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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
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Bifurcated Stories
Writers must make the decision to choose a perspective from which to present a story, picking a point of view and a narrative voice. Often in drafts they try one or another to find which feels right. But once the choice is made the story is essentially locked into that singular outlook. An option, rarely used, is to include more than one in what might be called a bifurcated presentation. I can think of two examples, Joyce Carol Oates’ retelling of Henry James novella “The Turn of the Screw” and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s original telling of Benito Mussolini’s one-day and night visit to an Italian home in “The Guest.” Both stories employ the typographical formatting of two columns side-by-side on a page, each offering a contrasting view of what is taking place in the other. Such a method becomes a challenge for the reader, literally asking where the eye should focus and asking the mind to cope with two sources of information at the same time. I suppose this can be a version of multitasking, juggling the simultaneity of a dual gathering of related but contrasting information. If the reader read through one column completely and then did the same with the other, that would defeat the writer’s purpose of ongoing balancing of the two versions, pinging and ponging to make immediate comparisons while in a state of living in two fictional worlds at the same time. Oates offers parallel points of view: the haunter's and the haunted's. This example, two passages that appear side-by-side, here one after the other as they were probably taken in by the reader—first the left and then the right: A thicket for us. Giant bushes, Spongy ground. The pebbles fade. The girl backs away from me. Wide staring smile. Her face protruding plump. Something about her wet mouth that is fearful … but I cannot stop, it is too late, I cannot stop my hand from reaching out to here … There! He approaches her, His back stiff. She draws away, teasing. Giant bushes will hide them from me. Panting, dizzy. I will be sick. He has taken hold of her now—yes, he has touched her—the two of them drawing back, back, back, almost out of sight—they will hide themselves from me—it is going to happen, it is going to happen— Essentially, the reader gets the experience for the perspective of the actor—the man grasping the girl—and of the observer, who is vicariously participating in the act with similarly intense emotions. Stevenson, who was inspired by Oates, identifies the basic subject of “The Guest” as “the embrace of fascism and Mussolini by the Italian people.” In one column, we get the thoughts and actions of those in the hosting household told from different perspectives and in the other the thoughts of the visiting il Duce himself. For this story, I’ll choose another sensual comparison, the very young girl on the left and Mussolini on the right: His hand brushes my cheek and I am a statue. I am the statue in the square—the lady with the smooth white face—with arms that fold across her chest. The guest brushes my cheek with his hand. Her eyes are open and yet I think she is sleeping. Perhaps sleeping. Yes, perhaps she is just walking in her sleep. Her jaw is square like that of a boxer. Yet she is delicate. I think both delicate and wild. Her eyes are open and she stares as if with purpose. Intent perhaps on the purpose of her visit. Her visit. This child (for she is a child) has come to my room in the night. This comparison offers what the girl feels and, at the same time, what the observer believes he sees. The reader has access to both minds. The bifurcated method is tempting because it allows the writer to tell two stories simultaneously. The fact that examples of this approach are so rare reveals the approach is so daunting few try and even fewer succeed. But why not have a go? -
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American Psycho and the Rise of Capitalist Horror
The first time I read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, I abandoned it two-thirds finished. Listen, I was a freshman in college. Very fresh into college, actually—it was orientation week. With a few empty days of freedom before classes started, on my first week away from home, I decided to pick up a book about a finance bro turned remorseless murderer. Up until that point, I’d hardly been able to tolerate even fairly benign scary movies, but dark stories always fascinated me. This one was far more gruesome and horrifying than anything I’d read before—I ended up hiding the book in a drawer and sleeping on the floor of a dorm-mate I barely knew because my roommate was out of town and I was afraid to be alone. Just over a decade later, while revising my latest novel, youthjuice, I found myself thinking about American Psycho again. I was trying to write a horror story set against a glamorous backdrop—a beauty and wellness company in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood—dealing with consumerism and the pursuit of physical perfection. I was searching for that perfect balance of sharp social satire and stomach-turning body horror. Naturally, I found myself thinking about the book I’d abandoned as a younger reader and writer. Revisiting American Psycho, I saw just how funny it was. Better yet, that humor reinforces and amplifies the horror—it’s one thing to depict a cunning murderer, it’s another take us through his inner monologues about Huey Lewis & the News and his extensive morning routine (a precursor to the popular “Get Ready with Me”–style videos that overpopulate YouTube) in between slaughters. Patrick Bateman is a monster, but a strangely relatable one who deals with petty jealousies and boring dinners with colleagues. On my second (and first full) read-through of Ellis’ third novel, I finally understood why it became a modern classic. Two common complaints pop up in reader reviews of American Psycho—some say it’s too banal, too focused on the dull details of what designer suit so-and-so is wearing or what everyone is eating at Texarkana; others object that it’s gratuitous, the violence too over-the-top. However, both are equally necessary: the book wouldn’t work if either the banality or the violence was dialed down. In Bateman’s endless recitation of details, you can feel the attempts to stifle his true nature and murderous impulses under a torrent of what he views as normality. This lends tremendous comic power to the scenes when he slips up and reveals himself in public. Consider the famous moment when a woman at a club asks what he does for work and he says, “Murders and executions, mostly.” The joke, of course, is that she mishears him as saying “Mergers and acquisitions” because it’s too loud and—illustrative of one of the book’s central themes—she’s not really listening, anyway. I have never found another novel that blends humor and brutality quite so effectively, without minimizing one or the other. The jokes are almost as chilling as the deaths for what they say about the soullessness of ’80s New York yuppie culture. In the decades since, it’s only become clearer how the destructive systems Ellis satirized have metastasized. I never worked on Wall Street, but as a beauty editor in my early– to mid-twenties, I spent time in a similarly status-obsessed environment, where people my age were getting “preventative” Botox, having their blood drawn for creams made of their own plasma, and dutifully recounting the minutiae of their daily lives—what they wore, ate, said, and put on their faces—for audiences on social media. Suddenly, the banal consumerism so viciously mocked in American Psycho was everywhere. Now, when you search “Patrick Bateman morning routine,” you can find an AI-generated itemized list of the steps, presented as if to be followed. While working on youthjuice, my updated, feminized spin on capitalist horror, I found the only way I knew to accurately capture this absurdism I witnessed in the beauty industry was a similarly sardonic, cynical, and bloody point of view. Horror is uniquely equipped to reflect the realities of an often unreal-feeling world, and that’s in part because the genre can hold so many things at once: blood-and-guts, comedy, lyrical prose, complex characters, social commentary. Without that visceral reading experience in the first week of college, I’m not sure I ever would have found my way to horror writing. But picking it up so many years later, I was delighted to find American Psycho’s multilayered cultural commentary, aspects I missed as a less mature reader. I may have traded the certain emotional vulnerability that allowed me, as an anxious teenager, to feel the book so deeply I was convinced Patrick Bateman was about to step out of my dorm room closet and wear my skin. In its place I gained a healthy cynicism that allows me to appreciate the fullness of its craft. Now I carry that balance into my own work, bringing my own blend of satire and gore. I hope Patrick would be proud. *** View the full article -
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Quiz: Can You Identify These Femme Fatales from Classic Crime Novels?
In our recent trilogy of quizzes on this site, this one going to be the most challenging. Ain’t it just like a dame. Like the quizes that came before it, this one is part quiz, part trivia. Under “questions” I have listed many descriptions of femme fatales from crime novels. And you have to guess which book each description comes from. Now, because this category might be incredibly hard otherwise, I really mean it when I say: these are classics. I’ve stuck to the most famous crime and mystery novels. You don’t have to rack your brains for femme fatale-types, like Circe or Salome or Lady Macbeth. I’ll also say that you should feel free to guess characters from the same author, and even from the same book. Sometimes, there’s more than one femme fatale in the midst. The answer key is way down at the bottom. As you take the quiz, I’d write down your answers next to the corresponding questions’ numbers (on a sheet of paper or in your notes app) and then grade yourself in one swoop when you’re done, so that you’re not constantly scrolling down and up again as you go, thereby risking seeing some of the other answers. I think it’s toooo hard to ask you to remember the name of each femme fatale; the book should be enough. If you can only get the author, give yourself half a point. If you CAN guess the name of a femme fatale, give yourself an extra point! Also, be forewarned: some of these descriptions are… ahem, a bit sexist. Well, happy quizzing! __________________________________ Questions: 1. “Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her. ‘Meet my wife.’ She didn’t look at me. I nodded at the Greek, gave my cigar a kind of wave, and that was all.” 2. “Her face was beautiful. More beautiful than the photograph. Wavy hair so light brown that you might have called it blond from a distance, and eyes that were either green or blue depending on how she held her head. Her cheekbones were high but her face was full enough that it didn’t make her seem severe. Her eyes were just a little closer than most women’s eyes; it made her seem vulnerable, made me feel that I wanted to put my arms around her—to protect her.” 3. “A voice said, ‘Thank you,’ so softly that only the purest articulation made the words intelligible, and a young woman came through the doorway. She advanced slowly, with tentative steps, looking at Spade with cobalt-blue eyes that were both shy and probing. She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow. She wore two shades of blue that had been selected because of her eyes. The hair curling from under her blue hat was darkly red, her full lips more brightly red. White teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made.” 4. “She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn’t look too healthy.” 5. ““Oh, she has turned all the men’s heads down in that part. She is the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet. So say the Serpentine-mews, to a man. She lives quietly, sings at concerts, drives out at five every day, and returns at seven sharp for dinner. Seldom goes out at other times, except when she sings.”” 6. “She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full. She had a drink. She took a swallow from it and gave me a cool level stare over the rim of the glass. ‘So you’re a private detective,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know they really existed, except in books. Or else they were greasy little men snooping around hotels.'” 7. “’She’s money-mad, all right, but somehow you don’t mind it. She’s so thoroughly mercenary, so frankly greedy, that there’s nothing disagreeable about it. You’ll understand what I mean when you know her.'” 8. “All these Spanish houses have red velvet drapes that run on iron spears, and generally some red velvet wall tapestries to go with them. This was right out of the same can, with a coat-of-arms tapestry over the fireplace and a castle tapestry over the sofa. The other two sides of the room were windows and the entrance to the hall. ‘Yes?’ A woman was standing there. I had never seen her before. She was maybe thirty-one or -two, with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair. She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas. She had a washed-out look.” __________________________________ . . . . . . . Answers down below. . . . . . . . Keep scrolling! . . . . . . . Answer Key: 1. Cora Papadakis: The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain 2. Daphne Monet: Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley 3. Brigid O’Shaughnessy: The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett 4. Carmen Sternwood: The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler 5. Irene Adler, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Arthur Conan Doyle 6. Vivian Regan (née Sternwood): The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler 7. Dinah Brand: Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett 8. Phyllis Nirdlinger: Double Indemnity, James M. Cain View the full article -
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Lovin’ the Southern-Fried Crime Films of the 1970s
The 1970s was an odd decade for movies. Following the late 1960s counterculture movement and consciousness-raising that translated into films like 1969’s “Easy Rider,” the 1970s were a time of great artistic merit, as exemplified by the “Godfather” films, huge box-office blockbusters like “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” and a steady stream of drive-in fare best represented by horror films and so-called “blaxploitation” films. And then there were the Southern-fried, often-seedy but always entertaining crime films set in redneck towns surrounded by swamps and crossed only by lonely highways. These were the kind of movies you were lucky to find at a drive-in double feature with a Roger Corman film – many of them were Corman films – and they were successful enough to spawn many other films, some of which, like “Smokey and the Bandit,” were big box-office hits. Because they were so cheaply produced, they made a lot of money, but their sometimes-unsavory marketing or word of mouth made them an under-the-radar guilty pleasure. The Southern-fried drive-in flicks even influenced the James Bond movies. (I’ll explain, I promise.) There’s been a current of Southern ennui, malaise and corruption in novels, TV and movies for as long as there’s been a Southern United States. On TV, Andy Griffith’s Andy Taylor was the exception to all those stories about corrupt Southern lawmen, but his North Carolina town was filled with colorful characters, oddballs, town drunks and folks from the hills who got liquored up and started playing banjo or throwing rocks. (Imagine if Andy had taken a hard line with those offenders? That’s a whole different kind of show.) The Clampetts, who moved to the Hills of Beverly, popularized the hick stereotypes, as did the soda pop Mountain Dew, which was born not far from me here in Knoxville and was once labeled with a hillbilly drinking from a jug. One of the best known, relatively early big-screen treatments of Southern crime and corruption came in 1958 with “Thunder Road,” starring Robert Mitchum as a moonshine runner. With a little luck and a strong tailwind, I can throw a Mountain Dew bottle from where I am right now and hit the original Thunder Road. I feel this Southern entertainment streak acutely, obviously. As a newspaper reporter for decades, I covered Indiana politicians who were only slightly less charismatic but just as corrupt as Willie Stark, whose exploits were first recounted in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel “All the King’s Men.” The 1949 film version featured Broderick Crawford as Stark and is a template for later Southern corruption films, as is “Thunder Road.” In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, those templates, archetypes and a few others I’ll detail here were used to solidify the idea, for moviegoers around the world, that the South was a fetid, corrupt and dangerous place. Sometimes those ideas were accurate, but usually not. But they sure sold tickets. The good ol’ boy who hits hard There is no better example of the Southern good ol’ boy in movies than Burt Reynolds, who hailed from Florida, made a living in Hollywood and then came to represent the rowdy Southern boy cliché like no one else. Reynolds made his mark in westerns and crime dramas for movie and TV before striking gold in 1972 with “Deliverance,” director John Boorman’s film version of the James Dickey novel. Reynolds played one of four men lost in the Georgia backwoods who, when hunted, become as murderous as their hillbilly adversaries. The unsettling banjo scene and the threat of male rape were used to make the film as off-putting and terrifying to modern audiences as possible. “Deliverance” launched Reynolds’ film career. “White Lightning” followed in 1973, along with its sequel, “Gator,” in 1976. Reynolds played other roles, from tough cops to comedic and romantic leads, but it was those three movies that not only solidified his stardom but led to his casting in “Smokey and the Bandit” in 1977. As Bobby “Gator” McKluskey in “White Lightning” and “Gator,” Reynolds was not just a good ol’ boy but the archetype Southern avenging angel. In the first film, he’s in an Arkansas prison for running moonshine but escapes when he hears his younger brother has been killed by evil sheriff J.C. Connors, played by Ned Beatty, Reynolds’ “Deliverance” co-star. The “Gator” films – the second directed by Reynolds – have some Southern comedy but they’re thick with atmosphere and crime: not just moonshine but corrupt and evil sheriffs and politicians as well as drugs, prostitution and murder. By comparison, “Smokey and the Bandit” is a movie made for a children’s matinee. The Southern girl who fights back If there was a woman in 1970s cinema who was the feminine equal of Reynolds, it was probably Pam Grier, whose beauty kept some from recognizing her steely determination. But for the Southern-fried version of Grier, look no further than Claudia Jennings. A lot of women in exploitation films of the 1970s were either victims or objects of desire, but some could kick ass. Grier sure could in films aimed at the urban box office. Jennings was an object of desire and an avenger like Reynolds, and she was most memorable in films steeped in Southern sweat and swamps. Jennings was Playboy’s playmate of the year in 1970, after having worked in the Playboy offices, and no doubt her work for the magazine taught her how to navigate treacherous waters. She broke out as the lead in the roller derby drama “Unholy Rollers” in 1972 and “Truck Stop Women” in 1974 and took a few roles in comedies until making her place in drive-in history in 1974 with “’Gator Bait.” Gator Bait (1973) Following in the wake of “White Lightning” but in advance of “Gator,” “’Gator Bait” was cheap and looks it. Jennings, as a barely-dressed swamp dweller named Desiree Thibodeau, is a poacher of alligators. That makes her a target for Sheriff Joe Bob and his son, a deputy named Billy Boy. But when men led by Tracy Sebastian as Big T victimize Desiree’s family, Desiree aims for revenge – and gets it. (Desiree was called “’Gator Bait” in the movie, by the way, because her father, also an alligator poacher, tied a rope around young Desiree and threw her into the swamp to attract gators. And you think your parents were tough on you.) Jennings made impressions with moviegoers in “Moonshine County Express” in 1977 and the Roger Corman-produced sci-fi film “Deathsport” in 1978. She had a part in “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” but one of my favorites of her films was “The Great Texas Dynamite Chase,” released in 1976. A film that “Thelma and Louise” owes a debt to, “The Great Texas Dynamite Chase” stars Jennings as Candy and Jocelyn Jones as Ellie-Jo. Candy breaks out of prison and armed with some aging and faulty sticks of dynamite, robs a bank. Ellie-Jo, a teller, decides to join her and the two, Bonnie and Bonnie style, travel around the state, robbing banks simply by lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite. The dynamite often fizzles. Sometimes it does not, and neither does the movie. The film reinforces that the two women can’t trust (most) men and can rely only on each other. It’s almost a remake of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” although with a happier ending. Jennings’ death in 1979 at only 29 years old cut short not only her life but a promising career. I would have loved to have seen her in the type of latter-day roles that Grier filled, and I would have loved to have seen a bank-robbing reunion of 50-something Candy and Ellie-Jo. It was not to be. Sidekicks were along for the wild ride A few other women had an impact in Southern crime films in the 1970s – Angie Dickinson as the mother of two rowdy young women in “Big Bad Mama” comes to mind – and Dickinson got some support on screen from her sidekicks, played by Tom Skerritt and William Shatner. That film demonstrated that sidekicks could transform into adversaries, but with no disrespect to Shatner and Skerritt, no one played a better sidekick than singer, songwriter and actor Jerry Reed. Reed had a role in the 1975 comedy “W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings,” which starred Reynolds and was directed by John G Avildsen, a year before Avildsen made “Rocky.” The chemistry between Reynolds and Reed clicked and when Reynolds directed “Gator” he asked Reed to join the cast. A year later, Reed would play Cledus, Reynolds’ sidekick, in “Smokey and the Bandit” and its sequel and Reed moved into the lead role in the third film in the series, which featured Reynolds in a cameo. Reed had the country chops not only for the music industry but for films. He went on to play himself or thinly-disguised versions of himself for the rest of his Hollywood career. He was never more amiably chilling, though, than in “Gator.” Reed played “Bama” McCall, an old friend of Gator’s who has become the crime boss of a small Georgia town. Gator is used by federal authorities to take down Bama’s empire of drugs and prostitution, but Gator is motivated to bring down his friend’s empire after he’s horrified by the underage prostitutes at Bama’s place. “Gator” isn’t as good a film as “White Lightning,” and that’s partly because the sequel lacked one of the strongest elements of the original: Beatty as a ruthless lawman. The long, corrupt arm of the law – and a few good lawmen The TV series “The Dukes of Hazzard” debuted in 1979 and co-opted many of the themes of Southern crime movies, namely the good ol’ boys, the booty-shorts-wearing female lead and the corrupt town boss and sheriff. The show took all the menace out of the latter characters, of course. By the close of the 1970s, it would have been hard to make those corrupt lawmen really stand out. By that point, we’d seen all kinds of southern badge-wearers. Macon County Line (1974) In 1974’s “Macon County Line,” we saw a Clampett – Jethro Bodine himself, Max Baer Jr. – as a menacing deputy who, after the film ambles along for an hour, decides the three leads are responsible for his wife’s death and seeks revenge. In a comedic vein, the “Smokey and the Bandit” films gave us Jackie Gleason as Sheriff Buford T. Justice, who upped the film’s comedic quotient with his inept efforts to catch Reynolds, Reed et al. We saw incorruptible lawmen like the great Ben Johnson as J.D. Morales, a legendary investigator with the Texas Rangers in “The Town That Dreaded Sundown,” a pseudo-documentary about the hunt for a serial killer in 1940s Texarkana, Texas. Johnson is great, as always, as the drawling, matter-of-fact lawman. Released in 1970, “tick … tick … tick” gave us former football great Jim Brown as the first Black sheriff of a small Southern town. When lawlessness threatens the peace, the cop gets an assist from the previous sheriff, played by George Kennedy. Probably the most famous real-life lawman portrayed in films of the 1970s and beyond was Buford Pusser, a county sheriff in Tennessee who carried a two-by-four and tried to clean up the Dixie Mafia and its domain of drugs, prostitution and gambling on the Mississippi state line. Pusser, who survived assassination attempts only to die in a 1974 car crash, was the inspiration for a series of movies that began in 1973 with “Walking Tall.” But the most memorable lawman in Southern-fried 1970s flicks had to have been Ned Beatty as J.C. Connors, whose killing of Gator McClusky’s kid brother kicks off the plot of “White Lightning.” Beatty is the personification of small-town evil in the role. Despite his too-tight, short-sleeve shirt and his pocket protector and his rants about hippies and communists, we take him seriously because Reynolds’ Gator takes him deadly seriously. Oh, and how did the Southern movies of the 1970s work their way into films about James Bond, the quintessential British spy with the license to kill? Well, it’s not like Southern sheriffs weren’t a cliché before all these Southern-fried crime films started coming out around 1970, but the producers of the Bond films saw an opportunity to include a Southern sheriff, J. W. Pepper, played by Clifton James, in “Live and Let Die” in 1973. Pepper was comic relief, not unlike the blustering Buford Justice played by Jackie Gleason in the “Smokey and the Bandit” movies. Audiences no doubt found Sheriff Pepper jarring in the Bond film, even though it was set in the South. Bond fans were either amused, irritated or confused when James returned as Pepper in “The Man with the Golden Gun” in 1974. The sheriff and his wife took a trip to Thailand and ran into Bond there. And that was probably as far afield as any 1970s Southern movie lawman strayed from his jurisdiction. View the full article -
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A Brief History of Bedlam Hospital
The third book of my ‘Hooke & Hunt’ series, The Bedlam Cadaver, includes a building designed by Robert Hooke. And, indeed, includes the shortened version of its name in the title. The Priory of the New Order of our Lady of Bethlehem was founded in 1247, its main purpose to collect alms to support the Crusader Church. By the 17th century, it specialised in the treatment—and confinement—of the insane. By now better known as the Bethlehem Hospital, or Bethlem, or Bedlam, it escaped the 1666 Great Fire, but was ‘very olde, weake & ruinous and to small and streight for keepeing the greater numbr of lunaticks therein.’ Its governors decided a new building was required; they appointed Hooke to design it and to oversee its construction. Famous for his astronomy and his ‘Air-pump’, and as the Royal Society’s Curator of Experiments, Hooke might seem an odd choice for the role. But he was also Surveyor to the City, and a member of the committee which set the regulations for rebuilding a less combustible London. As such, he worked closely with Sir Christopher Wren, and had his own commissions as an architect. In the mid 1670s, when his new Bethlehem Hospital was built, Hooke was architect of the Royal College of Physicians, the Monument to the Fire of London, and the Greenwich Observatory. He built Montagu House, and also (a lot of alsos with Hooke) a house in Devon for Sir Walter Yonge, and another for the Earl of Oxford in Whitehall Palace’s Privy Garden. Hooke oversaw rebuilding Bridewell prison, the canalization of the Fleet River—a difficult and demanding civil engineering project—as well as the bridge at Holborn crossing it. He designed the Pepysian library in Cambridge. And the Tangiers mole in Morocco, damaged by a storm. All this while working with Wren on London’s churches—including St. Paul’s Cathedral—and providing demonstrations and experiments for the Royal Society Fellows. Ground was purchased on Moorfields, just north of the Roman Wall. In April 1674, as his diary shows, Hooke conducted his first survey. The ditch left behind by the Romans was filled in, the foundations set into the rubble used to do so. The Hospital was to be large enough for 120 patients—twice the capacity of the old one. The governors rejected Hooke’s initial design, two buildings to keep separate male and female patients. They wanted a grander scheme. Hooke was fast and efficient. Within budget, between 1674 and 1677 he built the only building in London which looked like a palace. (Whitehall Palace, by contrast, was a messy sprawl of buildings.) He oversaw everything from its sewers to its ornamental gardens, the perimeter walls, and the patients’ exercise yard. He worked with Bethlehem’s physician, Dr. Thomas Allen. The two men were good friends, and Allen was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He’s another real person who appears in the story, as does his ‘Roome reported to be convenient for Docto Allen the Phisitian to open the Bodyes of Lunatickes’, as Hooke’s diary describes it. Allen, it’s known, conducted numerous post-mortems here for interested spectators. (An aside: Hooke asked Allen to provide ‘some mad person’ to carry out experiments on blood transfusion on them, but Allen—to his credit—refused to do so.) Having tightly controlled the awarding of contracts and all expenditure, Hooke completed the Hospital for a modest £17,000. (According to the Bank of England’s ‘Inflation Calculator’, that’s just over £3,000,000 in today’s money, which to me just shows the difficulty of translating 17th century prices to modern day values.) For this sum, Bethlehem had two stories consisting of long galleries, some two hundred yards long. Each housed 60 patients. It was so large Roger L’Estrange wrote ‘…the Vast Length of the Galleries wearies [the] Travelling eyes of visiting Strangers.’ The patients’ rooms, each 12 feet by 9, were to the south side, with a long, well-lit corridor to the north. At first, the lower gallery housed the men, the upper the women, so they were ‘not suffered to lodge p[ro]miscuously together.’ In later years, the sexes were divided vertically, and new, ceiling-high metal grates installed between them. To save money, most of Hooke’s Hospital was of brick. (Perhaps made using his brick-making machine, mentioned in his diary.) But in the centre and at the two ends were pavilions of stone, each with a large cupola. Beneath the galleries was a basement, with the kitchens and laundries and so on. This level had rooms rented by tradesmen and companies, including the East India Company, to store goods; the Hospital must have smelled of spices and pepper. This renting out of rooms brought in much needed money, for ‘mainteyning the poore Lunatiques.’ In fact, the building’s demise, in the early 1800s, was partly because more cellars were dug out to enable more storage. The back of the building (so, the patients’ side) subsided alarmingly, causing cracks in its fabric. Another way of bringing in money was to allow visitors to view the Hospital and the patients within. A collection box stood near the entrance. Painted the same sky-blue colour as Bethlehem’s uniforms (for staff and patients), it had a slot for coins, and a brass plate inscribed with the words ‘Pray remember the poor lunaticks.’ In 1681, the year The Bedlam Cadaver is set, the Hospital’s Governors reported on ‘the greate quantity of p[er]sons that come daily to see the said Lunatickes.’ Asking them for charitable donations didn’t sufficiently cover the Hospital’s costs; although an entrance fee was never officially charged, the expectation was that at least a penny was paid. (The porter, possibly rerouting the money, encouraged it.) There’s even a report that one porter locked the exit until the visitors coughed up. When my stories are set, the later Hogarthian image we have of the Bethlehem Hospital was not the case. It was still new. The ratio of staff to patients was far more generous than it became. (Hooke was instructed to provide servants’ rooms on each gallery, to prevent ‘Dainger that may happen among the lunatikes themselves when they are permitted to walke the yards there in the day tyme and alsoe that they be ready to prevent or suppresse any miscarriage that may happen by the said Lunatikes in the night tyme.’) Hooke designed the place to be well-lit and airy. The patients’ rooms had no glass in their windows, instead having grills of thin rods to allow in fresh air, thought to be therapeutic. But as the Hospital’s records show, abuse of patients had already begun. The starting point of my story was finding out (while reading Jonathan Andrews’s unpublished thesis Bedlam Revisited: A History of Bethlem Hospital 1634-1770, which he’s kindly allowed me to use and quote) that, in 1681, two ‘basketmen’, Edward Langdale and William Jones, impregnated two of the patients. (The basketmen did the general work of the Hospital, including feeding the patients.) Mary Loveland and Esther Smyth were both speedily returned to their families, and had their babies. The Hospital’s Governors agreed to pay for their upkeep. They paid £20 per annum to Mary’s two brothers who now looked after her, and £5 to Esther’s brother John (a vicar in Woodhurst in Sussex) for the ‘charges of [her]. ..lyeing Inne.. .and. ..the childs funeral.’ Langdale and Jones were expelled from their employment, and Bethlehem’s porter and matron were ‘censured’ for their laxity in allowing the basketmen access to female patients. It may be reading between the lines too much, from this distance in time, but the matron being found ‘much to blame’ for allowing basketmen ‘to goe among the Lunatike woemen’ seems to me somewhat misogynistic. Be that as it may, the case was certainly enough for me to set about recreating Hooke’s Bethlehem Hospital, and gave me a motor for its plot. *** View the full article -
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The Get Off: Excerpt and Cover Reveal!
· They called me a femme fatale in the media, back when that Jesse Black fiasco went down. Most people have no idea what it really means. Most people think it means badass with tits, but that’s not it at all. A real femme fatale is a villain, and I always thought of myself as a hero. At least I tried to be. Turned out they were right. May, 2011. I found out I was pregnant on my way to kill Vukasin. I’d been stalking him, online and in real life. I followed him everywhere, obsessively studying his daily habits. Letting him think he was hunting me, when I was really hunting him. I started fucking his urologist about three weeks ago. Dr. Albert Balian was a sweet guy but utterly clueless when it came to women. Middle aged, unattractive, unhappily married. An easy mark. It was no sweat to convince him how hot it would be for me to dress up like one of his nurses and blow him under the desk in his cluttered office during business hours. At first, he’d been resistant to the idea of me wearing the boring unisex scrubs his real nurses wear and wanted me in some kind of skimpy stripper fantasy getup made out of red and white vinyl. I wore him down, claiming it would be so much sexier for me if I could imagine he was my real boss and that I might lose my job if I didn’t do what he wanted. I’d done it just often enough for the rest of his long-suffering staff to get used to seeing me wearing scrubs around the office, but not enough for him to get bored with the whole idea. When I stepped onto the elevator that day, I was locked and loaded. Pulse racing as I fought to slow my breathing and steady my hands. I had a capped syringe tucked into the pocket of my borrowed scrub pants, filled with enough potassium chloride to stop an elephant’s heart. I was sweating under my expensive blonde wig. The tunnel vision of my aching hatred made me feel righteous and invincible. Nothing else mattered. Excerpt continues after cover reveal. It was 2:20 pm as I stood alone in the elevator, waiting for the doors to close. Vukasin’s appointment was for 2:30, so I still had time to get in through the back door and meet him in the one place his security goons didn’t follow. He didn’t want any of his men to see that hunk of badly reconstructed meat that dangled between his legs. That’s my fault, by the way. I didn’t technically do it, but I was the catalyst that made it happen. If you just walked in on the middle of this low-budget action movie that my life has become, all you need to know for now is that he did shit to me and to people I love that I can’t forgive. Not fucking ever. Hence, the mutual vendetta. The doors on the elevator had started to slide closed when they suddenly bounced back open to admit a pregnant woman with a baby strapped into one of those carrier harnesses that make you look like you have a stunted and partially absorbed Siamese twin growing out of your chest. The woman was flushed and cheerful with the same fluffy, strawberry blond hair as her equally pink-faced baby. She was dressed in roomy, colorful sweats and had a fancy designer diaper bag slung over one shoulder. The baby was wailing and hiccupping in ascending scales like a soprano warming up for a difficult aria. “Whoo,” the woman said, panting and leaning heavily against the left side of the elevator as she pressed the same glowing button that I had obviously already pressed. “Can’t move so quick anymore.” I didn’t answer. Just stared straight ahead at the closing doors. “Is this your first?” she asked, lightly bouncing her fussing baby. I turned to her with a baffled frown. “This is my fourth,” she said without waiting for my answer. The baby was starting to gasp and spit like it might blow a head gasket. “A little boy, finally, after three girls! I promise it gets so much easier after the first one. When are you due?” The baby’s high-pitched wailing was fraying my last nerve and making my fists curl and itch, but that woman’s sweaty pink face was so mild and sweet, completely oblivious to the battle currently raging inside me. I was about to say something cruel to shut her the fuck up but didn’t. I forced a smile that I hoped didn’t seem too condescending. “I’m not pregnant,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the crying baby and smoothing my scrubs over my admittedly bigger-than-I-might-have-liked belly. “I’m just fat.” She laughed and shook her head, like we were sharing some wonderful private joke. Her baby was still crying but starting to wind down as she continued with the bouncing and cooing. “I know, right?” she said. “When my sister-in-law was pregnant with my nephew, she looked like an ad for prenatal yoga, all toned and glowing with this perfect round tummy. Me, I always look like I just escaped from Sea World.” She rooted around for a second in the outer pocket of the diaper bag, and I figured she was looking for some kind of pacifier or toy to help shut the baby up. Instead, she took out a small packet of tissues and held them out to me. “They make pads,” she said. “You should get some. At least while you’re still working.” They make pads. That sentence was so far outside anything I expected from the conversation that for a moment I thought I misheard her. “Pads?” I repeated, frown deepening. Again, that light, happy laugh, like there was nothing wrong with the world. Like I wasn’t about to go kill the man who had killed or helped kill pretty much everyone I ever cared about. “Bra pads,” she said, pressing the packet of tissues into my hand. “I didn’t need them when I was pregnant with Olivia, my oldest. She had the hardest time latching and I ended up having to hire a lactation consultant just to get the taps running, but this time around I’m already a total colostrum fountain, just like you! Anyway, for now you can use these to absorb any excess and hopefully one of your coworkers will have a spare top they can lend you.” I looked down at my navy-blue scrub top. There were two small, damp blotches on the front, one over each nipple. I couldn’t have been more horrified if I’d just realized I was covered in blood. __________________________________ From THE GET OFF by CHRISTA FAUST. Used with the permission of the publisher, HARD CASE CRIME. Copyright © 2025 by CHRISTA FAUST. Cover painting © 2025 by PAUL MANN. View the full article -
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Death of the Kraken, A Love Story, first two chapters
You have lived for so long in the cold pleasant deep that time means nothing. You glide past dark shapes and your large eyes see only the luminescent ripples they leave behind. Your supple skin tells you where to find sustenance, and your movements become quick and deadly. Deep under the water, in the narrowest of valleys hidden below a kelp forest that you know nothing about, you float. The low rumble of ships passing by far above you tumbles through the water and momentarily surrounds you. You watch for the whales that would eat you if they caught you, an old instinct, and unnecessary now that they’ve left these seas. For some time now, you have been collecting treasure. You glide from one end of your trench to the other and back again, picking up the hard transparent cylinders you find and bringing them back to your nest. Some of them have glyphs and symbols inscribed on their shells, which you ignore. Some have a soft rotting skin that flakes away over time. Most of the empty cylinders have an opening at one end and contain no edible remnants, but others have a small shell that you have learned to twist off, letting your tendrils enter the vessel to taste the strange sweet or bitter flavors that linger there. You are the last of your kind. If there were a mate for you, you would have ejected your eggs in a joyous eruption by now and then drifted to the bottom to be eaten by the crabs and starfish. Emotions are things felt but unexamined. There’s no realization of loneliness. But sometimes, remembering the songs of the ancestors brings a feeling of something like melancholy, if you could name it. Fish scatter away from you as you sing – songs of battles with whales and of large schools of blinking and glowing fish. There is a song you hardly remember, the song of sunlight, the miracle, the unimaginable. The cold water presses against you from all sides. You catch a deepwater grouper in your tentacles. You glide and float. Your large eyes peer into the darkness. Chapter 2 The air in Santa Ana was always blue and white. Shaped like a fat boomerang, the island lay just beyond sight of the mainland, an arrow pointing east. The northeastern shore rose to rocky bluffs where surfers lolled in the water, while to the southeast, wide flat beaches baked in the sun. On the western side of the island, the water was smooth and deep, with a marina that was the center of town. The fertile soil in the island’s middle valley was fed by underwater springs that filled a large freshwater lake. What I would want you to know about the afternoon that OnHigh appeared is how ordinary it was, a Tuesday in February, cold and bright as a diamond. I steered The Little Gem northward from Libertine’s dock for the afternoon patrol, cutting easily through the glittering chop. At this time of year the island was quiet as the year-rounders caught their breath, recovering from and preparing for the raucous summer to come. I skirted the edge of the island passed Apollo’s Arch to my right. On my left the vast Atlantic, with nothing but blue between me and Europe and the life I’d left behind over three hundred years ago. I waved at the surfers in the waves. Nothing was amiss, all of the wards held. In the distance a trio of tropical orcas surfaced. And then behind me, OnHigh’s voice. “It’s just me. Don’t be afraid,” she said in her charming and unplaceable accent. I hadn’t expected her until the equinox at the earliest. She was an old and beautiful woman, although often her age seemed to shift. Her eyes and skin were clear, her hair dark and swept away from her face. The flowers on her embroidered silk coat seemed to be continually blooming, releasing a faint scent of jasmine into the air. “Dearest. What brings you so early?” She smiled brilliantly. “It is so good to see you, Catherine my love.” She squinted at the horizon and leaned on the railing. “It’s still so beautiful here.” “What brings you, OnHigh?” I asked again. “We have a final task for you.” I inclined my head. “Final?” The bluffs and pebble beach had given way to the broad flat expanse at the tip of the island. Behind the dunes, pastel houses slumbered. “We’re winding it down,” OnHigh said. “You and your Regiment will be going to Chapter 42 no later than the autumnal equinox. In the time from now until then you’ll unwind the Wards.” She looked at me sadly. “We’re sorry, Catherine. You are the oldest Guardian; did you know that?” “I did not,” I said. It seemed the wrong thing to respond to. She sighed heavily. “You have a strong and generous heart. No one could have done more. You have always put the Work before yourself. And now I must ask you to do the most difficult thing. The Guardians are leaving this world. You know what that means, yes?” I gripped the steering wheel tightly. “I’ve only read of this,” I said. “I’ve never done anything like it.” She nodded kindly. “We know. We will make certain that you have all the support you need. You will unwind the wards. Sea, land, sky – all of them. You will have choices as to where you go in the next Chapter – no small thing. Think back to when this planet was healthy and choose your most favorite place. There may also be the possibility of going into the next Chapter with some of your Guardian comrades. Everyone has to agree, of course.” She opened her eyes wide. “You understand?” “Just like going back with our Beloveds,” I said. “I understand. But why now? Aren’t we making headway with the weather?” She shook her head. “The last glacier will melt before the summer is over. This world is done.” “What about the other Regiments?” “Japan, New Zealand, Cape Town, and Madeira have already begun their work to unwind the wards,” she said. “And now you begin as well.” “Whidbey?” She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “You know about the flood?” she asked. “Recoverable?” She shook her head again. “Complete loss.” Her eyes sprang open. “So now you see why this world is done for us. It won’t keep stitched together anymore. We have to go.” “OnHigh,” I said. “Please. Things here are staying stitched. There’s more we can do.” She shook her head. “You could hang on here for six or seven more years. But all around you the world would continue to disintegrate with an infinitesimal chance of reversing it.” “That’s not nothing.” We rounded the southern tip of the island, and now the town was on our right. The water rushed against us and it seemed to me that we were nearly stationary, so that the storefronts seemed to float past us instead of the other way around. OnHigh directed her kindest expression at me. How is your Second? We’ll put you together in Chapter 42 if you like.” “OnHigh, please. Our bee colonies are thriving. The Koenig family will ship over fifty new colonies to the orchard regions this summer. The Institute has discovered a new form of cephalopod whose ink has amazing antibiotic qualities, unlike anything we’ve seen before and likely to be useful against the bacterial forms of blood fever. And it can be harvested without killing the animal. One of the Fellows is doing work on a water purification system that harvests humidity from the air to create sources of drinkable water, even in areas where particulate pollution makes it impossible to be outdoors – and the system appears to have beneficial effects on the air quality – “ She waved a hand at me. “Your Institute has been doing beautiful work. And so have you, Catherine. You are a favored child. You have always been so. We treasure your work, your sense of duty and responsibility. We could ask nothing more. But there have been too many missteps among the Unknowing. We should have made the stakes more apparent to them long ago. I said, “This has been my life for over three hundred years. I can’t leave it.” In all these years, there were still things I hadn’t done. And I thought of Sarah, my Beloved niece, and bundling ourselves close to the fire in her father’s house in England so many years ago. OnHigh looked surprised. “You know you could have left at any moment,” she said. “Or that we could have asked you to. Now we’re asking you.” She paused. “But of course you realize, we’re commanding you.” I bowed my head. “I remain committed to my duty, OnHigh, as always. But if there’s still a chance, then we should stay. What do we have to do to stay?” She looked puzzled. “I didn’t expect such a passionate rebuttal,” she said. She laughed. “You could clean the water, restore the ocean currents, clear the air, repair the holes in the ozone, and dial back the temperatures. And then the earth would heal itself and you could stay.” “We should try.” “Catherine, I’m a custodian of the worlds. There are so many, too many to name. Think of a library filled with books, and each book writes itself as we read it. Some of them are beautiful, like this one, and yet they still end badly.” She pulled me into an embrace. “This one is ending badly, my love. You don’t have to end with it. Your story can continue in a different book. But first you will unwind the wards, so that our influence will not hinder what is to come. Earth, sea, and sky. All of them.” She cocked her head to the side. “Do you hear me, daughter?” In her embrace it was impossible to do anything but agree. I bowed my head. “Yes, OnHigh. It will be done.” “Good,” she said. “Gather your Regiment and begin right away.” And now The Little Gem headed toward the marina without any help from me. OnHigh was bringing us to the pier herself. “Will we have a new cohort?” We’d been preparing for a new group of Guardian trainees, printing the guides and books they would need and gathering the kits they would take with them into the world. “Unnecessary,” OnHigh said. “All new Guardians from this Chapter are being deployed in others.” “How will we explain this to the Unknowing? They’ll be expecting the usual interns.” “You’ll tell them that Libertine is undergoing a renovation this season.” She shrugged. “They won’t so much as much blink. Your focus is on the unwinding of the wards.” She smiled at me. “You know, you won’t even miss this world. You won’t have it in your memory to miss. You’ll blink your eyes as though wiping away a dream and you’ll be in your life there. It will be as though you’d always been there.” We were nearly at the dock. “I’ll be back no later than midsummer. I’ll be looking for a certain level of unwinding by then, but of course you have until the autumnal equinox, as I said before.” The boat slipped next to the pier and held steady. She stopped to look at the the town, the row of shops, the Art Institute across from the marina, and the houses in neat rows behind. “Such a lovely place,” she said. “Now I leave you, Darling. I’m going to run into a man I know. It’s been a long time since I last saw him.” OnHigh held my hands and gazed into my face. “You have your work ahead of you but remember, you can choose not to suffer.” I held to her tightly. Once she disappeared this part of the Work would be over, all of it to be unwound as though it had never been done. “We could still heal it,” I said. She pulled away and her eyes were sad. “Part of me hopes you’ll find a way, even now,” she said. “But we both know the odds.” In the next breath she was gone, and I stood on the deck of the boat alone. -
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Write to Pitch 2024 - June
Assignment 1: József, a young intellectual man beyond his years, lived with his parents and three siblings in a small town in Hungary near the Austrian border. He comes from a powerful and influential family that lives a comfortable lifestyle. Unbeknownst to them, their lives will be threatened by WWII. József is taken to a forced labor camp, where he’s stripped from his aristocratic veneer, revealing a core of resilience he never knew he possessed. Assignment 2: The echo of bombings haunted József’s dreams. Even decades after the liberation, he was transported back to the bleak expanses of Auschwitz. The horrors of the war were etched into his soul, an indelible mark left by an antagonist who, though long gone, continued to exert a malevolent force over his life: Adolf Hitler. József’s days were lived between normalcy and the shadows of his past. He lived in a world away from the barbed wire and watchtowers of his youth. Yet, Hitler’s specter lingered, manifesting in unexpected moments in József’s classrooms. Holding on to his principles, and with a trembling voice, he began to speak. At first, each sentence was a struggle. But soon, the memories flowed, and each tear he cried became a cathartic release. He spoke of his family and friends he had lost; their faces still vivid in his mind. He spoke about the small acts of defiance, the glimmers of hope that had sustained him. Through his lectures, József began to see himself not as a victim, but as a survivor—a testament to resilience in the face of unimaginable evil. József reclaimed his narrative to grasp control from the lingering shadow of his tormentor. Assignment 3: 1. József, the Pocket Watch, and Their Journey: Based on a True Story 2. From Chains to Freedom: the Story of József, a Hungarian WWII Survivor 3. A Pocket Watch for Freedom Assignment 4: Ticket to the New World by Tánia Juste-The story is about 20th century migration from Spain to Argentina and the challenges faced by the main character while settling. The Time in Between: the Seamstress, and Sira by Maria Dueñas- These are books (and TV series on Netflix) about a seamstress turned spy in times of war. Although my character didn’t turn into a spy, due to the nature of the historical setting, Dueñas’ narratives are ‘ongoing’ with several ‘cliffhangers’ along the way. Paula by Isabel Allende- As so many other books by Isabel Allende, most of her stories are inspired by her personal experiences. Allende’s historical fiction/thrillers are often cited as magic realism; a genre associated with the works of Gabriel García Marquez. Assignment 5: József walked several times along the periphery of the temple and looked at the hands of those present hoping to see his mother’s watch. It was useless: the pocket watch was gone. József felt the lump in his throat choking him. Assignment 6: Inner Conflict: József is a typical adolescent who questions authority except, in his case, with confidence and intellect. But his comfort and security are threatened by the Nazis. He’s soon captured and sent to a forced labor camp aware that he will never see his family again, or will he? He doesn’t know what the future holds, but he knows one thing: that he wants to survive. Secondary Conflict: The close relationships József builds with friendships (Jani, then the priest, Vittorio) and family, are always threatened by the character’s uncontrollable fate. However, every lost relationship leads to something new. Is József’s destiny causal or circumstantial? Assignment 7: WWII is the historical setting that drives the plot forward because it serves as the catalyst for the storyline, creating conflict and influencing József’s' journeys. The circumstances József endures during WWII ground the narrative (in a specific time and place) that allows an understanding of the societal conditions, the political climates, and religious controversies. The storyline revolves around József grappling with other political, economic, and societal turmoil that threatens his principles post-war. The historical circumstances are the force that force József into becoming who he becomes, allowing for a deep understanding of his character development. Furthermore, József’s character continues to be influenced by his grappling with oppressing forms of government in various countries. As he escapes from one, he seems to find himself in another political upheaval, which affects his motivations and decisions. -
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The Best Historical Fiction of 2024 (So Far)
We’re halfway through 2024, but in these books, we’re still in the (generally terrible) past! Its been, as usual, a great year for historical fiction, and I’ve assembled the best historical fiction of the year so far. The following books are as great as the history they depict is awful, and the beauty of their sentences can be matched only by the grotesqueries of their contents. For those of you who have noticed a certain 20th century sensibility in past incarnations may delight in the plethora of distinguished novels featuring 19th century settings that have been released this year. Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (Avid Reader Press) Setting: Paris, 17th Century While debatably gothic, this novel set in 17th century ancien regime France is most certainly suited to the damp—after all, it was an era long before dehumidifiers (of which I now possess four). The Modern Fairies features the great historical salons of Paris, in which literary luminaries mingled with the demimonde and mixed witty repartee with inventive storytelling. Pollard’s characters are reinventing their nation’s traditional stories and creating the modern fairy tale, even as the details of their lives show the the rot of French society before the Revolution. Niklas Natt Och Dag, 1795: The Order of the Furies Translated by Ian Giles (Atria) Setting: Stockholm, 1795 1795 is the devastating conclusion to Niklas Nat och Dag’s historical trilogy of late 18th-century Stockholm, a divided city on the precipice of revolution and beset by a conspiracy of violent libertines who feel themselves to be above the law. Nat och Dag’s one-armed watchman, Jean Michael Cardell, with assistance from Emil Winge, brilliant watchmaker and former alcoholic, are hell-bent on bringing the evil mastermind of a hedonistic cabal to heel, but they face numerous set-backs in imposing justice on someone so powerful, and as well as lingering guilt over their past failures. Few historical novels are willing to plumb such depths of depravity (or include quite so many descriptions of bad smells), and I’ll be thinking about this trilogy for many years to come. Michael Crummey, The Adversary (Doubleday) Setting: Newfoundland, Early 19th Century A remote Canadian fishing village, deliciously christened Mockbeggar, is the setting for this epic tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. The small town is ruled by two siblings, a brother and sister. Both are terrible people, but their malevolence finds expression in vastly different forms, as their take-no-prisoners rivalry and intense mutual hatred inevitably destroys their community, their family, and their souls. Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher (Knopf) Setting: New Jersey, mid-19th Century Sure to be known as one of Oates’ greatest works! And based on some very real, very awful history. In Butcher, a variety of perspectives depict the life and crimes of doctor and misogynist Silas Weir. After an ignoble start in a posh Massachusetts town, Weir heads to New Jersey to be resident doctor at a women’s asylum, a hellish prison in which his determination to succeed at gynecological surgeries will lead to unfathomable amounts of suffering. While any depiction of 19th century medicine is horrifying, the ways in which bad science and worse prejudices combine in the surgeon’s practices make for one of the most disturbing novels I’ve ever read. Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria) Setting: Paris, 1866 All is not what it seems in this lush and twist-filled tale. Two spiritualist sisters, famed in their teen years for their convincing seances, must come together for one last con. Spitting Gold is carefully plotted, fully characterized, and incredibly satisfying. Let the ectoplasm flow! Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster) Setting: Texas and Mexico, 1895 Growing up in Texas with a historian father, I longed for novels like The Bullet Swallower, based on a legendary outlaw in the author’s own family history. In The Bullet Swallower, a bandit on the run from the Texas Rangers must do whatever it takes to save his family, while two generations later, his descendant confronts an ancient entity determined to make him pay for his ancestors’ crimes. If you like this book, check out With a Pistol in His Hand, Americo Paredes’ classic history of folk hero Grigorio Cortez, subjected to the largest manhunt in US history after a wrongful accusation of horse theft left a Texas Ranger dead and Cortez on the run. Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years (Viking) Setting: Durban, South Africa, early 20th century and present day In a crumbling South African mansion, a young girl brings the house’s denizens together in quest to learn the history of her home. A discovered diary’s yellowed pages slowly reveal the tale of love and murder that has left the house, and its djinn occupant, grieving for decades. L.S. Stratton, Do What Godmother Says (Union Square) Setting: Harlem, 1920s L.S. Stratton’s new gothic thriller is divided between the Harlem Renaissance past and a writer in D.C.’s present. In the past, a young painter is taken under the wing of a mysterious socialite; her new hopes for the security to pursue artistic freedom are quickly dashed as she learns how controlling her new patron can be. In the present, a journalist comes into possession of a valuable painting, only to find herself beset by collectors who seem ready to engage in unscrupulous methods in order to get their hands on the piece of art. Do What Godmother Says is both a prescient critique of artistic appropriation and a darn good mystery—in short, an immensely satisfying read. Joseph Kanon, Shanghai (Scribner) Setting: Shanghai, 1930s Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe settle in Shanghai in Kanon’s latest novel, a deeply engrossing tale of corruption, violence, and doomed love. The story begins on the first class decks of an ocean liner but soon runs headlong into the city’s warring gambling operations. Kanon always situates his political clashes and spy games in a fully realized human drama. Shanghai proves one of his most powerful stories to date. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads editor-in-chief Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (Marysue Ricci Books) Setting: Malaya, 1930s and 40s In one of the best espionage novels I’ve ever come across, a bored Malayan housewife lets a Japanese spy charm her into giving up the secrets necessary for her nation to be invaded; later, as the war continues, her guilt grows monstrous as her children suffer. View the full article -
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Henry Wise on bridging the inner divide and defining justice in Holy City
In Holy City, Henry Wise honors the Southern gothic tradition with a captivating and lyrical debut rooted in rural Virginia. At the heart of this gritty thriller, deputy sheriff Will Seems returns home after a decade in Richmond, Virginia, to restore his dilapidated family estate and face his grief and guilt over long-ago tragedies. After Will pulls the body of an old friend from a burning house, he finds himself at odds with the sheriff who has arrested an innocent man for the murder and seems pleased to move on. The town’s Black community hires a ruthless private detective from the city to help Will find the true killer, but their partnership proves fraught. Complicating Will’s dueling loyalties to his morality and public duty, he remains indebted to a Black friend who saved his life years ago. All the while, Will wrestles with his reluctant connection to the impoverished, swampy landscape he again calls home. Featuring a diverse cast of complex, soulful characters, Holy City offers both a tightly woven crime plot and a deeply felt treatise on loyalty, justice, courage, and humanity. This dark, lush novel has already garnered impressive blurbs and reviews and I suspect it’ll soon earn more accolades. Henry Wise is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Mississippi MFA program. His poetry has been widely published. I connected with the author over Zoom to discuss his debut. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Jenny Bartoy: The theme of home pervades this story. Will returns home where a variety of ghosts and guilts await him. For several of the characters, home is fraught — whether that home is a house, a family, a culture, a county. Can you tell me more about how you played with this theme? Henry Wise: Will’s got a foot in two different worlds, so he doesn’t really belong entirely anywhere. He’s held suspect in what he considers his home. He returns to it and it’s not what he expected entirely. And he’s got a foot in Richmond, he’s been there for 10 years, but he doesn’t really belong in Richmond either. This idea of inner division between urban and rural Virginia, and how he doesn’t really belong in either place — that sort of ended up controlling a lot of the narrative. You know, Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again,” but what happens when you do? What happens when you try to get back in touch? Drug use is a theme in the story, and Will is not a drug addict, but returning home in a way is almost like a relapse. He probably shouldn’t go back if he knows what’s good for him. But he does. There’s this thing that’s pulling him. We think of “Home is where the heart is,” and “There’s no place like home.” But what if home is also toxic? JB: This novel feels very intimate, in that you dive deep into each point of view (POV) that is shared, but the story rotates through an impressive number of POVs. This felt to me like old-school narration, almost omniscient, but with a modern emotional depth. How did you navigate this balance? HW: I think POV is one of the hardest things for writers. If you’re writing a memoir, it’s probably going to be in first person, it’s a little easier to make that decision. But in fiction, you can do almost anything, that’s wide open. There was a time that I thought about writing in first person from Will’s POV and the limitations there. I think what is achieved by the third person, and being able to freely follow different characters, is far greater than what it would be just following Will. I ended up realizing these characters are fascinating, and I think there’s something in the world that connects them. Will’s our lead but he’s not the only interesting character. I didn’t set out to say, okay, I’m going to write about each one of these characters, but it’s so organic to the process for me. I ended up writing from other perspectives. I had to find something in each character, whatever made them human, even the most despicable or the most troubled. Is there a glimmer of hope in this person? Is there something I’m rooting for in this person? Writing about the complexities of each individual was also the fun part for me. Each one of them emerged from the two-dimensional to really form three-dimensionally, and I felt that I had been dropped in this fictional county, and that I was meeting everybody there. I’ve realized in my rereading of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim recently, how deeply he gets into the psychology of these characters and explores cowardice and heroism and the thin line between. Authors like him and William Faulkner and Willa Cather, they really get into their characters. And so maybe there was a more contemporary psychology [in Holy City] but definitely influenced by some older authors. JB: Holy City isn’t a traditional whodunit in that we discover who the culprit is fairly early on. The mystery becomes instead whether they will be caught, and then whether the characters will get justice. Tell me about this narrative choice. HW: Yeah, I think the crime almost takes a backseat. You think it’s going to be a whodunit, but then you’ve still got something like 100 pages before the novel ends. There is that mystery that drives the book at first, it gives us a reason to follow Will on a bit of a shallow level, a little closer to the surface. But we learn fairly early on as well that Will is driven by his past. And that’s really what the story is about, not just about Will, although he is the one coming back to face his past, but it’s really about this return home. The crime and his past collide, and he has to deal with both. And in fact, the crime functions to bring his past to a head. Some might fault some of his past behavior as cowardly, but at the same time he’s returned to face these traumas and tragedies of the past, and I think there’s a real courage in that. JB: This is one of the darkest, grittiest novels I’ve read in some time. You cover a variety of tough topics: murder, suicide, addiction, necrophilia, incest, poverty, racism, family estrangement, to name a few. How do you keep your own head above water when exploring such darkness? HW: It is a very dark book, but these characters are trying in their own way to deal with their lives. And I wouldn’t say that this book is uplifting, but I think there can be inspiration in the courage of a particular moment. People deal with messy lives all the time. And people deal with grief. I’ve been touched by it, everybody has, and I think it’s worth exploring. I met Richard Ford a few years ago and I asked him, “What advice would you give somebody who’s writing a first book?” and at first he said “Don’t do it” like a joke, but then he gave me some of the best, most meaningful advice I’ve ever received as a writer: “Write about what’s most important to you, because that will sustain you.” And I think, if we’re going to write a book, let’s get in there and write it and get dirty. I didn’t want to just throw all these dark things in there — some books do that and it feels almost gimmicky — but the characters emerged organically and they surprised me. I had pictured [some of them] as 100% villain or 100% corrupt, and then this person shows a glimmer of love or wants to protect somebody. That to me as a reader is an enriching experience. JB: You write with such compassion for each of your characters. For me, that really balanced out the darkness. There was such heart to the story. You just touched on this a little bit, but I’m curious: what’s your approach to character development? HW: It’s a long process. [I spend] a lot of hours exploring each character and trying to see them almost as a movie. I write a lot of scenes. Everyone’s got a different approach — I write for surprise. There are a lot of pages that are written and never make it in. Kurt Vonnegut said in his eight rules for creative writing to “be a sadist” towards your characters. To some extent, you need to find out what they’re made of. And to do that, you have to challenge them. That pressure is so important, especially for Will. He’s the deputy sheriff, and he doesn’t agree with what the sheriff and many others think about the crime at hand. He’s also doing some things illegally. He’s also facing his past. All of these things kind of put him in a vise and something’s got to give. And I feel like the setting itself also does that. The [small Southern town] setting helped me explore these characters, because they’re either stuck there and trying to get out, or they’re just stuck there and falling into the ruts of life in an economically challenged area. JB: This novel is a delight for the literary reader. One blurb said you “bring a poet’s ear to the Southern landscape” and that encapsulates your writing style perfectly. What is appealing about the South for you as a writer? HW: As a Southerner, I wasn’t just born in Virginia, but I was raised as many Southerners are with a real sense of “This is where you’re from” and “This is home.” I think for me, there’s always been a division within, as a Southerner, partly because I grew up outside of Richmond, Virginia, but I’ve got family and deep roots in rural Virginia. My grandmother grew up in the house that my cousins now own, that goes back to 1834. It’s got the original French wallpaper and nothing has been renovated in the old part of the house. You step into these places or into a family graveyard, and you can feel the centuries and what’s beneath them as well, the fact that Native Americans were there before. Buffalo used to roam even in Virginia. I’ve been aware of all of these layers of history for a very long time. I think I was tired of the Civil War the day I was born! The South to me can be convoluted. It’s also a beautiful place, with beautiful people. And I think the writing almost has to be a bit convoluted as well and poetic. It’s almost a snake bending over itself — you think it’s one thing but it becomes something else. And the writing became a lens through which to see this world. I think Holy City is a book where the writing itself is a necessary component. It’s not just the story. It’s not just the plot, the writing itself also colors how you see this world. And I think it makes sense in the South, but I might write a very different book set in Wyoming or something. JB: You have a great line in the novel, about how “Justice had no meaning, only consequence.” At first, this seems to imply revenge, but by the end justice seems to be more about redemption or maybe karmic balance. What’s your view on justice after writing this novel? HW: There are different kinds of justice, and this book grapples with a few of them. One is of course, legal justice, which seems not necessarily the purest form of justice. And I think Will is after something pure. He doesn’t know what that is, he’s really searching for it. And it seems that the more he tries to achieve it, the more he drives people away or hurts them. Justice goes far deeper than legal justice. I think you’re right in redemption. How can you live with yourself if you’ve done something unspeakable? But we’re also talking about historic justice. There’s a sense of being oppressed by one’s own legacy and history, which is also tangled up in that landscape. I think eventually Will realizes that he’s got to do something to get out of his head. And finally he does, and I don’t know if it’s the right decision, but it’s his decision. [The writer] Chris Offutt one time said to me: “The perfect ending is both surprising and inevitable.” I hesitate to say that something is always true, but for me, that is a really good thing to strive for. To his credit Will seems to maybe achieve some sort of redemption by the end. JB: What’s next for you? HW: I’m working on another book set in the same area. So this will be a series of sorts, but I want every book to be a new story. Some characters may come back. Certain threads may come back. This one is going to take place primarily in the Snakefoot region, which appears in Holy City. I’m really fascinated by that and how it harbors misfits, outcasts, secrets, and the potential of the supernatural even. It’s fictional, but there were places, particularly the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, where entire communities of Native Americans and escaped slaves would retreat and actually live there. And I was thinking, what if we see the continuation of that? And that’s the power of fiction to me. It’s fun to write about places that may not exist, but absolutely could have. View the full article -
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Rachel Howzell Hall on Grief, Strength, and the Purifying Nature of Fire
Rachel Howzell Hall had what can only be described as an annus horribilis while writing What Fire Brings, which was published on June 11, 2024. Her father, both her in-laws, and her dog all passed away during that year. But, like the protagonists who persevere in her novels, Rachel prevailed. That’s not to say there wasn’t a toll: for the first time ever, in a writing career on top of a full-time job during which she often wrote in the car before going into her office, a battle with breast cancer, and all the varied vicissitudes of life, Rachel couldn’t make the book’s deadline. Knowing Rachel, that’s not a big deal, it’s a huge deal. Rachel’s herculean challenges are mirrored by Bailey Meadows, the protagonist of What Fire Brings. Bailey arrives for her undercover assignment posing as an aspiring crime fiction writer at the Topanga Canyon compound of one of the genre’s most successful scribes, battered, bruised and with a knife wound to her side that she’s not sure how she got. Wounds notwithstanding, Bailey is determined to find Sam, a woman who went missing in Topanga Canyon more than a decade before, for an organization called The Way Home. Neither Hell nor high water will stop her. Well, maybe Hell—in the form of a canyon wildfire—just might. Nancie Clare: Writing this book was a challenge, to say the least. Your father, in-laws and dog passed away during the year What Fire Brings was written. Rachel Howzell Hall: I mean, we write about death [in our books] all the time, but to actually be involved in it, while trying to manage your work life? So yeah, [that year] was extra crispy. It’s been extra, extra crispy. Because of the multiple layers of What Fire Brings—it’s the twistiest story I’ve ever written—I couldn’t get it together. My brain wouldn’t. I was totally exhausted. I’ve never missed a deadline in my entire writing career. My life was one big, big strand of fish line that refused to untangle. I tend to repress [my feelings]. I have to keep going because people rely on me. And it just gets worse and worse, and then you’re stuck, which is why we use writing in the first place: to get unstuck. I had been so invincible, but no matter how smart and talented and invincible you think you are, there’s always that thing that’s going to stop you. And you’ve done nothing to deserve it. It just is. And for What Fire Brings, it was kind of like a perfect in-class tutorial of what? Grief and being unable to solve it, to think through it, to see the fires and know that they’re fires. Until the last minute and then you pull it out with the grace of God and the grace of family and friends! That’s how it felt. I put a lot of myself in my stories, and I want to earn my twists organically. And I think that me having so many deaths back-to-back, if I didn’t experience it, I would’ve said, “That’s impossible. How could something like that, death after death after death, happen? Really?” But yeah, it did. What do you do with that? That’s going into this book. This is how it is to be lost and in the dark and needing to get going. Nancie Clare: Bailey Meadows is complicated. She’s posing as an aspiring writer, arriving at a literary event at the Topanga Canyon home of Jack Beckham, a famous bestselling crime fiction writer. And she’s the only Black woman there. Only she’s not an aspiring writer about to take up a writing residency. She’s an undercover P.I., there on behalf an organization committed to searching for the missing, looking for a woman named Sam who had disappeared in this same part of Topanga Canyon. And, unlike earlier in her investigation, instead of talking to sketchy people in sketchy places, Bailey is going to embed herself in the world of Topanga Canyon. Where did that come from? Rachel Howzell Hall: My first real job out of college was with the PEN Center USA West. And the bulk of the writers and boards of directors were wonderful, wonderful white folks of Los Angeles. They lived in Beverly Hills, they lived in Topanga Canyon. And as the administrative assistant, it was my job to go to the parties with the envelopes of tickets and take notes or show people where the bathroom was. So that comes out of my real-life experience of going to these spaces where I’m typically the only Black person there. And a famous LA novelist who’s now passed, Carolyn See, [lived] in Topanga, and I loved her. She was one of the most wonderful writers I’ve ever met. And I just remember hearing her talk about Topanga, and I’m like, “What is it? Topanga Canyon?” I’m a native, but I live in South Los Angeles. I don’t know nothing about Topanga Canyon! [Laughs] It was always that place in the woods somewhere that I could kind of see as I passed by on [Pacific Coast Highway]. Growing up in the church, especially as a Seventh Day Adventist, Topanga Canyon felt like this kind of forbidden place for Black Christians down in South Los Angeles. I wanted that for Bailey: to be in a place where she’s an “other,” in an “other” place. That’s me, my career going to book events in these places where you’re the only Black person. It’s like, “I’m smart, but what is happening right now?” It was just a weird kind of thing for me. And then, Topanga is a place that’s always on fire, now more than ever. The hills are alive with fire all the time. Nancie Clare: For someone who is obviously fond of your protagonists, you do beat them up. Mercilessly! Rachel Howzell Hall: I do. You know why? I feel beat up sometimes. I think: is God just putting me through my paces because He knows that I need material? I don’t know. But I think things that don’t bother other people bother writers. And because of that, we make things a little harder for ourselves. I reflect that in my characters. They’re professional women, they’re lovely people, but bad things happen to lovely people all the time. And I want to figure out how someone who seems to have it all fights to keep it. I get bored with characters who don’t have to fight for anything. I feel like I’ve fought for every success that I’ve had. I’ve fought for it being a Black woman in this field, a woman, period. I fight for space in everything. I guess that’s just my nature. And I want people to look at my characters and say, if not a hundred percent, I’ve experienced fifty percent of what this character’s going through, and this is how she’s solving it, huh? Let me think. Can I figure something out that will help me in that? It’s part me seeing myself, part public service announcement, part making interesting stories about interesting people. People are incredibly interesting, even the most boring ones. I think [boring people] are hiding something! Nancie Clare: One of the things about your characters in general, and Bailey in particular is that she is continually underestimated: because she’s Black, because she’s not wealthy, or connected. She’s not a nepo baby. People assume she’s there because it’s Affirmative Action or DEI. Someone actually says to Bailey at the party, “you’re only here because you’re Black.” Your characters fight that sort of preconception and underestimation, and to me it seems that your stories travel on two tracks: Your protagonists are investigating, looking for truth; and the fight they have with the people surrounding them. It’s as if they have to say, “yes, I am a legitimate person regardless of my sex, regardless of my color, regardless of my economic background, this is who I am.” I can feel Bailey’s frustration. Rachel Howzell Hall: Women especially can read this and say: I know what it is to be in a room like that where people are like, “oh, you’re only here because of whatever.” You feel it going into a space, you feel it even outright when someone reviews your book on some website and says, “I haven’t read it, but it’s probably woke, so one star.” Or “I haven’t read it, but it’s affirmative action, one star.” You can’t reach those people, but the people who leave two stars, three stars, those are the people who are like, “oh, we vote [the right] way,” but they still see you as an interloper. It’s frustrating. For Bailey, she can’t even look for a missing woman without having to deal with her legitimacy. Nancie Clare: Sam, the person that Bailey is looking for, is suspected of having Dissociative Fugue Syndrome. To quote from What Fire Brings, it’s “a condition that causes people under great stress or experiencing trauma to lose their identity and impulsively wander away from home.” How did Dissociative Fugue Syndrome come to your attention and what caused you to use it in the story? Rachel Howzell Hall: It’s a real thing. I read about it a long, long, long time ago. It’s always kind of been [in the back of my mind]. And then I saw Memento, and it’s like, “Ooh, what? I like that story.” And then I read Shutter Island, and it’s like, “okay, but how do I do something like that?” Then about two or three years ago, I read a story in the New York Times about a young teacher who wandered off after a hurricane down in the islands. She showed up somehow in the New York Harbor and had no idea how she got there or where she’d been. And then it happened again, and no one knows where she is. Then when I read that PTSD tends to bring it on, and everything that my family had been going through, it’s like sometimes you wish you could just [say] “I don’t even know what all this is or who you all are. I’m going to just create this new existence just so I can have a breath.” There has been this back and forth over whether fugues are real or not, because you can’t see it on a CT scan. I mean, what keeps us all from just pretending to space out and wander away and not return to something that’s hard. I mean, I find it fascinating that it can’t be seen, and yet it happens. Nancie Clare: Let’s talk about Jack Beckham, the best-selling crime fiction writer. He’s a handsome white guy with a tragic story and a creepy vibe. Fortunately, in real life there are very, very few unsavory characters in the crime fiction community—but there are some. Was Jack Beckham inspired by one of these guys? Was he taking advantage of Bailey because having a writing partner who is a Black woman is going to appeal to a demographic that his books might not have? Rachel Howzell Hall: He was inspired by some of our peers as well as writers [who came] before us. Jack Beckham is [the guy who says] “I want to teach you how to do this thing, and so come to my house and I’ll show you.” Maybe I don’t know what their intentions are, but it always comes out that they are assholes; they’re not doing it for you. They do it because they will look better politically and sociologically. Beckham wants to use Bailey, to appropriate her Blackness for his own. I was trying to come up with a character who, on his face, looks benevolent and generous because he opens up his home and he has this tragic backstory about his wife, and [the reaction he expects is] “oh my gosh, you’re so wonderful. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.” And it’s all bullshit. It’s all fiction, it’s all lies. And again, as fire comes, fire cleanses, and I wanted his whole estate to be burnt down, and never have it rise again. But eventually, if there is another story, a sequel to this book, there’d be someone like him to take his place, because that would be interesting. Nancie Clare: You’ve been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize a time or two, the Lefty, Barry, and Anthony Award… Rachel Howzell Hall: Yes, I have. Yeah. Yeah. I just like trophies, period. My dad was a trophy hound, and so I grew up in a house of trophies, and so that kind of burns me. It’s like, ah, I have to win one! But at the same time, my readers, people who enjoy my books, they really do enjoy them. And I like that. I like being able to do interesting things with each book. I don’t ever want to write the same book. As a writer, you’re also learning new ways of telling a story because you read a lot. I remember reading Dennis Lehane and saying, “oh, man, I want to write a story like that!” And it takes me years to figure out how to do it. When I finally do it, it’s like, did I land? Did I do it right? Am I honoring my heroes? When I’m feeling like, “oh, man, why can’t I win something? Why do I constantly compare myself?” I’ll just go over to GoodReads and read reviews on Shutter Island, which I think for me is one of my pinnacles. I see how some people just didn’t get it. It’s like, okay, well, if they don’t get him, then I’m good. Because I think he’s one of the most talented writers in the existence of crime fiction ever. So that’s how I soothe myself, by looking at the Dennis Lehane reviews! View the full article -
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How Lab-Grown Diamonds Upended the Industry and Could End Up Changing the World
The diamond world was stunned when De Beers, the storied diamond miner, announced this month it was ditching its lab-grown diamond business. De Beers had been selling lab-grown gems online through its Lightbox brand for six years, at prices its competitors found hard to beat. But the lab-grown diamond price was crashing, and De Beers will now focus its $94 million Oregon diamond factory away from gemstone production and onto something much more exciting: diamonds for targeted industrial uses. Among these new and often secret uses is the place of diamonds in the race to develop a quantum computer—the mind-boggling doomsday machine that China and the United States are desperate to get to first. De Beers diamond-technology experts have put the company in the forefront of this race, with their ability to manipulate tiny diamonds at the atomic level. Characteristics such as “vacancies”—missing atoms—allow such stones to perform a crucial function for quantum machines, which will complete in minutes calculations that today’s fastest supercomputers would take years to finish. The plot for my new novel, The Lucifer Cut, revolves around these developments. But first—how did diamonds get where they are now? I started writing about diamonds in 1991, when a discovery in the Canadian Arctic sparked a winter staking rush. Loaded with posts, planes flew out into the frigid wastes. At isolated tent camps, diamond geologists and staking crews shifted the posts into helicopters and clattered off to distant coordinates, often just flinging the posts out into the snow when they got there and inking another claim onto the staking map. Tens of millions of dollars in speculators’ money poured into that rush, all of it riding the same belief—that diamonds were valuable and hard to find. In other words, rare. Rarity is the basement attribute that supports the diamond industry. Without that concept, the whole idea of a jewel is under threat. That threat became real when a virus invaded the sparkling domain of diamonds, destroying the very idea of rarity. The virus was lab-grown diamonds. Diamonds depend for value on distinctions of rarity. D color costs more than F because there aren’t as many Ds; a two-carat stone is rarer than a one, so you pay more per carat. Absurdly, lab-grown diamonds shadow this pricing system, even though the supply of lab-grown, in any practical sense, is infinite. There is no such thing as rarity. Diamond growers can make as many stones as they like, and even advance a stone from one category to another basically by leaving it in the oven a little longer. By that I mean that industrial processes involving heat and pressure, not the casino of natural formation, determine what a stone will look like. The only value of a lab-grown diamond is that it looks like something it is not. How do you even sell such a stone? In an industry whose mother ship is the idea of eternal love, you don’t want the whole retail pitch to just be that it’s cheaper than the real thing. So the makers of lab-grown found another story: namely, that that the stones are more ethical and greener than natural diamonds. It was a ridiculous claim. The Federal Trade Commission ordered lab-grown manufacturers to drop it five years ago. Yet somehow the belief that lab-grown have a moral edge has stuck. The truth is that most lab-grown diamonds come from factories in China and India that rely on huge amounts of electric power. That power comes from coal-fired generating plants. So much for the eco edge. The other idea, that lab-grown are more ethical, is laughable. It’s a hangover from the blood-diamonds scandal, which exposed the trade in conflict diamonds. But anybody who thinks a diamond made in a Chinese or Indian factory is more ethically sourced than a mined one hasn’t been following the relentless campaigns of persecution against ethnic and religious minorities by governments in New Delhi and Beijing. Buyers flocked to lab-grown anyway, pushing the category’s share of the global diamond market last year to more than twenty percent. Since the supply is essentially limitless, manufacturers responded to the boom by producing even more. Choked by oversupply, the wholesale price collapsed, and as sure as night follows day, the retail price began to follow it. Since the price of natural rough diamonds had also taken a haircut, this meant the whole industry—natural and lab-grown—was caught up in a price retreat that looked like a rout. Into this dangerous moment stepped the only force in diamonds that could stop it—De Beers. De Beers invented the modern diamond business. For decades they ran it like a private fief. They are still a powerful force—the pre-eminent natural diamond company and a successful lab-grown maker too. This made De Beers the only power that could calm the seething waters of the lab-grown diamond price, and in May they tried. They slashed the price of their standard range of lab-grown goods from $800 a carat to $500. How did that work out? Not great, I guess, since a month later they threw in the towel and got of lab-grown altogether. When lab-grown diamonds appeared, I thought they would turn out to be the virus that ate itself—a commodity whose basic worthlessness would ultimately push down prices until the enterprise went bust. I didn’t see the other threat, the more insidious one, which was how good they would get. It was that penny finally dropping—that fakes might actually get good enough to beat the tests designed to catch them—that convinced me to set my new thriller, The Lucifer Cut, in that world. Here’s an example. One recent fake—a six-carat white—appeared in Tel Aviv. The fakers had found a natural diamond just like it on an online data base. Their fake even had flaws positioned where the natural stone’s flaws were. The online stone was identified, as any large diamond would be, by a certificate whose number was lasered on the stone. No problem. The fakers lasered the number on theirs. This fake was caught when a trader brought it to a lab, which detected minute differences between the natural and the fake, and ran some tests. But in an intensely secretive art whose sorcerers can reposition atoms, one day the tests will fail to catch it. From that moment the diamond business is finished. The Lucifer Cut dives into this dark realm as Treasury agent Alex Turner and his lover, the millionaire Russian diamond thief known as Slav Lily, pursue an elusive genius who can make any diamond—including one that could give its owner the power to rule the world. In The Lucifer Cut, nothing is stranger than fiction! *** View the full article
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