and other impurities. This one-step method was discovered in the process of producing cannonballs that could be fired in the manner of a rifle. Bessemer was driven to problem-solve after the British postal service stole his fiancée Ann Allen’s idea to modify the dates on embossed postal stamps, a grudge he held even after his steel foundry made him wealthy. Steel had previously been quite precious and rare, but unlike lab-grown diamonds its new availability and cheapness did not temper demand. Skyscrapers and trains and paper clips alike flowed out of the foundries, along with a flood of hand tools: hammers, shovels, hoes, and others were suddenly much more common and inexpensive. In the 1866 Fyodor Dostoyevsky masterpiece Crime and Punishment, the antihero Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker and her sister with an axe, grabbed from the kitchen in his apartment building. In the depths of his absurd and monstrous plans, in the chaos of Saint Petersburg and his own head, he settles upon the convenience of the axe: “nothing could have been simpler.” As electricity and plumbing and cars and telephones became increasingly accessible, the axe seemed all the duller. Guns supplanted the axe as the convenient weapon of choice. Chainsaws were used for a larger and larger share of forestry applications, though they weren’t yet in use in the home. Axes were becoming an object of slight kitsch. At the 1893 World’s Fair, a small glass version of George Washington’s axe was a popular souvenir. Carrie Nation—a leader in the temperance movement of the early twentieth century who raided and destroyed bars and speakeasies—remained an object of derision long after the repeal of prohibition, her tiny hatchet no equal for the country’s thirst. One brand of tobacco in the form of a plug (a brick of compressed tobacco leaves, to be cut off and chewed or smoked in a pipe) called itself Battleaxe, recalling a now firmly extinct era of violence to flatter male customers who want to think of themselves as rugged—not unlike the logic behind Axe personal care products today. The axe was still around, but becoming antiquated. By 1922, the phrase “axe murder” appeared in U.S. newspapers hundreds of times each year, always used to describe actual crimes. But, like all grabby phrases, it became tinged with the grime of exploitative newspaper coverage through overuse. As the chainsaw took more and more of the axe’s main occupation, the axe became an anachronism. The contrast between the axe (boring) and murder (exciting) gave the phrase a darkly comic tinge. By the 1950s, “axe murder” was still a staple of newspaper headlines, yet the phrase and indeed violence with axes itself was becoming a stock joke. In Shirley Jackson’s lighthearted book of domestic essays Life Among the Savages, she writes of a sleepy domestic scene perked up by violence: “I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.” In 1955, Charles Schultz killed off unpopular character Charlotte Braun in an illustration that parodied the gentle humor of Peanuts by putting an axe in Charlotte’s head. In the 1964 hagsploitation movie Strait-Jacket, Joan Crawford campily raised the axe for B-movie thrills to theatrical success. Axe murder had primal connotations, deeply interpersonal and separate from the state violence of execution rituals and battlefields where axes have created the most bloodshed. These associations came in handy in 1976, when North Korea and the United States nearly got into a war about a tree. In the North Korean axe murder incident, Captain Arthur Bonifas and Lieutenant Mark Barrett of the U.S. Army tried to trim a poplar tree that had created a surveillance blind spot. The tree grew on the Bridge of No Return, a tense spot near the Demilitarized Zone where North Korea, South Korea, and the United States observed an uneasy truce, often taunting one another by banging on windows with axe handles. The captain and lieutenant were killed by thirty North Korean soldiers, armed not just with their own axes but with “crowbars, pipes, [and] clubs” taken from South Korean laborers. The United States responded with restraint by simply cutting down the tree (with a much more efficient chainsaw), leading to some crucial concessions from the North Korean president and transforming the tripartite relationship. Though the event was not especially well remembered, it illustrates some of the crucial associations of axes and violence in the United States. The term “axe murder” characterized the incident as a close-quarters grudge, not a military exercise with guns and helicopters but something ugly and outside of bounds. And, since this war was almost begun by trimming a tree and ended with chopping down that tree, there’s a sense of something just barely funny about it. Axe murder—or really, axe murderers—became a permanent punchline after The Shining in 1980. The moment where Jack Torrance hacks through a locked door with a fire axe is darkly funny all on its own, with its invocation of Johnny Carson’s signature catchphrase; the shot itself harkens back to a movie called The Phantom Carriage, made around the first flush of “axe murder” in 1920. When a Mike Myers movie goofily satirizing the eighties erotic thriller needed a punchier title, they went to the Shining parody set piece at the center and called it So I Married an Axe Murderer. Though the comedy wasn’t an initial hit, it’s become an enduring cult classic, permanently sealing the idea of axe murder as comic. Infinite references, parodies, homages of the axe breaking through the wood in The Simpsons or MythBusters or Super Bowl ads for Mountain Dew Zero Sugar have built a long legacy for the fire axe wielded by Jack Nicholson. But the phrase mostly disappeared from newspapers describing actual crimes. It is now too unserious. The axe in silhouette still has genuine menace when the tone is dark, and power—an axe, usually with a hyperbolically huge blade, is often a formidable weapon in violence-oriented video games. But an axe murder is also appropriate for a throwaway line in a lighthearted family comedy like Bob’s Burgers, the second of three in a list: “roller coasters, or axe murderers, or Dad’s morning breath.” An escalation from roller coasters on the way to the real punchline. The idea of an axe murderer is not so much a shock as a joke so easy a ten-year-old could make it. Axes are far from humanity’s only deadly, omnipresent instrument. Hammers and swords and knives are objects of fetishistic fear, each in many ways more iconic than the axe. Knives and hammers are an even more essential tool for the little jobs of daily life, closer at hand than an axe in most modern households. And while axe throwing has had a recent upswing in popularity, fencing is an Olympic sport. Axes can be expensive toys and objects of honor and prestige, but a hatchet will never have the pedigree, the classiness, the pretensions of the epee. Yet it is that earthbound flintiness that makes the axe so iconic. There is no tool older. The axe is the sword, it is the hammer, the planer, the scythe, khopesh, knife. As every task somehow involves your smartphone today, so everything required a hand axe when humanity began. Early people spent their lives refining their craftsmanship to make these biface tools beginning about two and a half or three million years ago, learning the qualities of different kinds of stones and perfecting the flaking and percussive techniques to make these elaborately faceted gems into teardrop shape. And then half a million years ago, the tools got a hell of a lot better. Handles were a miracle of engineering, allowing the one-piece blade to do “cutting, scraping, chopping, and piercing.” This was a transformation in hunting and in interpersonal violence. The axe gained literal power with the handle, its force physically enhanced by the new leverage, and became all the more valuable as a tool, as a weapon, as a symbol of wealth. Specialized axes spread into professions beyond woodcutting, such as coopering (barrel making), shipbuilding, and roofing, and revealed their usefulness for enforcing community disputes. The axe’s power only grew with the introduction of metals. Otzi—the naturally mummified man who lived 5,300 years ago in the Alps of Northern Italy and was discovered in 1991—held an axe. The head of the tool was fitted into the handle and lashed rather than the other way around—typical for stone axes. But this blade was copper, a sign of the man’s high social status, and his weapons were flecked with the blood of others. By the time we start to have recorded history, the axe is already loaded with the language of power. The Dresden Codex—a Mayan book that is one of the oldest in the Americas—had a specific ideographic symbol, ch’ak, defined as the “axe/comb glyph,” which possibly refers both to events of war and decapitation as well as the movement of the planets. This association is reflected in the warrior god of lightning Chahk’s great jade axe—an association between the axe and the great whacks from the sky that persist across many systems of belief from around the world: Pangu’s axe that cleaved the world in Chinese mythology, or Hephaestus hitting Zeus’s head with an axe to birth Athena. State violence invested the axe not just with power but with authority. In war, execution, and other official and sanctioned shows of power and force—the axe was always present in the chaos of battle and the awful order of ritual violence. Battleaxes were thinner than woodcutting axes, but both were present on campaigns, key to battles on land and sea. Axes were a distinctive part of many legendary military forces, even into the twentieth century in some cases—in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Songye people made elegant hatchets for ceremonial decapitation rituals that have spokes where the cheek of the blade would usually be, etched with human faces. The posture a person must assume to be beheaded is submissive. To lay your neck on the block means that you have not just been defeated but that you have stopped fighting. This is the theater of death: it is not so much about making the condemned feel their defeat, but about communicating the totality of their defeat to the people watching, who might wish to succeed where the condemned failed. This is the reason the axe was such an important part of the fasces, a symbol from Rome that has resonated with genocidal imperial empires from the United States to Germany, and the namesake of fascism. The axe tells anyone who hopes to resist that they will be not only killed but also ideologically defeated. But even as the axe can be put toward the abuse of power, so it can be put toward resistance. The commonness of the axe and its inseparability from the rank and file of labor processes lend it unexpected power in rebellion and revolution. The artist Kerry James Marshall has returned again and again to the subject of Nat Turner, who led a slave insurrection armed with axes in southern Virginia in 1831; the axe appears in two of these paintings, for woodcutting and for beheading Turner’s enslaver. In the establishment and westward expansion of the United States, the axe became pivotal. Early on, it was heavily taxed as an import, making it a scarce and valuable tool in trade. Demand only grew. This was once a heavily forested country full of unimaginably huge trees, and there were homes and farms and railroads to build. Even nonrural families like the Bordens found themselves with five different axes in their cellar. As the Bessemer method led to the explosion of steel tools in general, there were suddenly many more patterns of axes to fit different needs: roofing, woodcutting, firefighting. The Pulaski, an axe with a hoe on the back of the pole invented in 1911, endures especially as an essential firefighting tool. But by 1965 the axe was no longer the default choice for so many of the tasks it once handled. Chainsaws took its truest purpose, woodcutting. Electric heat reduced the need for firewood cut in the home. Grocery stores made it easier and easier to buy meat that was already butchered. Cars meant there were no more carriages to repair or horses to shoe. Today, you only have five axes in the basement if you really like axes. It’s not that the axe is no longer useful. Someone who is sleeping rough in the woods has great need for a hatchet to clear a place to sleep. A housed person with a fireplace or a backyard full of scrubby trees could use an axe toward those purposes; there are less work-intensive options, but the challenge and the connection to the old ways are the point. Like the cowboy or the gangster, the woodsman has turned from a laborer into a mythical beast of masculinities past, a Paul Bunyan fantasy you can buy at the hardware store. And that’s not silly; it fulfills something deep within us. But the axe doesn’t carry the connotation of practicality that it once did—it’s usually not the most efficient way to solve whatever problem is in front of you. Especially violence. Guns are easy to use, there are a lot of them, and they’re much likelier to be used to fatal effect than the axe. And yet the axe is still a common object that gets picked up in unpremeditated violence, whether in the great outdoors or the garage. Though gun purchase laws are nowhere near tough enough, it’s still much easier to buy an axe than a gun. In this book I’ve tried more than anything to look directly at the axe, both as it gets lost in a sea of other tools and technology and as it becomes a fetish or an afterthought in violent stories throughout time. I’ve reviewed true crime staples, toured three Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, hiked a Pennsylvania glen, and dug into the backstory of a throwaway sentence in Herodotus. The kind librarians at the University of Kansas sent scores of books about everything from handles to sex crimes to Vikings, right to my office at my day job (and let me renew them for years). Lost one summer on a college campus in Memphis, Tennessee, I found a huge mural of Ramses II smiting his people with a circular axe. And I’ve learned to see human-sacrifice rituals everywhere. Each story in this book is prefaced with a brief explanation of one specific kind of axe, and how each new blade reflects the axe’s evolution as a piece of technology, weapon, and cultural symbol. There are hundreds and sometimes thousands of years between many of these murders. The events in these books take place at such disparate moments in history, but they have commonalities beyond the tool central to each: revenge, guilt, entitlement, exploitation, shame, spite, war, greed, madness. And occasionally, freedom, resistance, redemption. Community, even. ___________________________________ From Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. View the full article

When that unknown assassin squeezed the first trigger back in 1889, blowing Belle Starr from her famous hand-worked leather saddle, they would have had no way of knowing they were inadvertently knocking her right into the pages of history. How could they? At that point, she was only a colorful local character with a checkered past, barely known beyond the frontier settlements of what is today eastern Oklahoma and northern Texas; someone who stirred gossip in neighborhood saloons and provoked headlines in town papers with her ribald antics and frequent brushes with the law. And it very easily could have remained that way, with her name quietly fading into the past, had it not been for one serendipitous event. Two days after her death, the editor of the Fort Smith Elevator, a minuscule Arkansas weekly from the ragged edge of Indian Territory, sent off a dispatch about the killing to a few of the large, metropolitan papers. Including, as it were, the New York Times. The timing could not have been better. With the 1880s coming to a close and with the “Wild” quickly leaking out of an increasingly tamed West, eastern urbanites held a voracious appetite for salacious true-crime drama from whatever was left of their nation’s vanishing frontier. Yes, heroes sold papers, but villains sold even more, and a villainess—particularly an unabashedly stylish one clad entirely in black velvet and flashing an elaborately plumed hat—well, that was simply too good to pass up. Just three days after her death, the rest of America received its first glimpse of Belle Starr, in the form of an obituary on the front page of the Times, titled “A Desperate Woman Killed.”1 The piece was short and contained as many exaggerations and errors as it did facts. It labeled her “the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders” (she certainly was not that), stated that she “married Cole Younger directly after the war” (she never married him at all), and also claimed that she “had been arrested for murder and robbery a score of times, but always managed to escape” (also false—she was only ever formally charged three times, for robbery, yes, but never for murder). Yet what the obituary lacked in fact-checking, it made up for in raw titillation. The slim core of truth it conveyed, that a female bandit who ran with famous outlaws had been gunned down in Indian Territory by an unknown assassin, was morsel enough to whet the general public’s appetite for more. Among those intrigued by the murder was Richard K. Fox, owner of the National Police Gazette, one of the most popular true-crime tabloids of the day—the word “true” being somewhat loosely applied. But while journalistic integrity may not have been one of the publisher’s strong points, knowing how to make a buck was. Recognizing the story’s explosive potential, Fox decided a full-length book was in order. A writer was dispatched immediately to Fort Smith, an egregious amount of creative license was taken, and by that summer, a paperback was produced, titled Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen or the Female Jesse James. Again, the book was far more invention than fact, and even contained “excerpts” from a fabricated diary. It was a work of bombastic fiction, pedaled as something closer to biography, but the audience for Fox’s lurid crime dramas didn’t much seem to care. The slim volume described her as “more amorous than Anthony’s mistress, more relentless than Pharaoh’s daughter, and braver than Joan of Arc.” It went on to claim that “Mother Nature was indulging in one of her rarest freaks, when she produced such a novel specimen of womankind.” And it sold by the thousands. From there, the legend of Belle Starr effectively—to use the parlance of our times—went viral, gaining in grandiosity with each new serialization and with each fresh telling, affixing her place among the mythological pantheon of the Wild West. In the decades to come, there would be novelizations, epic poems, historical biographies, folk songs, and when the technology arrived, even movies. Belle Starr fever may have reached its peak with the 1941 release of an eponymous film, produced by 20th Century Fox, starring the stunning Gene Tierney, who bore no physical or historical resemblance to the raw-boned middle-aged woman who gave up the ghost on the banks of the South Canadian River. Throughout the final decade of the nineteenth century and the entire first half of the twentieth, Belle Starr, the notorious “Bandit Queen,” captivated America and captured its collective imagination. Until, rather suddenly, she didn’t. In the postwar years, the name of Belle Starr faded from the national consciousness of the American West. Not entirely—there would always be historians and enthusiasts who knew her story, and her name would continue to ignite sparks of recognition here and there. But her days as a household name, if not a cultural icon, had passed. As to why this occurred, one could posit a number of theories, from the slow death of the Western as a popular American trope, to revisionist historians poking holes in the many biographical embellishments that had gained credence over the years. Perhaps the most convincing reason, however, relates directly to the cultural shifts that were taking place in the United States at that time, as a freshly suburbanized nation stomped the historical mud from its boots and leaned into a new, whitewashed era of cultural puritanism. The cinematic Westerns of the 1950s and ’60s—at least the ones made in the United States—held little room for moral ambiguity or complex sociologies. They were ritualized retellings of the creation myth of the American West, one in which brave Anglo- American settlers, pure of both heart and mind, tamed a wild land, cleansing it of materialistic outlaws and hostile Indians through righteous violence. And primary female characters, almost with- out fail, were paragons of an invented ideal of frontier femininity. Chaste, wholesome, oftentimes schoolteachers or fiancées from back east, they brought decency and lily-white “civilization” to a supposedly lawless and miscegenated land. In effect, they made the West softer, whiter, and safer. More “suburban,” one might even say. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how Belle Starr—a whiskey-drinking, horse-thieving, gunslinging double widow, who not only bedded a much younger Cherokee man but also forced him to change his surname to match hers upon marriage—might not fit that prevailing paradigm. In the gritty cynicism of a European spaghetti Western, perhaps, and there actually was one such film released in Italy in 1968, retitled in English as The Belle Starr Story. But a John Ford movie? As a love interest for Gary Cooper or John Wayne? It’s unthinkable. The censors of the era would never have allowed it, and forget about the American public at large. When it came to the pop culture depictions of Western heroines and anti-heroines in the latter half of the twentieth century, she was in effect written out of the script. Annie Oakley would receive her own Irving Berlin Broadway musical, Calamity Jane would be featured in a whole slew of movies, not to mention an HBO series, and Big Nose Kate would have cameos in everything from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to Tombstone—she would even be played once by a decidedly petite-nosed Faye Dunaway. For Belle Starr, however, there was nothing but literary tumbleweed and cinematic crickets. She was all but forgotten. As far as cultural lacunae go, this one was unfortunate. Because unlike her more celebrated frontier sistren, Belle Starr actually was an outlaw and a gunslinger and an equal partner to some of the most legendary bandits of the era. Indeed, while Annie Oakley was shooting at glass baubles in staged Wild West shows, while Calamity Jane was stumbling drunk and aimless through Deadwood, and while Big Nose Kate was peeking out from behind the curtains of her bedroom during the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Belle Starr was packing pistols and raising hell, from Texas all the way up to Missouri. Her early chroniclers may have taken some creative liberties, but certain facts are in- controvertible. Belle Starr definitely did harbor and consort with legendary outlaws like Jesse James and Cole Younger. She did marry into a clan of Cherokee warlords, operating, alongside her husband Sam Starr, one of the largest banditry and smuggling rings in the Indian Territory. She did ride sidesaddle and sport a pair of intimidating .45s that she lovingly called her “babies.” And she did face charges of horse theft and armed robbery, even serving prison time for the former, courtesy of the infamous “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker. Belle Starr may not have received national recognition during her lifetime, but her plumed hat sat squarely in the shaded, overlapping portion of a fascinating historical Venn diagram, containing both storied personas and epochal events. Encircling her own blood-drenched biography like barbed wire is the history of Appalachia, of westward expansion, of the forced removal of the Cherokee, and of the Civil War in the Border States. Her life was lived at the crossroads of all of them. However, even the dowdiest of historians can prove vulnerable to the allures of raw curiosity and human wonder. And when it comes to writing about Belle Starr’s life, even more compelling than all that dry and weedy history are the rich mysteries that still attend it. It’s true: the story of Belle Starr is rife with unknowns. Not even newspaper articles or census records of the era can be fully trusted. Dates were erased, names were changed, details were invented—sometimes out of carelessness, but often with an agenda in mind. Were one to asterisk every sentence that contained a suspect source or an iffy reference, a book about Belle would become a veritable Milky Way of stars. Practically by necessity, any researched attempt at revealing the details of her life becomes less like writing an academic treatise and more like painting an artistic portrait, shaded as truthfully as possible, while also acknowledging a bit of interpretive brushwork. The West has simply become so mythologized, so aggrandized, that teasing ironclad truths from that tangled skein of frontier yarns is often all but impossible; a little bit of legend will cling to almost any fact. And when it comes to Belle Starr, said legends are usually woven from unanswered questions. Did she really serve as a teenage spy for Con- federate guerrillas? Did she fence horses and provide a hideout for Jesse James? Which of the many armed robberies attributed to her did she actually participate in, if any? And did she ever kill anyone in the process? All of which leads to the biggest mystery of all: Why? Why did a woman who had considerable advantages in life—a good family, a decent education, solid marriage prospects, a clear path to financial security—choose to pursue a life of crime? Belle Starr very easily could have slipped into the character and mien of a Southern belle, marrying a wealthy landowner or merchant, living comfortably in the boomtown of Dallas. Instead, she chose to consort with bandits, flee from the law, live rough among the Cherokee, and stroll through the streets of one-horse towns, laden with guns. One could blame the societal damage caused by the Civil War, her family’s move from Missouri to the Texas frontier, or even the death of her older brother Bud—a trauma, most seem to agree, that scarred her for life. And one would not necessarily be wrong. There is probably some truth in each of these suppositions. The fullest answer, however, as to why Belle Starr chose the outlaw’s way may quite simply be found in her adamant refusal to be cowed by a society that held definitive ideas about how a woman should behave and what she could accomplish. Belle simply had no use for sewing circles or calico dresses; she would not be cosseted inside any farmhouse kitchen or be seen as less than equal to any man. In her own words: “So long had I been estranged from the society of women (whom I thoroughly detest) that I thought I would find it irksome to live in their midst.” The very rights and privileges that nineteenth-century America denied her because of her sex, Belle Starr decided to acquire by the gun. She chose a path different from that which was expected of her—a route that shook with thunder, that was drenched in blood. An exceedingly dangerous road, albeit one upon which she took orders from no man. And here one must also be careful. Because the temptation is certainly there, given the currents and trends of our times, to portray Belle Starr as some kind of proto-feminist Robin Hood or some form of Wild West justice warrior. It would make for some catchy storytelling, that’s true. Belle Starr, however, was neither of these things. And while she may have been bucking the same sorts of societal pressures, it’s hard to imagine that the saloon-loving, Confederacy-sympathizing Belle would have had much in common with the teetotaling Yankee matrons who served as the vanguard of the early women’s rights movement. It’s far more likely she would have threatened to smash their teapots over their heads. The truth, be it comfortable or not, is that Belle Starr was never out for social justice, nor was she an advocate of any cause—she was in it solely for herself. And in that regard, she bore far less resemblance to any Susan B. Anthony than she did to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish gangsters who would emerge half a century later in the ethnic ghettos of Eastern cities. Individuals who, just like her, knew that because of their identity in America, the life they aspired to could never be achieved through honest means. So just like them—but fifty years earlier—Belle Starr chose to achieve it through dishonest ones. She put down her sewing kit and picked up a gun. And the way of the gun did indeed bring her the very freedom she craved: to love whomever she wanted, to live however she pleased, and to take whatever she felt was rightfully hers. But in the end, as was the case with so many outlaws and gangsters, it also led to her ruin, leaving her to gasp out her last breaths face down in that Oklahoma river- bed, riddled with buckshot—and perhaps even regret. And it is that meteoric rise and vertiginous fall, in pursuit of a kind of liberty and equality that her own country refused to grant her, that makes her story so quintessentially American and as relevant today as it was a century and a half ago. But there’s one more mystery still. A smaller, more personal one, which I hoped, possibly naively, I might solve as well. Growing up, I was often told that Belle Starr was a distant relation on my mother’s side—Scots-Irish farmers who arrived in eastern Texas in covered wagons at roughly the same time Belle did, and who, if the stories are true, also had blood ties to the Cherokee Nation. As to the veracity of both claims, going into this project, I honestly could not say. As I suspect is the case with more than a few American families with deep rural roots, the alleged link to Belle Starr is just one square of trivia in an admittedly checkered past. There is no shortage of outlaws and troublemakers dangling—several by the neck—from our family tree. And while some, like my second cousin Lester, the last man to be hung in Macoupin County, Illinois, I know for a fact to be kin, others—well, it’s harder to say. I began this book with the hope that the research involved might shed some light on the matter—and that if I was very lucky, somewhere amid all the gunsmoke and betrayal, the war cries and blood spatter, the rumbling of horses and jangling of stolen gold, I might even find an answer. Excerpted from Queen of All Mayhem: The Blood-Soaked Life and Mysterious Death of Belle Starr, the Most Dangerous Woman in the West. By Dane Huckelbridge. Copyright 2025. Published by William Morrow. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

When it comes to the term puzzle novel, I’m going to cast a wide net here. There are novels with puzzles incorporated into the plot and then there are novels with very puzzling plots (but in the good head-scratching way, not the what-the-hell-was-this-author-thinking way). The novels with puzzling plots category could even include most mysteries since a mystery is, at its heart, nothing but a puzzle. So, the following unordered list contains some of each, but I may not tell you which is which. Surprise is, after all, half the fun of reading. In my opinion, these are all books for the intelligent reader, if that isn’t redundant. Coincidentally, many of these books are also debut novels. The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall Several years ago, I was taking a creative writing course and working on The Language of the Birds, when one of the instructors said that my work reminded them of The Raw Shark Texts. Clearly, I had to read it. And I loved it. Few books can tackle hefty topics such as memory, identity, and grief while doing so with such a unique storyline. A cat-and-mouse hunting expedition for a voracious memory-eating predator, this funny, emotional, page-turning thriller is equal parts Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Franz Kafka. Conceptually brilliant, The Raw Shark Texts was Steven Hall’s first novel and won the Borders Original Voices Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer While the puzzles in The Wishing Game may play a relatively minor role, it would feel remiss to exclude it from my list. Featuring a puzzling competition created by a wealthy reclusive (something you will also find in the next book on this list), Meg Shaffer’s debut is a lovely story full of imagination and hope. It is also a paean to books, and especially to those books that touch us at a young age. Some puzzles in novels (including my own) are so complex as to be virtually impossible for the reader to solve, so the reader must merely follow the logic of the brilliant protagonist and be awed by their ingenuity. I think The Wishing Game is different in that many readers should be able to solve the puzzles themselves, providing a fun reward above and beyond that of the compelling and heartwarming story itself. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline This bestseller, also made into a movie by Steven Spielberg, is a joyride of a treasure hunt through puzzles, pop culture, and gameplay. In all due deference to the author, whose pop culture knowledge vastly exceeds that of most of us mere mortals, I expect that most readers won’t be able to solve the pop-culture-packed puzzles found within, but that doesn’t take anything away from the enjoyment of this read. This story is a win-win, the opposite of the Kobayashi Maru, and if you know that reference this book is for you (rhyme neither intended nor regretted). The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton I must confess to being a little lost in the woods when this debut novel took the first of its turns. But boy was I lost in an atmospheric and utterly compelling place. And the feeling didn’t last, quickly replaced by intrigue and wonderment. This is another mind-bindingly original idea, a brilliant genre-blending twist on the classic whodunnit. I am loathe to say much more to avoid any spoilers but suffice it to say that I would be genuinely shocked if you can predict the ending of this one. Brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed, this book earned its place on too many best-of lists to name here. The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett A brilliantly clever, mind-bending mystery, The Twyford Code is a page-turning scavenger hunt chock full of puzzles, red herrings, and an endearing protagonist you will not soon forget. I must confess to holding The Twyford Code in a special place as it was one of the three comps (comparable titles) that I used when querying agents for The Language of the Birds manuscript (you won’t find my other two comps on this list). While discussing The Twyford Code, I should also mention The Appeal, Hallett’s debut novel. The Twyford Code might be considered more puzzle-oriented, whereas The Appeal is more of a puzzling twist on a classic whodunnit. But both stories are presented to the reader in strikingly original ways. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon Another book recommended to me by a creative writing instructor while I was working on The Language of the Birds, this book has so much going for it that it’s honestly hard to know where to begin. A 15-year-old boy with a very distinctive perspective investigates the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog. Filled with humor, heart, and told from an exceptionally unique perspective, this is a truly remarkable story. I think it’s fair to say that it has one of the most memorable and impressive narrative voices that I’ve ever read. A must-read and a modern classic. *** I hope you find as much delight in the pages of these books as I did. Enjoy! View the full article

Anthony Horowitz’s biographies often state that he “may have committed more (fictional) murders than any other living author,” which may be true. Best known in the US for his work in television as the creator and primary writer of Foyle’s War, a writer for the show Poirot and the developer of the long-running Midsomer Murders, Horowitz is also the writer of the young adult Alex Rider series of novels. In recent years Horowitz has been focused on writing novels, including two Sherlock Holmes books, three James Bond novels, the Hawthorne series of mysteries, of which there are currently five, and the trilogy that began with 2016’s Magpie Murders and concludes with the new novel, Marble Hill Murders. Magpie Murders was a celebration of the mystery novel, but also an examination of the genre. Each of the three novels in the trilogy are about a novel within a novel and about the secrets encoded in the text, but each has a different structure and approach. This is not surprising because for all the murders he’s written, and as serious and prolific as he is, Horowitz is very playful in how he works. He’s constantly trying to go out of his way to find new ideas and structures and approaches. To both check every box that people would expect, but also subvert their expectations. Foyle’s War involved a murder (or many) in each episode that was resolved, but it was primarily about the experience of the Second World War. The TV series New Blood was a mystery thriller about white collar crime and corruption, but also a look at the life of 21st Century immigrants in Britain. The new novel has, as Horowitz admitted, a somewhat unusual origin. On the last day of filming Moonflower Murders, star Lesley Manville “mentioned that she would love to do a third season and of course everyone was excited by the idea. Unfortunately, there was no third book ready to adapt for TV. Therefore, after a bit of thought, I sat down and wrote Marble Hall Murders which I finished in six months, and then, one day later, began the TV adaptation.” The third series is in production and Horowitz – who á la Alfred Hitchcock likes to cameo in his shows – was kind enough to answer a few questions. You mentioned that wrote this book in six months. Is that typical for how and how fast you write a novel? Absolutely not! Magpie Murders took five years to think up and fifteen months to write. I had to write Marble Hall Murders extremely quickly because PBS/Masterpiece and the BBC had greenlit a third TV series and I needed a novel to adapt. The writing process was challenging, to say the least – but I’m surprised and pleased that it came out so well. One reason I ask is because you’re very prolific, but you’ve spoken about Magpie Murders having a long gestation process. Was that the exception for how you’ve worked over the years? It often happens that an idea will come into my head and stay there for years and years until I realize that the only way to get rid of it is to write it. There are three ideas like that in my head right now. Nightshade Revenge, the most recent Alex Rider book was based on an idea I’d had almost twenty years ago. You’ve written a lot for television and film. When working with someone like Michael Kitchen or David Suchet or John Nettles over time, outside of any ideas or suggestions they may have, I assume that their acting choices affect how you write those characters. Has Lesley Manville affected how you’ve come to write Susan? Susan Ryeland was originally based on two editors I’d worked with (both women). But of course I can’t write the character now without thinking of Lesley Manville who has appeared in two seasons and soon will be seen in a third. That’s the joy of working in TV. Lesley doesn’t make direct suggestions but watching her on the screen, I see things in the character which I hadn’t noticed before. I also understand, intuitively, the sort of dialogue she favours. And inevitably that influences the way I write. When you adapted Magpie Murders to television, you completely rethought the structure and the storytelling choices. To a degree that was stunning. But you take great care to structure the books in very literary and novelistic ways. And to structure and design each book differently. You want them to be novels, is that fair? When I was writing Magpie Murders, I realised that it would be impossible to leave Susan Ryeland out until half-way, as happens in the book. It would utterly waste the talent of our star, Lesley Manville. So I was almost compelled to bring the past and the present together, to have Pünd and Susan on the same page. It was a terrific breakthrough! As for the books, structure is essential. We have two, perhaps three timeframes and a large cast. If I don’t know where I’m going, nor will the reader. The key word in your question is “differently”. The main challenge is to use effective the same idea – the book within a book – but to do it in a way that isn’t repetitive. I have a fear of formula. Even as you’re figuring out how to tell the story in Marble Hall Murders, are you also thinking about how the TV version would play out? How much are you adapting the story at the same time you’re writing it? I try not to. When I’m writing, I’m immersed in the story, the characters, the atmosphere. I’m not sitting back, thinking about a book that has to be adapted. And I can’t let one inform the other. For example, I decided to set Marble Hall Murders – the book– in the South of France. I knew from the start that it would be too expensive to film there and that I would probably have to rewrite an entire strand – the theft of impressionist art. But I went ahead anyway. That was how the book has to be. In this novel we have a new version of Pünd and what was important that would be in this version of Pünd and what did it have to be missing? How were you thinking of these as opposed to the Conway books we read in the first two? I’m not sure that Pünd’s character has particularly changed but of course the circumstances have, as Alan Conway is dead and he has a new author in Eliot Crace. This has perhaps made him a little more aware that he is, at the end of the day, a character in a book and I’m very fond of the trick we pull off at the end of Episode 5 when reality hits in a particularly shocking way. I’d say more but I don’t want to spoil the surprise. You’re clearly not opposed to continuations and sequels, but beyond the ones that you’ve written, are there any that you think were especially good, either because they were so good at being like the originals or because they managed to change or reinvent them in interesting ways? I’m not at all opposed to continuations and sequels but I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t tend to read them myself. This is not a deliberate choice – it’s just that I have so much to read (I love nineteenth century fiction) that I just don’t have the time. The Pünd books are all about anagrams, hiding information in them for people to hunt down. I’m curious what you think about these mysteries and thrillers which are all about puzzles and hidden clues, often tracing conspiracies and buried secrets, because they are related to traditional mystery novels, but they’re also their own thing that I think of as very influenced by video games and their storytelling. I’m certainly not influenced by video games. In fact, I started hiding things in books long before video games were invented. It started with a Robin Hood novel, tied in to a hugely popular TV show which I’d been working on. I did it as a favour but I found the work quite dull so I concealed the names of all the actors and production team inside the text as a sort of private joke. That’s what Alan Conway does too – but he’s more malign. I like the idea of puzzles and anagrams because they remind you of the building blocks that make up a story – i.e. the words. You’ve been focusing more on fiction in the past 15 years. Magpie Murders has become a contemporary classic. In that same period, I would argue that your adaptations of Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders have been some of your best screenwriting work. What are you thinking about or wanting to do next? More Hawthorne novels? A new TV show? A new novel? Something completely different? I have lots of thoughts and perhaps not too much time. I’m currently writing the sixth Hawthorne novel and plan to do twelve in total. I’m talking to my wife, producer Jill Green, about a possible TV series for Hawthorne, although we have to find a way to make it original, to make the meta-fiction work on the screen. I have ideas for two murder mysteries set in very unusual locations: one in the nineteenth century. I want to write another play. I’m always looking for ideas that tear the envelope. The danger of writing so much is that you become repetitive and formulaic. Is there any chance of more Foyle’s War? Or a sequel focused on Sam? I apologize, because I feel like you’re going to be asked this until the end of your days. I’m afraid there’s almost no chance at all. I worked on Foyle’s War for sixteen years and that’s enough. Also, I don’t like going backwards. But I’ve learned never to say “never” about anything. So if Lesley Manville says during the filming of Marble Hill Murders, this has been such fun, Anthony…will you take that as a challenge or will you say, why don’t we do something else together? I would work with Lesley Manville again like a shot. But we have always seen Marble Hall Murders as the end of a trilogy. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Carl Hiaasen, Fever Beach (Knopf) “Hiaasen is working in a grand tradition that stretches back to Mikhail Bulgakov satirizing Stalinism and Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler. At his best, he can pack a paragraph with so many little parodic bangs that it feels like a fireworks display when the explosions come so fast you stop saying “Ahhh” and just stand in slack-jawed bedazzlement…. While white-shoe lawyers, university presidents and media moguls cower before the MAGA assaults on American democracy and decency, this mischievous 72-year-old writer is fighting back with every political gag and sex joke he can get his hands on.” –Ron Charles, The Washington Post Anthony Horowitz, Marble Hall Murders (Harper) “Horowitz dazzles with the brilliant third entry in his Susan Ryeland series . . . . Horowitz is at the top of his game here, linking past and present in a virtuouso finale worthy of Agatha Christie. Fans will clamor for the sequel.” –Publishers Weekly John Lawton, Smoke and Embers (Atlantic Monthly) “Intricate . . . Short chapters and snappy dialogue help speed the kaleidoscopic narrative along, though not at the expense of character development or emotional power. Lawton remains a force to be reckoned with.” –Publishers Weekly Rachel McCarthy, Whack Job (St. Martin’s) “Whack Job is an engrossing historical analysis of how the axe has evolved as an instrument of change, retribution, and menace. In this exceptional book, James cites cases famed and obscure involving the axe, which will both inform readers and occasionally unsettle them.” –Booklist Michelle Young, The Art Spy (HarperOne) “The story of Valland’s courage and dedication to art and justice is compelling and inspiring… Ideal for fans of espionage and strong narrative nonfiction that reads like a compelling novel.” –Library Journal Helen Monks Takhar, The Marriage Rule (Random House) “Fiendishly entertaining…Monks Takhar remains a writer to watch.” –Publishers Weekly Brendan Slocumb, Dark Maestro (Doubleday) “A virtuosic thriller. . . . This is an intricately plotted novel, paced perfectly by Slocumb, who keeps the book moving at a breakneck speed—but not at the expense of his beautifully drawn characters. Curtis, shy and sweet, is especially memorable; Slocumb paints a beautiful picture of the young man’s internal life. . . . This novel should catapult Slocumb into the upper echelon of thriller authors.” –Kirkus Reviews Nev March, The Silversmith’s Puzzle (Minotaur) “March proves herself a master craftsman in offering us a glimpse into India’s conflicted history, which forms the perfect backdrop for a mystery shrouded in shadows and subterfuge.” –BookTrib Dana Huckelbridge, Queen of All Mayhem (William Morrow) “Huckelbridge has conjured up one heck of a Wild West tale about a ‘whiskey-drinking, horse-thieving, gunslinging double widow’ that is chock-full of Western lore and nasty desperadoes. . . . The elusive, colorful story of a rare outlaw, told with brio.” –Kirkus Reviews K.A. Merson, The Language of the Birds (Ballantine) “A thrilling page-turner full of heart and unforgettable characters . . . The Language of the Birds is a must-read for fans of puzzle books and intelligent suspense.” –Meg Shaffer Michelle Gagnon, Slaying You (Putnam) “Feature[s] Vegas-worthy theatricality and satisfying character evolution . . . a wild, absorbing ride. Recommend Gagnon’s series to readers who will appreciate hard-boiled crime delivered through a madcap filter.” –Booklist View the full article

James M. Cain was my gateway drug into crime fiction. Before Cain, I’d read Nelson Algren, whose novels, while often featuring criminals, would be better defined as social realism. But to my twenty-five-year-old aspiring writer self, Cain’s voice—and the reading it inspired—changed the focus of my writing horizon. I discovered Cain through film, specifically The Postman Always Rings Twice—the original, starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, its screenplay co-written by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder—and eventually tracked down from the library James M. Cain: Four Complete Novels (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity, and Serenade). I read them in order, and quickly. Cain’s career in fiction writing didn’t follow the path of his being a successful short story writer and novelist before heading out to Hollywood to make his fortune. Instead, the writings for which he first became known, and which led to a lifelong friendship with H. L. Mencken, were nonfiction pieces for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and The American Mercury. His first article for Mencken in The American Mercury, “The Labor Leader,” mocked both the miner and the businessman, using the vernacular of each. These so-called dialogues gave Cain the reputation as a master of spoken word, and among his admirers was Alfred A. Knopf. If he lacked the typical screenwriter’s pedigree, it was this facility with dialogue that led to his getting offers from Hollywood studios. When he got fed up with his job at The New Yorker, he finally accepted an offer from Paramount, believing that moving west would help him solidify his voice as an author. By 1931, Cain was indeed headed for Hollywood. Unlike some of the authors who preceded him there—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al.—Cain had limited success as a fiction writer before he arrived, and so the charge of being a sellout didn’t apply. In fact, the opposite occurred as his literary reputation began to expand, beginning with the short story “The Baby in the Icebox,” published in The American Mercury and then sold to Paramount. With more confidence, Cain began writing a novel based loosely two news stories he’d read—one about a female gas station attendant who ended up killing her husband, the other about a woman and her lover who conspire to murder her husband before turning on each other afterwards. Because of its length (35,000 words) and perceived problems with the ending, the novel, titled “Bar-B-Que,” was conditionally accepted by Alfred A. Knopf. After considerable back-and-forth between Cain and the publisher, the book was finally published as is save for the title. “Bar-B-Que” became “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Upon its release in 1934, Postman went—and there is no other word to better describe it—viral, with rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and best seller status for hardcover and paperback editions, along with adaptations for serial, stage, and screen. Cain’s next project was an eight-part serial, its title suggested by Jim Geller, his agent, and inspired by his own experience in the insurance industry. Titled “Double Indemnity,” the story was rejected by Redbook but eventually bought by Liberty. Like Postman, Double Indemnity went viral, if in a different way: people lined up to purchase the next issue of Liberty as soon as it was out. In between these successes, Cain spent time, much less successfully, on other writings. If he didn’t see these outlets as a hindrance to his novel writing, Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher of Postman did: “You can’t write fiction with one eye on the movies. … How much money would it take to persuade you to drop everything and do this book [meaning his next novel]?” Cain didn’t answer but did eventually produce Serenade (1937), a book as sensational as its predecessors, but one that did not sell as well. Mildred Pierce, Serenade’s follow-up, appeared in 1941. Unlike the earlier three works, it was written in third person (one of only three such novels in Cain’s lifetime) and was much longer; also unlike those three, it was not initially the publishing sensation of its predecessors. But of the four novels in the collection, I remembered details in Mildred Pierce the best. In one chapter, Mildred practices balancing plates at home to improve her waitressing skills. Far from being superficial, this scene reveals Mildred’s determination and drive, as well as her self-awareness, and it also shows that Cain, as always, had done his research. Cain spent many years in Hollywood, but received only three screen credits. Most of his income there came from work on other scripts and from the sales of his own fiction to various studios. His last novel, The Cocktail Waitress, was published posthumously by Hard Case Crime in 2012. Cain began writing it in 1975, when he was 83, but it remained incomplete at the time of his death. Edited by Charles Ardai based on Cain’s various drafts and notes, The Cocktail Waitress represents, as Ardai points out in the Afterword, when Cain “decided to go back to his roots and write a James M. Cain novel again.” There’s no way of knowing how many future authors Cain inspired. Ardai writes that without James M. Cain, there would be no Hard Case Crime. And without James M. Cain, it would have taken me far longer to find my way to writing crime fiction, if I got there at all. For if I’d initially embraced the laconic, cynical persona of Philip Marlow in my first crime fiction efforts, Cain’s prose and characters were surely living in my subconscious, because when I finally started writing from the perspective of people caught up in crime, I felt liberated. Author’s note: The quote from Alfred A. Knopf and the biographical details of Cain’s writing life are taken from Ray Hoopes, Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982). *** View the full article

Aspen, Colorado – a silver mining camp turned luxury ski resort. Once home to Hunter S Thompson, John Denver and some discreet druggies. The full-time population is not much more than 7,000, but that gets super swelled in ski season. What a great recipe for crime! Chuck Morgan’s Crime Delayed (2018) has all the luxurious ski resorts and celebrity sightings you could need. When a wildlife ranger goes missing, Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Buck Taylor is called in to assist with the search which uncovers the mummified bodies of 15 young women, all killed by the same person decades ago. Aspen’s citizens promptly go into panic mode and Taylor needs to get to the bottom of this. The Buck Taylor series – 20 books in all – bounces around Colorado from Durango to Rio Blanco County. A few, as well as Crime Delayed, focus on Aspen. Crime Denied (2020) sends Taylor back to the snow-capped mountains and luxurious ski resorts where a female killer is luring victims using her charm and beauty to lure unsuspecting victims into her traps. And Crime Scene (2023) sees Taylor and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation chasing a club killer through the streets of Aspen. Catherine O’Connell specialises in crime books with snow and skiing in them. O’Connell’s latest book, The Ski Resort (2025) is not clearly identified as Aspen but might as well be. Ski patroller Greta Westerlind wakes in hospital having almost been killed in an avalanche, she is devastated to learn that her close friend, bond trader Warren McGovern, perished in the slide. With no memory of the incident, Greta is at a loss to explain why the two of them were skiing in such lethal terrain in the first place and why a young woman they supposedly encountered is now missing. The Dead Girl in 2A (2019) by Carter Wilson starts with two strangers meeting on a plane. Jack Buchannan thinks he knows the woman sitting next to him on his business flight to Denver―he just can’t figure out how he knows her. Clara Stowe admits she’s traveling to the Colorado mountains to kill herself, and she disappears into the crowded airport immediately after landing. A psychological thriller of the whom-can-you-trust paranoia genre that is a good example of the sub-genre and has some Colorado mountains in it. And a few more Aspen and Colorado-set crime novels…. Antler Dust (2007) by Mark Stevens is set in Colorado’s Flattop Mountains and features a female hunting guide, a “reformed” hunter, an earnest ranger and a greedy outfitter. Two deaths occur within a few minutes of each other on a snowy day at the outset of elk hunting season with witnesses seeing hunters dragging corpses – humans, elks? – up mountains. Hunters are shooting eco-protestors too. Stevens is a Colorado resident and former Denver Post reporter and producer for the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour. Patrick Hasburgh’s Aspen Pulp (2007) is set in off-season Aspen with former TV writer turner private eye Jake Wheeler hired to find the rather feckless Tinker Mellon. Using what little he’s learned from The Rockford Files and other TV detective shows, Jake’s search for the cheerleader-turned-runaway uncovers a complex crime ring that lies deep within the old mine shafts of Aspen mountain. Anne Shillolo’s Murder at Aspen Creek (2023) finds off-duty Inspector Hilary Casgrain looking forward to a Cowboy Poetry Festival (sounds like fun!), but dragged into a drive-by shooting and the search for a missing teenager. Killjoy (2002) by Julie Garwood introduces FBI profiler Avery Delaney finds that her workaholic aunt Carolyn, trying to relax at the posh Utopia Spa in the Colorado mountains, has vanished mysteriously before even reaching the spa. Taylor Adams’ No Exit (2017) takes us up into the Colorado Mountains where college student Darby Thorne is stranded by a blizzard at a highway rest stop. There she stumbles across a little girl locked inside one of their parked cars. With no cell phone reception, no telephone, no way out because of the snow, and she has no idea which one of the other travelers is the kidnapper. Vibe change! – Aspen has attracted a lot of cozy crime writers it seems. Gail Roper writes the Mysteries of Aspen Falls series. In Tell Tail Clues (2022) Ohio native Dr. Ashley Hart, is the new veterinarian in Aspen Falls with best friend dog groomer Holly Kipp. And so a vet and a dog groomer solve crimes with animal-related clues piling up all over town. Other titles include Dogged Deception, Foal Me Once, Bones to Pick, Hounded by the Past, Paw and Order – you get the idea. There’s also a few in the crime/romance hybrid. For instance Christmas Crime in Colorado (2008) by Cassie Miles where Brooke Johnson is spending a quiet festive season in her new Colorado home before her look-alike roommate is killed and sexy police detective Michael Shaw shows up. She falls, literally, into the long arms of the law, but Michael can’t let down his guard with a killer still on the loose. And finally, something special and highly recommended – Ryan La Sala, the wildly popular author of Reverie, followed that hit up with The Honeys (2022), a kind of horror, crime melange set in and around Aspen. Mars has always been the lesser twin, the shadow to his sister Caroline’s radiance. But when Caroline dies under horrific circumstances, Mars is propelled to learn all he can about his once-inseparable sister who’d grown tragically distant. And so he attends the prestigious Aspen Conservancy Summer Academy where his sister spent so much of her time. But the longer he stays at Aspen, the more the sweet mountain breezes give way to hints of decay. It’s a super-contemporary novel where supposedly idyllic locales butt up against tradition and intransigence. Aspen may be chock full of luxury hotels, resorts and spas, but there’s some serious nature out there too. Put the two together, along with humans and all their petty jealousies, foibles and weirdness and you’ve got a great setting for the crime writers of Colorado. View the full article

2025 will be the last year of the Bristol Crimefest — 15 years of what one English newspaper described as ‘the friendliest of festivals.’ Among the guests of honour will be the Cornwell brothers, sons of John le Carré, one of whom (under the nom de plume of Nick Harkaway) is continuing the character George Smiley. Two years ago the same slot at the fesitval went to the heirs of Ian Fleming. Now, I am told, even in print, that I can be a bit of a churl and for reasons I can no longer remember I did not attend; hence I will not attempt to quote or paraphrase anything said on that occasion. Yet … and yet … that event, bolstered by the upcoming 2025 event, keeps prompting me to wonder what I really think of the much vaunted terms ‘heritage’ and ‘legacy.’ Name me an American president of late who has not worried about his ‘legacy’. In the last week Pope Francis’s legacy has been aired repeatedly, probably in every newspaper on earth. My dad’s legacy, some sixty-odd years ago, was a pair of shoes that didn’t fit me, an unpaid bill for piano lessons and a photo-album of his time in Hitler’s Germany — the latter, I freely admit, an influence and an inspiration. I have not yet paid for the piano lessons. Smiley’s ‘legacy’? Call for the Dead (the first to feature GS, I think) is one of my favourite novels. I could take more, and so it seems could England — Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice has been very well received. Bond’s ‘legacy’? Tricky. I read them all at the right age (17) and umpty years later find I have very mixed feelings. One of my first memories of James Bond is sitting outside a pub in Dublin (as the Dad necked a pint) reading a newspaper condemnation of the filming or Dr No in 1961 — readers were urged to reject Bond as ‘pornography’, referring to the bollock-beating Bond suffers at the hands of Le Chiffre. Alas they cited the wrong book — that scene is in Casino Royale not Dr. No and did not grace/pollute the silver screen for another forty-five years. But … it pinpoints a regular elision. At seventeen skool put me in a civics class — foreseeing that some of us were about to desert the summer of love to become the rebels of ’68 they made a last ditch attempt to mould us into good citizens. Tough. Sysyphean. Each surly brat was asked to deliver an appraisal of a writer they liked. One chose Fleming. I gave him three or four minutes before I interrupted. “Mike, have you actually read any of Ian Fleming’s books?” “What?” “Because it seems to me you’re describing the films not the books. You refer to Bond as ‘the man every man wishes he could be.’ Do you honestly want your bollocks beaten raw … do you want your girlfriends to kill themselves? James Bond is an habitual loser, for every triumph he pays a price in personal loss.” Amidst the chorus of denial I was chucked out for the ‘bollocks’ and ordered to recite eight million Hail Marys, so I never knew where the debate ended. The closest I got was a kid who accosted me in the seniors’ quadrangle the following day to tell me I was a ‘fukkin nutter.’ A year or two later the first legacy Bond book appeared, Colonel Sun by Robert Markham, a one-off pen name for Kingsley Amis. It wasn’t good. Almost simultaneously Amis published his study of Bond, The James Bond Dossier. Now, that was good. You can learn a lot reading it even today. Thereafter it seems the legacy novels were almost always eclipsed by the films. John Gardner wrote more Bonds than I can count, certainly more than a dozen, and the Roger Moore films were churned out with an alarming regularity if only to use up the stack of safari suits in Pinewood’s wardrobe that happened to be his size. They are all forgettable. They were not the Bond of the novels. Nor even the Bond of the early films. When Sir Roger retired I hoped Eon would call it a day. They got lucky, Tim Dalton finally signed on the dotted line. Suddenly with The Living Daylights the franchise was alive again. Fukkit, spoke too soon. The second Dalton film might just be the worst Bond film ever made, eclipsing even the execrable No Time to Die. Skip a few years. Eighteen to be precise. John Gardner’s last Bond appears in 1996, and in 2008 on the hundredth anniversary of Fleming’s birth, the books are relaunched with Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks. It was an intriguing idea — ask prominent writers, often literati rather than crime and espiongage specialists, to pick up the mantle. It worked. In 2015 Trigger Mortis (great title) by Anthony Horowitz came out. Anthony is quite possibly the most prolific current writer of crime. Was I alone of seeing a touch of PC? I aired this, to not much reaction, at Bouchercon Toronto a year or so later. Yet the doubt still nags. Bond is a misogynist dinosaur. In what I take to be ‘heading the critics off at the pass’, Judi Dench’s M says that to Pierce Brosnan’s Bond in their first film together. It changed nothing. So … at last to the point … where is the franchise going … and, just possibly, why? And why ask now? Two reasons. 1 : Amazon just bought the film franchise for a fortune. 2 : Fleming died in 1964. Under the terms of the revised Berne convention, for all countries that are signatories, the Bond books will enter the public domain in 2034/5. In media terms … that’s about 15 seconds. The opportunities for speculation are almost endless. Will the literati books continue after 2035 … alongside the zillion other efforts that will surely take advantage of the end of copyright? Will Bond free-for-alls see 007 in sci-fi, porn or giving online cookery lessons with our dreadful Duchess? (Helpful hints # 37 : Anyone wishing to set up a franchise would be well-advised to study the British Royal Family.) What will Amazon do in the eleven years of outright exclusive that remain? A film a year? Part of the Bond phenomenon has always been the waiting, the anticipation, the cinematic tease so neatly captured in the trailer for Goldeneye, the first Brosnan film — “You were expecting someone else?” A 52 part TV series streamed not released to cinema? Whaddafukk? You mean I’d finally have get a Netflix/Prime/Bookface/X/TukTuk/WakWak subscription? Ye gods and little fishes. Bear in mind that all this is happening with no one yet cast to replace Daniel Craig … and a long history of the English resisting Bond being played by anyone other than an Englishman. Who would I like to see play Bond next? Sorry, life is too short to give that question a nanosecond’s headroom. I don’t know, but … yep, there’s always a but … but … I think it a waste of time to update Bond. A PC Bond is no Bond at all. He is as Fleming made him. In all his nastiness, violence, misogyny and, as Amis asserted, racism … ‘who else would be snobby enough to draw a distinction between a plains Cretan and a mountain Cretan?’ (I paraphrase, of course.) As soon make Macbeth into a good guy. As soon redeem Bill Sikes. I’m not agin franchised sequels per se … Marjorie Allingham is continued by Mike Ripley, seamlessly. The great (nah … the greatest) Robert B. Parker continued by no less than a writer than Reed Farrel Coleman. It can and does work — but I fear it won’t work with Bond any longer. I think JB was ‘born’ circa 1920. He may be an author fantasy, Fleming being a much older man than his character. Bond lives the life that Fleming could not and had not? 1920 … that makes him … er … 105. Could I put in a plea here? Isn’t it time to kill the old bugger off? Rather than see Bond remoulded to fit the 21st century could he not simply be allowed to die? If not, we will see him milked like the cash cow he surely is until excess extinguishes all interest. If I’m right about the direction I perceive we are in for a Bond glut, a Bond who will be politically correct, thereby ceasing to be Bond, and both films and books will be regarded as ‘product’ (a word I do not want to see within ten light years of my novels — same goes for ‘brand’) and might as well be stacked in supermarkets next to the corn flakes. “The name’s Kellog, James Kellog.” As they say in my native dialect, “Tha mun let t’owd bugger dee.” *** View the full article

Assignment 1: Amidst violence, rebellion, and the awakening of long-dormant powers, Tristan and Ellasmer must work together to overthrow the Torrolc King and his immortal mystic, Galrwin, traveling to the Ebysand Isles in hopes of securing allies and a prophecy that might just help them succeed. Assignment 2: Ellasmer Isona is the rightful heir to the throne of Starn and one of the last surviving members of the Royals after the bloody sacking by the Torrolc tribe twelve years ago. But her plans must change when a boy named Tristan, the same boy prophesied to her by the waters of the Ebysand Isles when she was six to help her retake said throne, lands half-dead on her doorstep. Glarwin Elden was not always this empty, rotting, immortal mystic. Four hundred years ago, he had been a mortal, cursed to this existence by the Ultesca Stone when the one he had loved, Sira, was taken from him by her possessive mate. Now Galrwin has struck a dangerous deal with the new rebel King and the same ancient being in The Stones that took his mortality to win it back. His first task: kill a boy named Tristan. Assignment 3: 1. Voice in the Stones 2. Stonebound 3. The Prophecy of Water and Stone Assignment 4: The hero's-journey reminiscent of 'A Darker Shade of Magic' by V.E. Schwab, with alternating POV narratives like 'Six of Crows' by Leigh Bardugo. 'A Darker Shade of Magic' follows the journey of a man who becomes the target of a dark conspiracy, pairing with a fierce and reckless adventurer. Readers of this story will like the high-stakes, adventure, witty conversations, and magic of my novel. 'Six of Crows' narrates different POVs, capturing the internal conflict and struggle of each character. My story follows the POV of three main characters, including the antagonist, allowing readers to know what motivates and troubles each character. Assignment 5: Primary Conflict: Tristan must confront the truth of his bloodline and unravel a prophecy in order to survive. Secondary Conflict: Galwrin is trying to kill Tristan to win back his immortality and rescue Sira from her prison. Ellasmer wanted to use Tristan for her own ends to gain the Starn crown. Despite his efforts to stay focused on revenge, Tristan falls in love with Niressa. Inner Conflicts: Tristan doesn't believe he is worthy of any of it. It all feels too big for someone with such simple beginnings. Assignment 7: Tristan’s story takes place in a country called Starn, a larger part of the continent Matria. Starn is famous for its mountains and weapons, with a ragged history of conflict and stories of long-buried magic within the Earth. The kingdom is now poor and broken, torn apart by the mountain barbarians, the Torrolc, who razed the kingdom to the ground twelve years ago. Life is a brutal existence for most who live there, facing down poverty, famine, and the cruel whims of the Torrolc King. Because of this, most of people turn to stories to sate their thirst for life and what it used to be. Stories of old about magical beings who used to love humans and bestow them with gifts of power and elongated life. Of dragons who flew high and proud against the bluest of skies and men who lived within the mountains, carving tunnels deep into their depths and stashing away the treasure of a hundred kingdoms. Stories that most everyone, especially Tristan, sees as nothing but childish tales…until they start coming true. Tristan, isolated in his small farming town in Yú Valley, knows very little of the world beyond his sight and the stories their town weavers tell. But after his family's slaughter, Tristan is forced to flee, encountering places he never dreamed of—a beautiful cottage next to the sea, ports bustling with people from distant lands, taverns packed to the gills with delicious food and exotic music. It is within these new places that he meets people equally incomprehensible. The soft kindness of a girl named Juniper and her fiery sister, Ellasmer. The stoic and constant of Rose, their caretaker, and the quick smile of their friend Niressa. One bad decision leads to another, and soon Tristan finds himself aboard an ice ship, headed far beyond the borders of Starn across the seas to the ice-covered Ebysand Isles in search of an ancient prophecy, rumored to exist deep within their cold waters.

The invitation letter came twenty years to the day after the kidnappings. In 1999, guerrilla combatants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia kidnapped my partner Terence Unity Freitas and two fellow land rights defenders. They were exiting Indigenous territory in Colombia—near land then coveted by a US oil company. Terence was a white environmental and Indigenous rights advocate from Los Angeles. He traveled with Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa—native to the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and executive director of the Fund for the Four Directions,—and Lahe’ena’e Gay—Native Hawaiian and the founder and president of Pacific Cultural Conservancy International. The three were working with the Colombian Indigenous U’wa pueblo. Eight days later, a farmer found their bound, hooded, and bullet-riddled bodies in his rainy cow field just across the Venezuelan border. The timing was uncomfortable. The 2019 letter invited the families of the slain into Colombia’s post-civil war transitional justice process to participate as victims in Case 001, a cluster of cases involving thousands of victims of kidnapping. In the original Spanish text, they sought our demandas de la verdad, our truth demands. The letter communicated that: They wanted to know our stories. They wanted to know our questions. They wanted to put the voice of the victims in the center of the process. They wanted to discern how to attribute criminal responsibility. They wanted to give ex-combatants the chance to officially tell the truth or not. They wanted us to use our rights to truth, justice, and non-repetition. In the years following the murders, I felt pressed up against the machinery of fossil fuel extraction, tied there by the murders’ known and unknown dismal facts. I held fragments of stories for two decades, awaiting resolution that never came. To enter the Chamber, I needed to write them down. I wrote Truth Demands. Shaping the fragments into this book changed my understanding of resolution. Questions about the murders may always remain unaddressed. Some stories may never be told. And the future will remain unknowable. To offer this telling, I had to acquiesce to these truths. Acquiescence led to acceptance, which stirred my memory of agency. Finding agency in the telling led to my freedom, for it opened a back door to resolution. Questions about the murders may always remain unaddressed. Some stories may never be told. And the future will remain unknowable. As I wrapped up a draft of my memoir, I tackled the one remaining box in my closet. This box was the repository for documents that I tagged as important to revisit. Post-It notes scribbled with marginal insights, related articles, truth and recognition documentation, Terence’s papers, court filings—any document that remained untreated or that I feared I would forget. I made my way through the box swiftly, lifting helpful citations, details, and corrections into this text. I hummed through the work. I watched for the familiar dissociative fog to begin. It didn’t. I marveled at its absence, thinking I perhaps had made it solidly to the other side, to freedom. I have. This is how I know. The box contained a letter Terence wrote to me during a prior trip to the Indigenous territory, a letter within the pages of his journal. A letter he had never sent or given to me. In this letter, he stated his belief that the guerrillas had gone full-bore in support of oil development and that he felt that he faced threats because of it. Over the past twenty-five years, in any forum possible, we have woven Terence’s posthumous observations into our questions about what happened. I was familiar with the letter. But when I picked it up again from the box, I couldn’t access my memory of those details. Instead, I experienced shock as though reading the letter for the first time. I was flooded with worry as though in a recurrent nightmare, one in which a missing key is revealed too late. That is how far my mind has buried pieces of this story that are the most threatening. In my shock, I called our legal team, worried that I had a new finding. They assured me that, yes, they knew this letter and had already integrated it into our work. I have no clear recollection of sharing the letter with them. Some past version of myself did, probably several times. After talking to the legal team, I felt relief and gratitude. My nervous system started to re-regulate. With balance restored, I reread the letter. I observed something in Terence’s writing. He wrote that even though he didn’t plan to send me this letter, he had “all of these thoughts wanting to come out, to be written so that I can rest”: Unfinished ideas that are screaming to become more whole. There, they are written. The way that I would say them if you were here. The way that I am saying them aloud to you now, so that you will comfort me in my sleep.. . . It feels strange saying that. I don’t often feel the need to have someone else help me feel safe, moreover there are not many who could. You, your strength, makes me feel safe. I was struck that Terence turned to writing to unlock rest. I was familiar with choosing this pathway for myself, but I hadn’t ever noticed that he did, too. A measure of the inadequacy of our support systems during those early years of walking alongside the U’wa, Terence, in essence, turned to his journal to stabilize his daily life on the ground. His writing invited me to hold his words so that he could rest. In the normal course of things, this exchange—of words for rest— would be symbiotic. It would be an exchange that could expand into a community conversation. The burden would be shared. But our lives did not follow the normal course of things. He thought we had time. We did not. The murders stole time from us. I could see now that because this exchange happened only after he was already dead, it would go on to become, unbeknownst to Terence, the source of my own inability to rest for years to come. The clarity smarted. I gasped. Here was the source. I felt outraged. As was my practice, I turned to the woods to walk it out. I turned to the waters to dissipate, dissipate. I have grappled with Terence’s words since I was twenty-five years old. To share the burden, I reshaped them into our truth demands and into this book. I have examined with care the exchange between words and rest. In writing my memoir, I have told the story of our truth demands as a way of learning how to stand on this wretched shore. Doing so taught me how to navigate home. In the telling, I saw glimmers of how we navigate our collective hearts back home, too. I am clear that I do not stand on the shore alone. It is now twenty-five years later. I let go of the words and I choose rest. ___________ Adapted from TRUTH DEMANDS: A MEMOIR OF MURDER, OIL WARS, AND THE RISE OF CLIMATE JUSTICE by Abby Reyes. Excerpted by permission of the publisher, NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS. Copyright © 2025 by Abby Reyes. All rights reserved. View the full article

When my family moved into a new home in the Chicagoland area around fifteen years ago, I was informed the day we moved in that the house had been previously foreclosed a while back in the depths of the recession. This house had been presented in a state of disrepair: the banisters were ripped out by the previous owner when he left. The windowpanes were missing. Upon meeting one of my neighbors, a girl my same age, she leaned in close and whispered that the home had been abandoned for some time, to the point where the neighborhood kids thought it was haunted and dared each other to go in there. When I was writing The Manor of Dreams, a story about an inheritance battle over a Chinese Hollywood star-turned recluse’s lavish, formerly grand estate, I was obsessed with the homes of the Gilded Age, a period of prosperity for America in the late nineteenth century due to technological improvements and the acquisition of coveted resources. Each of these houses had an origin of wealth, concentrated around titans who dominated industries of copper, railroads, guns, news media. They built houses with dozens of rooms and teeming with excess, homes so meticulously constructed in beloved architectural styles: Italianate, Beaux-Arts, Queen Anne Gothic. These homes now stand cavernous and empty, sometimes renovated into museums, sometimes left abandoned, hollowed of the promise which once possessed them, crumbling into the earth. What does the home mean? The home represents safety, security, shelter from all the uncertain unknowns and the outside elements. It represents rest and leisure. The concept of the home as an American ideal cemented itself in the nineteenth century, as a privilege to have a space to cultivate a private life and a family life. The opportunity to own a home was also a right that was wielded as a weapon against, withheld from, and brutally seized from historically marginalized people: Black, Chinese, and Native American communities, for example. Women were not allowed to own property in most states until 1900 and did not have equal access to credit to do so until the 1970s. To this day homes are both practical investments of personal capital but also keystones of personal identity and history. They are tangible representations of something one worked towards for their whole lives. To own a home, to get to renovate and decorate it, was to have made it; to have succeeded, perhaps in spite of the marginalizing forces, in achieving the American Dream. But what happens when the home becomes an unsafe place? The haunted house trope has long been an establishment of gothic fiction. There are many books with all kinds of creative spins on this trope—I point to favorites of mine such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, or more recently, Rivers Solomon’s Model Home or Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic—but the essence is this: the main character, or the main character’s family enters a home intending on staying there for a period of time, maybe forever. The house seems ominously sentient, strange things happen in the night, and some terrifying history about the house is revealed. The characters, at some point, might receive a warning about what has happened in the house. Still the main characters stay, until something truly cataclysmic and irreversible happens, and by then, it’s too late to leave. Why don’t they leave? It’s a question that is often asked of the main characters. Why not go at the first sign of unease, at the first hint that something might not be right with the place? I feel a sympathetic fear but also a deep, furious disappointment at the characters for choosing to stay and put everyone’s lives in danger. But I think it’s easy, from our omniscient perspective as a reader or viewer, to write off the main characters for being clueless and arrogant. It’s important to consider the context of the house as well. Maybe the house dazzled with a sense of promise, maybe it was a prized inheritance. Maybe this house was the culmination of their savings and everything they had. However they came into contact, the characters have staked their lives on this place to provide them exactly what they need, whether it be shelter, status, safety, clarity, or community. This is why the haunted house trope is so compelling every time; to see that place of promise turn into a place of terror is a betrayal on the deepest level. And this is why the cycle of the haunted house repeats: each set of people move into the house thinking that they could overwrite the past and avoid whatever pitfalls the previous inhabitants fell prey to. That they are different. And isn’t it a human condition, to think you could beat the odds? Isn’t it natural to think that if only you worked hard enough; if you only loved something enough, you could change it? The emotional heart of these stakes and this personal betrayal were what propelled me throughout the writing of The Manor of Dreams. In the book, Chinese actress Vivian Yin moves into her new husband’s home, a beautiful, decaying California Gilded Age era mansion that she is determined to rebuild and renovate for her young daughters. Eventually she learns that the house has a compromised history. It was built on railroad wealth, which involved the exploitation of Chinese immigrant labor. But she doesn’t let this stop her. With this house, she’s officially made it and secured the future for her family and herself, big enough to contain her Hollywood aspirations and everything she’s ever wanted for her children. This house is too important to her. Everything else is just ancient history, she thinks. To her, America is the land of reinvention; this all could be smoothed over and built anew. She is sorely mistaken. *** View the full article

I have always been fascinated with creatures, and I have wished to invite them into my life for as long as I can think—ill-fated early attempts at trying to hatch chicks from un-incubated eggs and breeding racing snails can attest to that. But while chicks are cute and racing snails are ambitious, there was one companion I coveted more than any other: I cannot remember a time when I didn’t want a dog. Unfortunately, my parents were a sensible lot, and so I spent a large portion of my childhood being bribed with low-maintenance hamsters and fobbed off with annoyingly reasonable arguments. Who is going to walk him? Who is going to train him? Who is going to clean up after him? I! I! And yet again, I! By the time I had finally achieved freedom from parental rules, some of their arguments had managed to seep into my own mindset. Of course, taking in a dog is a huge responsibly. Of course, they require not only love, but time, training, walks and ideally a garden. Of course, you can’t expect them to sit at home all day waiting for your return from uni. I spent my student years responsible and dogless. Time passed. Life unfolded. One sunny day I found myself an author, living in the verdant English countryside, in possession of a house. I was working from home. I had a garden. Surely, now, if ever, was the time to invite a waggy, sharp-toothed muse into my life! I could already picture myself typing away on my computer, my faithful hound snoozing at my feet. I can honestly say that the day I brought home my first dog, Fyodor, an impossibly soft pup the colour of smoke, was one of the happiest in my life. The subsequent night, however, turned out to be an entirely different story. Just how many times could a tiny puppy need to go out in a single night? I didn’t sleep a wink. The next morning found me bleary eyed and the pup exuberant, ready to dig his needle teeth into anything that moved—and quite a few things that didn’t. I couldn’t even glance at my computer, let alone work on my novel. Overnight, I had turned from author-with-a-deadline to full-time dog-police. Don’t bite! Don’t chew! Don’t dig! Don’t bark! And above all: Do not pee on the blasted kitchen floor! This was hell! How was I supposed to think? How was I supposed to write? The truth is: a puppy is the very opposite of a muse. They don’t inspire—they distract, absorb every last little stray bit of your attention and energy. * One of the things that kept me going during these taxing first months was the odd stolen glance at other authors. Being a dog owner and being a writer were not mutually exclusive. Others before me had brought pen to paper in the presence of a canine, hadn’t they? World literature is full of dogs, described in touching and accurate ways that show their creators had some firsthand experience in the matter. There is Argos, Odysseus’ faithful old hound, recognizing his master when no one else does (and tragically suffering a heart attack in the process). There’s Jack London’s White Fang, Virginia Woolf’s cocker spaniel Flush—all splendid fusions of fiction and dogginess. Apparently, the top dog in Virgina Woolf’s own life was her mongrel Grizzle. He even makes a surprise appearance in her diaries: “As for the soul . . . the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look [. . .] at Grizzle, [. . .] and the soul slips in.” Yes! Obviously, I was neither Homer nor London nor Virginia Woolf, just a writer of mystery stories, but this was what I was ambitiously hoping for: a slippery shard of soul! Naturally, over time, things improved on the domestic front. There still were days when I couldn’t write, but there was never a day when I didn’t laugh, didn’t feel my existence was richer and more complex than before. Our lives fell in step and trot and what had started out as outright canine sabotage, slowly morphed into something best described as a gentle and rather random inspiration. It seemed like a miracle at the time, but of course there were good reasons. A lot of my writing has always been about exploring the world from different angles, and few things help you shift your point of view like looking after a dog. Their world is fundamentally different from ours, full of scents and sound and speed and big big feelings. Understanding this world is crucial for interspecies bliss—in short, I was treated to the crash course in empathy I didn’t think I needed. A dog in the house will also help you to put things in perspective, recalibrate your sense of self-importance as a writer (and a human being). Nobody in your home is going to care more about you than your dog. And absolutely nobody is going to care less about your literary achievements. A book is a chew toy in the making, that is all. To me, this approach is quite refreshing and by no means trivial. I have always felt that writing a novel is in part a disappearing act. The goal is to become transparent as an author, allowing the reader the best possible view of the story beyond. It is not about you—it is about the world. I can attest that Fyodor helped me quite a bit to hone this transparency. Looking back, it almost surprises me to see how many dogs have found their way into my books. There has never been a dedicated canine protagonist—maybe because this feels too close to home and dangerously non-fictional. But the dogs on the sidelines matter. There is Tess, George’s old sheep in Three Bags Full. She barely makes an appearance, but her absence speaks all the louder. Brexit, the wolfhound in the Agnes Sharp series, is a chaotic and reassuring presence in the house share, providing my senior detectives with warmth, protection and dog hairs alike. Yet, the highest density of dogs is found in Big Bad Wool, my second sheep detective story. The situation is tense. My sheep protagonists are facing a series of mysterious killings and need all the help they can get. We finally get to spend some time with Tess; a lonely, heart-wrenching howling foreshadows dark things to come and Vidocq, the Hungarian livestock-guardian dog comes to the rescue. Even the perpetrator might or might not be a canine of sorts. * None of these stories are about the dogs, and yet the books are richer for them. Maybe their presence does imbue the works with a soul. There is a flipside to all of this, of course: the utter lack of inspiration that follows the death of your dog. When Fyodor died shockingly young, I was lost, devastated, desperate for the feeling of a wet nose nuzzling into my hand. Nothing worthwhile was written for over half a year. The pain was just stunning. Was it worth it? Yes. Without any question. I am writing these lines with my dog Ezra snoozing at my feet—and I wouldn’t have it any other way. *** View the full article