This is a redo on the homework using the new book I'm going to work on, Sleuthing on Set. STORY STATEMENT: Sydney Lang must make a go of segueing into a writing career within the next few months or have to move to an unwanted city and job. A murder on set occurs and she feels she needs to solve it. ANTAGONIST: My story has 2 antagonists. One is Willow Weston, the new PA who is the model daughter of a superproducer. Her goal is to get her script finished and to the showrunner before Sydney, and be selected to work in the writing department. The other antagonist is the murderer, but we don’t know who it is until the end. It’s someone who stabbed the showrunner’s assistant Olivia in the neck with a pen in the writers’ room. TITLE: Sleuthing on Set COMPS: Shock and Paw by Cate Conte Murder Buys a One Way Ticket by Laura Levine Both stories are fun, light cozy mysteries with strong female protagonist sleuths. There is whimsy and humor in the stories. CORE WOUND: Sleuthing on Set is Sydney Lang’s journey from office temp to possible TV writer. When she encounters writers’ block, the only thing that helps her creativity flow is sleuthing around the murder of the showunner’s assistant on set. INNER CONFLICT: Sydney is fighting to get her script finished in time to present it to Tina Tieri’s assistant with the goal of getting a job in writing. She encounters writers’ block and feels stuck, while her rival continues to get ahead. This makes her extremely nervous and worried that she will have to leave LA and move to another state to take a job in HR so she can support her son. She discovers that trying to solve the murder is a way to get her creating juices flowing again. SECONDARY CONFLICT: Sydney’s 5-year-old son has behavioral and learning issues. She is worried about being able to properly parent him and get him the help he needs. In one scene he has to go to a psyche hospital after threatening to “murder” someone (a term he learned while his mother has been sleuthing). Sydney feels challenged to rise to the occasion and help him get better. SETTING: The majority of the story takes place on the Brighton Network lot, a television studio in Los Angeles, both in the production office and on set. It adds an interesting element to the story, with the murder suspects being Brighton employees.

Hi everyone, here is my attempt to complete the 7 assignments. #1. STORY STATEMENT A hardened war reporter suffering from PTSD after her friend is killed in Afghanistan returns to New York to find she’s inherited his dog. She is forced to take a leave from work and heads to her cabin in Maine. Along the way, she and the dog witness the murder of a mother wolf, and unbeknownst to her, the dog rescues her pups. Setting off a new kind of war in the small town where a brutal land developer takes aim at her, the dog, and the pups and vows to protect his land by all means possible, including killing them. #2. The ANTAGONIST James Stanford is a land developer in Maine with several other projects scattered throughout the country. But Maine is his generational home, and his name carries a lot of prestige. Receiving the bulk of his money from his family, he has strived to make a name for himself but has never achieved the same status as his father. This is what drives him, to make his mark while he still can. As an avid lifelong hunter who’s been to every big game hunting resort in the world, chasing certificates for killing all kinds of wild animals, he decides to bring that kind of resort to Maine, but now with exotic animals. These kinds of animals will bring in huge sums of money from hunters wanting to kill a baboon for fifteen thousand or an old lion for twenty-five thousand, and the list goes on. He will make his resort the premier destiny for big game hunters. But he can’t do this alone, so he solicits the Governor of Maine and a Fish & Wildlife agent to help him with promises of big money. He also promises the town that he will revive their declining little village and give them jobs and prosperity. But with the unwelcome arrival of endangered wolves in the area, this could easily ruin his plans. Because he’s not going through the proper channels to bring the exotic animals to the resort. So, he devises a relationship with the Governor and cuts her in on the resort to delist wolves from the Endangered Species Act to be added to his kill list for the certificate. However, with a reporter on the scene making her opinions and facts heard cannot be tolerated on any level, so he must get the town to turn against her and the wolf population. This is a man without a soul and without a thought as to how his actions would affect or harm another person, place, or animal. #3. TITLES The title is THE LANGUAGE OF WOLVES. Which within the story is relevant to the journey Joey goes on to free the wolf pups. In the past, I have titled it: Open Season, Little Wars Everywhere, and Learning The Language Of Wolves. #4. COMPARABLE Gorillas in the Mist, by Dr. Dian Fossey, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study and love of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name. Marley & Me by John Grogan, is the heartwarming and unforgettable story of a family and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life. Three Billboards From Ebbing Missouri, By Martin McDonagh McDonagh said that the story was inspired by a true incident and his desire to create strong female characters. He said it took him about ten years to decide to make it fiction, based on a couple of actual billboards. about a mother’s murdered daughter I picked these books because my book is based on my screenplay, and at the heart of these books and movies, the main character, who is also a woman in my story, learns valuable life lessons from her inherited dog, the wolf pups and the nature of the deep connection of the animal world. #5. HOOK Joey, a former foster kid who is as tough as she is flawed, discovers that it doesn’t matter who you're born to but who you choose along the way, and a family of rag-tag misfits from all walks of life suits her perfectly and teaches her how to accept them and herself warts and all. #6. INNER CONFLICT Joey’s inner conflict comes from her screwed-up childhood, bouncing from one foster home to another, many times in abusive and horrible situations. Every situation she was in was beyond her control because kids have no power, especially a kid no one wanted. She has never felt grounded to anything or anyone except for her reporting. That’s because she won a contest as a teenager by writing an article for a newspaper in the Bronx about what it’s really like to be a foster kid, which led to getting a scholarship to college. In that article, she knew exactly what to write to tug at the heartstrings of the judges. But now she writes only the facts of a story so she never has to deal with the emotion of a story, especially her own. She keeps her emotions buried, and at a distance, but on her last assignment, while embedded with an Army battalion in Afghanistan, things changed when she met a fresh-faced young kid named Bobby “ Kentucky “ Jones, who, like her, grew up in the foster care system. That is not as common as one would think, considering how many kids are in it, and it’s just as big of a mess in Kentucky as it is in New York City. He became like the little brother she never knew she wanted. And then it happened: he was killed right in front of her. One of her favorite things about her friendship with Kentucky is the fact that they both ended up in the middle of a war zone because that’s all either of them has ever known. But at some point, everyone will go through a war, real or personal, and the one thing Joey does like about herself is that she knows she can survive anything. Moments before the bombing, she had sent her file to her boss, it was a long file of her new story that probably allowed the enemy to track them and send that bomb that killed Kentucky and maimed other soldiers, including the man she cares for like no other man she’s ever known, Captain Taye Morris. He is an unconventional but by-the-book military man and not a likely romantic partner for Joey, as she tends to like a rule-breaker like herself. She is riddled with guilt and hates herself for having these emotions, for letting herself care for these two men. How has she not learned this lesson after everything she’s been through, so she will do what she always does: drink the pain down, become numb, and not allow herself to care. Put herself in harmful situations so she can feel more pain by punishing herself. Everyone leaves or dies in the end, and they feel that continual loss is never worth the small moments of joy or the fleeting feeling of love and acceptance they might bring. She’s in her forties and knows better than to let her guard down. But then Birdie, Kentucky’s dog, shows up. She knows Kentucky put this plan in place to haunt her in the case of his death and maybe to do something more to force her to care. Well, fuck him, she’s not falling for this shit ever again. She will work herself into an early grave first. That is her salvation and redemption, her work. But how can she do her job, to report the facts when she can’t admit the truth to herself about what happened in Afghanistan. She’s a liar and a fraud, and she feels that to her very core. But she will put up a strong front showing the world the exact opposite. When she’s forced to take a mental health break, it turns her world upside down. What will she do, who will she be without it? This is what she will have to find out, and with the unlikely help of a dog and two wolf pups, not to mention Captain Taye Morris and a few new friends. Hopefully, her deep feeling of worthlessness will fade into the distance if she can get this one thing right and get the pups back with their pack and to freedom. Freeing herself from her own pain. #8. SETTINGS My settings are pretty straightforward. The dirt brown desert in Afghanistan with an Army battalion in the middle of the war. Then, the Lower East Side of Manhattan and then the beautiful mountains of Maine with its jagged rock with the tall pine trees shooting up toward the sky. Also, the Canadian border on the top of a mountain.

The frontier station of Dauria, in the Trans-Baikal region of Russia, was a garden of bones. They littered the land for miles around. The dirt floors of the stables of the headquarters of the Tsarist commander were stained with blood, and chunks of flesh and hair hung from metal rings, where tortured prisoners suspected of Communism or Judaism had met their ends in unspeakable pain and brutality. It was the Russian Civil War; one of the most savage and fratricidal conflicts of the twentieth century. The Whites controlled the rail line through Siberia, and the Bolsheviks were far away to the west. Here, the commander of the Czarist forces, ruling the surrounding area with a brutal, iron fist, like the medieval baron he effectively was, was Nikolai Robert Maximillian Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg. He was among the most brutal, dangerous, and deranged generals in an army that had a well-earned reputation for being brutal, dangerous, and deranged. He is also debatably the main antagonist in my horror novel, The Black Hunger, which was published this week by Orbit Books. Ungern, as he is known in the dark, terrifying corners of the alt-right internet where he is worshipped as a hero, is the ultimate proto-fascist; a symbol of the seductive, siren lure of fascism; one of the modern era’s most durable and reliable sources of horror, terror, and death. I met the baron in my early twenties, at a time in my life when I was myself a little unstable, struggling to comply with my treatment for Bipolar I. I was aimlessly browsing an Indigo in Toronto, my hometown, and he locked eyes with me from across a crowded room, commanding me to come to him. He was on the cover of a book called The Bloody White Baron, by James Palmer. It was a photo of him taken not long before his execution by the Bolsheviks, and he does not look at all well, if he ever did. His eyes are cold, cruel, and dead, without a spark of humanity, joy, or humour. I would say this was to do with the circumstances of the photograph, but as I discovered more about him, it became increasingly clear that this was a man who did not laugh, unless in cruelty. He was a Baltic German aristocrat, with family roots in what is now Estonia that went back to the days of the unfathomably brutal crusading order of the Teutonic Knights. The Baltic Germans were among the Tsar’s most fanatically loyal subjects, and had a long tradition of military service to the Tsar and his regime. Ungern was the sort of child who tortured animals and his peers, physically and psychologically. He was not a bully. Even the bullies were terrified of him. He was quickly banished to military school, and entered the service of the Tsar as a young man. He was quickly broken to the ranks for his astonishing, unpredictable, and random cruelty to his fellow officers, his soldiers, and civilians. You really had to stand out to achieve such a feat in the Tsar’s army. Fascism was yet on the horizon, but all of its primordial elements were already present in the mind of young Ungern. Fascism explicitly rejects Christianity as weak, effete, a slave religion, a Jewish poison corrupting the spirit of the Aryan race. Hitler and his acolytes openly intended to replace the Christian Church with a ‘National Church,’ with Mein Kampf on its altars. The Nazi Party’s earliest origins are in the Thule Society, an occult organization that made its members sign a pledge that they had no Jewish ancestry whatsoever. Ungern, of course, despised Jews as alien, sinister, and dangerous, and despised Communism, then on the rise in Russia, just as much. Ungern failed at all of his formal education, but acquired an enormous, autodidactic, and eccentric education in Theosophy, one of many occultist movements active in Europe in the early twentieth century, and became increasingly obsessed with Vajrayana Buddhism, seeing in it a purer, manlier, more honest faith than what he saw as the debased Jewish poison of Christianity. He was fanatically loyal to the Tsar, who he saw as chosen by God, though how he reconciled that with his occult beliefs is a matter of mystery to anyone other than him. Like so many men like him, he was saved by the outbreak of the First World War. War was what he was born for. He existed to kill. By the time the February revolution broke out, toppling Tsar Nicholas II, he had made colonel. As Kerensky’s provisional government was destroyed by the Bolsheviks, he quickly became a leader in the diverse ‘White’ Russian forces opposed to the ‘Red’ Bolsheviks, and as the war progressed, he found himself in Siberia, helping to control the Trans-Siberian Railroad and earning a legendary reputation for cruelty and barbarity. As the war began to turn against the Whites, he conceived a scheme to conquer and rule Mongolia, ostensibly to support the Bogd Khan, Mongolia’s Buddhist spiritual and temporal leader, who had recently declared Mongolia’s independence from a collapsing China. Ungern led his army into Urga, or Ikh Khuree, now known as Ulaanbataar, in 1921, where he was declared the Tsakhan Burkhan, god of war. His reputation for cruelty and brutality there endures to this day. Ungern was attributed supernatural powers by his enemies. He seemed impervious to bullets. He skipped and danced in the heat of battle like a little girl. Bullets seemed to bounce off him. He claimed to be able to read minds, and would execute people whose thoughts he could see were disloyal. He knew the White cause was finished. As a last ditch attempt to stop the Jews and Communists, he believed he could muster an army of horse lords, as a reincarnated Genghis Khan, to conquer the world, and wipe out the Jews and Communists to the last man, woman, and child, thus restoring the natural order of things: the dominance of the Aryan race. The enterprise was quixotic, to say nothing of stupid, in the age of the machine gun, and when he failed, he was executed by the Bolsheviks after a well-deserved show trial. One of the germs from which my own book grew was the simple thought: what would it have taken for his evil, terrifying, apocalyptic scheme to have succeeded? I have a rather broad, holistic interpretation of horror, and what it constitutes. One of horror’s most enduring and powerful uses as a genre is to reflect our own fears and anxieties back to us. Though we may think these fears are personal to us, unique, they are often in fact manifestations of the fears that grip the zeitgeist of our wider society. Thus, the vampire’s roots in the Victorian era reflect that generation’s fears and loathing of sexuality. The zombie, with its roots in a misunderstanding of Haitian religion, reflects both American racism and fear of a black other, and in more recent decades, our dread of the apocalypse we are manufacturing for ourselves. The Black Hunger was semi-consciously written under the influence of my own terror, as a gay man, certainly, but also as a human being, at the rise of the euphemistically termed ‘alt right,’ which is internet marketing speak for fascism. The Black Hunger was semi-consciously written under the influence of my own terror, as a gay man, certainly, but also as a human being, at the rise of the euphemistically termed ‘alt right,’ which is internet marketing speak for fascism. Obviously I’m not speaking of any particular Italian political party from the 1920s. I’m speaking of it in the sense Umberto Eco did: as ur-fascism, eternal fascism, an easily recognizable and definable tendency towards nationalism, contempt for law and institutions, and hatred. Our contemporary fascists may have (largely) abandoned their obsession with Jews, and prefer instead to focus on migrants and on proponents of ‘gender ideology,’ but if they do succeed (as they are beginning to in Italy, Hungary, and perhaps the United States) the death camps they establish will be populated by much the same group of ‘undesirables’ they were in the 1940s. Like the vampire, part of the terror of fascism lies in its power of seduction. It is not always ugly. If evil things were always ugly, the world would be a much simpler place. It is easy, if one is not on guard, to be seduced by the power, the elegance, the thrill of seemingly simple solutions to complex problems. It’s the fault of the Jews, for example. Or the immigrants. Or the queers. The bogeymen change, but the lure of the easy enemy, the simple solution, never does. Fascism revolts against a messy, nuanced, complicated world, where there are no easy answers and no obvious order. Fascism craves order, simplicity, purity. And it is always prepared to kill to acquire it. To punish. To destroy. The Black Hunger centres around a cult of reactionary occult fanatics, led by a fictionalized Ungern, and by the Count Evgeni Vorontzoff, determined to wipe out all life on earth in accordance with their perversion of Buddhist theology. They are as nihilistic and deranged as Hungary’s Jobbik Party, or France’s National Rally, or the dominant strains of America’s Republican Party. But there is an allure to their evil; to their desire to destroy. Evgeni is by design a seductive character. In the case of the Dhaumri Karoti, my cult, it is not just Jews, or Marxists, or Queers, or Muslims, or Migrants, but life itself that is to blame. This, in the end, is what fascists oppose: life, in all its variability, nuance, and complexity. They want to burn and destroy, not build and redeem. As far as they are concerned, death and terror are ends in themselves, not means. The Dhaumri Karoti are fictional, and it is nowhere yet a matter of public record that our twenty-first century fascists are members of a cannibal cult (though nothing would surprise me at this point), but it doesn’t take long delving into the darkest corners of the fascist internet, whether in the netherworld of alt-right Twitter, or in the writings of Bronze Age Pervert or Mencius Moldbug, to find Ungern spoken of reverentially, almost religiously, enshrined in memes and fan art, and in text, as the harbinger, the man who saw what was coming and tried to stop it. They adore him. Indeed, to be aware of him at all, is usually a terrible sign. If someone you know has heard of him, you should regard them with at the very least wary suspicion, until they’ve shown you how and why they know who he is. I like horror that plays for high stakes. The slasher and the serial killer and even the vampire are not for me, much as I love and respect them. I’m drawn to the apocalyptic, the earth-shattering, the epochal. I want the fate of our civilization to be the stakes of our game. This is why I love the occult, tampering with demonic, unstoppable forces. This is why I love the Lovecraftian cultist and the Great Old Ones, with their resonance of unfathomable purposes and apocalypse. This is why I love the zombie. It represents death; uncaring, unreasoning, unstoppable death. And not just my death. Yours, and everybody else’s as well. The Dhaumri Karoti, Count Vorontzoff, and Baron Ungern are playing for high stakes in my novel. So are my protagonists. And in the global fight against fascism, so are we all… *** View the full article

The Monster Within Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta It’s hard to pick when the voice changes — that’s the problem. We are both writers, and anxious ones at that, with sprawling internal monologues, a cacophony of different opinions and versions of ourselves all eager to assert their point of view. Everyone has some kind of internal monologue, albeit in surprising variations (one of our mothers once said that her internal voice speaks in third person, like an abstract observer narrating her thoughts). They’re lifelong, familiar companions. So it’s difficult to pick out the wrong thread, the moment in our rambling first person when another voice creeps in. Sometimes we only notice a shift when we realize that for the past little while, most of what we’ve been thinking about is how terrible we are. The monster in our new novel, Feast While You Can, first appears as a voice in our heroine’s head. Angelina, like all classic horror protagonists, is playing with fate: larking about in a cave, calling over the edge of a deep pit, urging whatever lurks below to come up and say hello. And then the pit replies. Good Joke, it says. Only she can hear the tremor, sonorous and oily, lodged in the back of her skull. Once it starts talking it doesn’t want to stop. Our monster becomes many things and exerts its force in different ways. But first and foremost it is a voice, held somewhere in the back of Angelina’s mind: conversational, sometimes even friendly. It cannot be trusted. It knows everything about her and takes a cruel delight in her darkest memories, with a knack for finding the worst and most humiliating moments from Angelina’s life and forcing them up to the surface. We knew, as we were writing it, that this voice didn’t come out of nowhere. Perhaps it sounds familiar to you, too. The most accurate term we’ve found for it is depression brain: the bleak voice that creeps into your head during a downward spiral, when everything is dark and hopeless and cold. The one that pokes and prods at your failings and then speaks comfortingly of self-destruction, punishment and pain. It’s a companion that arrives at two a.m. with a long, cheerful list of your missteps, your embarrassments, your cruelties accidental or not. It’s the low, nasty sneer inside of your head, and the morning that started so bright has turned into gray, and now the afternoon is gray, and everything is gray, and it’s your fault. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we wrote this novel deep in lockdown, and while the pandemic never appears in our 90s nostalgia ride, it makes its presence felt. We tend to conceive new projects around a central mood, an impulse that will form a baseline for all the other impulses and motivations that will follow from that initial trigger point. For our first book, The View Was Exhausting, that mood was exhaustion (shocker!). Another project became quickly focused on anxiety. As we wrote Feast While You Can, we were fixated on dread. And no wonder! Like everyone else we were locked up, alone, far from our families and isolated from our friends. The future, that clear and thundering path we had been sprinting on for our whole lives, had suddenly sunk into an abyss. There was no clear way forward, no clue as to what the world might look like in a week, or a month, or a year. Depression seemed an unavoidable state of mind. In the deep Berlin winter, we both sank into our ill feelings, separately and together. One of the saving graces of our situation was the ability to commiserate with each other and admit out loud: I have this voice in my head telling me that everything’s not going to be okay. It says everything is my fault. The monster’s voice in our novel reminds us of the ones we were both hearing around that time. It follows Angelina home and to work, it hovers in the background of her interactions with her friends and the woman she’s falling in love with. It mocks her when she’s scared: Don’t Be Such A Baby. It takes claustrophobic control of her surroundings, refusing to let her leave her increasingly threatening hometown (there’s those lockdown vibes again, creeping into our prose). At the same time, it can provide comfort, play at kindness, make her offers that are hard to refuse, make her want to please it. It takes control when she is too frightened to think for herself, and then it instructs her how to respond. You Can Say Thank You For Helping You Out. Toward the end of the novel, when things are starting to fall apart, the monster calls her a good girl. More than one reader has found it tantalizing. Is it weird that I think the monster is kind of hot?? one friend texted us. It was not weird at all, really; the monster is controlling and quick-witted, playful and dangerous—qualities that we tend to find reluctantly appealing. Writing a book is hard but our monster’s voice came easy, probably because it had been bitching at us in one way or another all our lives. Once it arrived, we became strangely infatuated with it. As our heroine Angelina discovers, it is a wonderful thing to confront your demon head on. We let it get sharper and fiercer. We gave it all the powers we feared our depression might have over us, hurting us and the people we love, stealing our memories and our futures, cutting off our voices and controlling our bodies. We threw it into the world of our lesbian pulp novel, where it seethed among all of the things we adore: feral femmes, hot girls in white T-shirts and blue jeans, buzzcuts, driving too fast on country roads, getting drunk at casinos, eating cherries, fucking in secret, all the things that make life worth living. It felt good to put our depression voice in there, amidst the list of other good, dangerous things. It felt mildly cathartic. Plus, we knew that it could be scary, because sometimes that voice scares us. It’s lovely to imagine that transforming our depression brain into a fictional monster could defeat it, a kind of imaginative antidepressant, a magic cure. Of course, it didn’t work out like that. But there’s something satisfying about having had it under our grip, three hundred-odd pages where it belonged to us, instead of the other way round. A brief, frightening rodeo, turning the thing that most regularly upsets us into something frightening but also campy and amusing and even meaningful. And then it slunk sulkily back from whence it came. You’re A Bad Person, it says. Yeah, yeah. We know. *** View the full article

Something that looked like a sea urchin was growing on the office door. I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was the same dark brown color as the wood but on closer inspection, the tendrils (I called them tendrils because I didn’t know what they were) looked like they were dusted with a fine powder. I had an urge to reach out and touch them—they seemed spongy and inviting in a weird kind of way—but I didn’t. Living on a tropical island had taught me that much. Growing up in New England, nature was, for the most part, bucolic and unthreatening, thanks to a few hundred years of farming, hunting, and logging. I’d walk for hours in the woods, hardly seeing any wildlife, and the only things that bit me were mosquitoes. Then living in concrete Californian cities like Los Angeles or Oakland, what little nature existed was conscripted to landscaping or parks, with maybe an occasional rectangle of hardened dirt along sidewalks so long as the roots didn’t mess with underground sewage pipes. On Maui, nature was bountiful, beautiful and it had teeth. Something I learned the hard way within the first five minutes of getting out of the cab in upcountry Maui. I saw a slow-moving chameleon and picked it up only to discover that while its legs moved slowly, its head moved quickly, and it locked onto the thin skin of my wrist with its tiny but powerful jaws. I, Dorothy, wasn’t in Kansas anymore. More lessons followed. Ignoring the warnings of posted signage, I waded into knee-deep water off Makena Beach, and a powerful rip current yanked me off my feet and thrust me into what felt like a washing machine, filling my lungs with ocean water. Discovering a gecko in the house, I tried shooing it into a glass like a spider—it detached its tail and ran off with a bloody nub, and the tail wriggled on the floor for a good minute after. After that, I let them be. I scoffed at the notion I’d need to dress warmly to watch the sunrise at the top of Haleakala—I was a Yankee, after all, used to harsh winters—and found myself shivering in my thin jacket, blowing on my hands to keep them warm until the sun came up over the horizon, revealing an otherworldly landscape of Mars-like rocks and cinder cones that made me feel like I’d landed on another planet. Eventually I came to grips with the idea that what I knew wasn’t applicable to where I was. So I took things slower. I observed more carefully. I listened more than I spoke. In the process, a kind of inversion began to take place and I began to get glimpses of my own strangeness, the peculiar qualities of my culture. Like looking directly into people’s eyes, which I’d been taught to do as a sign of confidence, but in Hawai’i could be considered aggressive, hostile even. My determination at work to have meeting agendas and a timely start when what was more important was to talk and build relationships because a community can accomplish more than a hierarchy. Careless consumption seemed especially egregious when I saw tourists behaving as I used to, treating the island as just another Disney-esque entertainment venue, an opportunity for selfies before getting back on the plane, leaving their trash behind. And then there were moments when the line between real and the surreal began to blur, which is harder to describe, but every once in a while, I’d run into a place or a thing that held a certain kind of magnetism that could attract or repel, an undefinable quality that felt like another world bubbling beneath the ordinary. Driving on the back road to Hana, high up on the hill, I saw a gnarled, half-dead tree with a commanding presence. I felt like it was watching me—glowering almost—and I would have pulled over to hike up to get closer, but there was no turnout. But I still think about that tree. One time my husband and I thought we’d go see the lava fields that hug the coastline, but as the road turned to dirt, the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be there, that we needed to turn back now was so overwhelming it almost felt like a panic attack. So we turned around, and as soon as the tires hit pavement again, I felt my breath begin to ease. And then on the back lanai, I found a gecko that was perfectly still, the tip of its tail a bright white. It looked at me with its big, orbital lizard eyes, I looked at it with my oval-shaped mammal eyes, and I felt compelled to sit down next to it. It didn’t move except to blink. Gradually the color drained from its entire tail, then its lower body, then its upper body, then its neck, then its head. Going, going, gone. I gently picked up its white body, and it was like holding a dead leaf, or a piece of paper, light and dry, while all around me the sun shone, and the wind rustled the palm fronds. I realized how simple and easy death could be. Just another natural transformation. Many of these elements crept into my novel The Nightmarchers, and maybe this is what draws writers to islands—when we press our hands in the dirt of the unfamiliar, we can see ourselves and our periphery more clearly. Because nothing that I saw or experienced was unusual to someone who grew up there. I was the interloper looking in. As was my sea urchin office mate, which turned out to be the fruiting body of a brown slime mold. Stemonitis splendens, a single-celled mass that can function like a brain—in fact, slime molds can solve mazes. How did it get there? Most likely, crawled. I decided not to disturb it. Or maybe it decided not to disturb me. So while it slowly digested the damp wood of the door, I focused on my work. Each of us inhabiting a single space, and our own, mysterious worlds. *** View the full article

There would ultimately be three main hideouts, and they would be connected by what came to be known as the Outlaw Trail. It extended from Canada to Mexico, and unlike other such trails elsewhere in the U.S., this one, according to Charles Kelly, “was provided with better hideouts, was used by more outlaws, and continued in use for a longer time than any other. Men who used it operated on a large scale; their banditry was bold and spectacular, and their hideouts were practically impregnable.” The first of its kind on the Outlaw Trail was initially known to most as Brown’s Hole. It would come to be called Brown’s Park, but to the old fur trappers, a “hole” was a valley enclosed by mountains. One of the distinctions the valley on the Green River in the Uintah Mountains had was it included territory from three states: the eastern boundary of Utah, the southern boundary of Wyoming, and the western boundary of Colorado. This could come in handy for bandits evading lawmen in one jurisdiction by escaping into another. The “hole” or bottom of the valley could be reached only by descending a narrow, rock-filled trail. The entire valley was thirty miles long, east to west, and five miles wide. In June and sometimes into early July, the Green River, which runs along the southern wall of Brown’s Hole at the foot of Diamond Mountain, flows with some violence thanks to the melting snow above. When trappers first came to Brown’s Hole, they found it filled with game because of all the grazing land the valley provided to antelope, deer, and sheep. Once settlers arrived, some of the land was farmed or sprouted orchards. Who was the man for whom the “hole” was named? He was Baptiste Brown, a French Canadian trapper working for the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had been founded in London in 1670. Men like Brown trapped as much beaver as they could find and, though not especially well compensated personally, by doing so helped to make the company by the early 1800s a powerful rival to the emerging American outfits led by Manuel Lisa, William Ashley, Andrew Henry, and Jedediah Smith. After an argument with Hudson’s Bay Company representatives, Baptiste Brown decided to strike out on his own—well, not completely on his own; in 1827, as he made his way down the Green River, probably in a dugout canoe, he was accompanied by an Indian woman. In the valley, they built a rough shelter as a base for hunting. Over the years, sensibly, given its dimensions and his presence, it became known as Brown’s Hole. He lived there into the 1840s, at times venturing out, such as when he was recorded having attended a fur trappers rendezvous hosted by the celebrated mountain man and scout Jim Bridger on Henry’s Fork in 1842. Brown’s last appearance in a written record was five years later when he was in Santa Fe, serving as a juror in the trial of Pueblo Indians accused of murdering Charles Bent, the first civilian governor of New Mexico Territory. What helped hunters and trappers—and, later, bandits—was that Brown’s Hole provided some refuge from the worst that a winter in the mountains could offer. The peaks themselves surrounding the valley were a barrier against the strongest of icy winds. And instead of having to brave fierce blasts of snow to find food, the animals came to them, down from the mountains to forage for what they could find on the valley floor. Other men took up residence in Brown’s Hole. In 1837, a year after being killed at the Alamo, Davy Crockett had a “fort” named for him there. It was really only a trading post, a hollow square of one-story log cabins, constructed on the bottoms of the Green River in northeast Colorado near the border with Utah. The increasing number of white men and their Indigenous neighbors lived peacefully until Philip Thompson, one of the men who had built Fort Davy Crockett, built another structure, this one at the mouth of the Uintah River. Included in the effort of stocking it that December 1837 was stealing horses from the Snake Indians. Wisely, the Snakes did not take up weapons. A delegation trekked to Fort Davy Crockett to plead their case as victims. One of the occupants of the fort was Kit Carson, whose job was to hunt enough game to feed the fort’s inhabitants. Grasping that in such an isolated area, peace was preferable to war with a tribe that far outnumbered the whites, Carson recruited fellow frontiersmen William Craig, Joe Meek, and Joe Walker. This posse proceeded down the Green River to Thompson’s outpost, stole the horses that had been stolen from the Snakes, and presented them to the delegation. After the satisfied Snakes left, the residents of Fort Davy Crockett celebrated Christmas in mountain man style, cracking open a keg of whiskey. As would happen decades later across the plains with buffalo, in the mountains and valleys of the West in the late 1830s the beaver would be thinned almost to extinction, and hunting parties did not earn enough to pay off their creditors. There were fewer and fewer trappers using Brown’s Hole as an escape from the harshest winter weather. The locale was not abandoned, though, because some men chose to settle there, often marrying Indigenous women. These families farmed and foraged for themselves and cared little about the doings back east, including a war between northern and southern states. Jim Bridger reenters the story after the Civil War because he had shown the railroad builders a route through the mountains that would help them finish off the transcontinental tracks. When the railroad reached Rock Springs in Wyoming, suddenly Brown’s Hole was not as far off the beaten path as it had once been. And a major figure in bringing civilization closer was John Wesley Powell. Born in upstate New York in 1834, Powell became one of the most intrepid explorers of nineteenth-century America. Barely out of his teens, he participated in explorations of the Mississippi River valley, spent four months walking across Wisconsin, and rowed the length of the Mississippi from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of several Midwest adventures, Powell was elected to the Illinois Natural History Society at only age twenty-five. A fervent abolitionist, just weeks after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, he enlisted in the Twentieth Illinois Infantry. A few weeks after that, he was commissioned a lieutenant. And by the end of 1861, he was a captain in the Second Illinois Light Artillery. During the especially bloody Battle of Shiloh the following year, Powell lost most of his right arm when struck by a minié ball while in the process of giving the order to fire. The raw nerve endings in his arm caused him pain for the rest of his life. He could have sat out the remainder of the war but that was not his nature. As soon as he recovered sufficiently, Powell was back in battle, including the successful siege of Vicksburg in 1863. By the time of the Atlanta campaign in the summer of 1864, he was a major commanding an artillery brigade. After the Battle of Nashville, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, but Powell would always prefer to be called “Major.” After the war, it was back to wandering the West. Though essentially one-armed, Powell led several expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and on the Colorado and Green Rivers, collecting specimens and drawing maps along the way. He and six others became the first white men to scale Longs Peak, in 1868. The following year, with ten men in four boats and packing ten months’ worth of food, Powell led an expedition that further explored the Colorado River as well as the Grand Canyon. The participants did not get to eat all that packed food because the journey that began on May 24, 1869, was completed by the end of August. It was during his 1869 travels that Powell hiked through Brown’s Hole, which he renamed Brown’s Park. Two years later, he was back, encountering two Texas cattlemen named Harrell and Bacon, who had wintered there with their herd. Over time, this became a common practice. Cattle ranches proliferated in Texas after the Civil War, and some of the owners drove them north to Wyoming and Montana where it was not so hot and there was plenty of water and range land for grazing. Some herds would be late leaving, and rather than risk getting the beeves caught in early snowstorms, they would be sheltered in Brown’s Hole. As Charles Kelly informs, “Previous to arrival of the Texas herds, horses were the only form of property in the country worth stealing, and all pre-railroad outlaws were horse thieves. The arrival of immense herds of cattle, however, changed all that; thereafter, Brown’s Hole became principal headquarters for the more profitable cattle-rustling business.” Some cowboys, either because they were budding entrepreneurs or just plain thieves, would cull a few head here and a few head there from the large herds grazing in and around Rock Springs. There were also beeves that had wandered off and could be captured. A good place to hide the cattle until it was safe to sell them was Brown’s Hole. There were also legitimate ranchers in the area. Through the 1870s and 1880s, much of the surrounding range became occupied by large cattle outfits, with some of them having moved full-time from Texas. Their herds grazed on thousands of acres, and to their mind, there was no room for small operations with only a couple hundred head. Not satisfied with enough, they wanted it all. The small-spread ranching families, referred to as homesteaders or “nesters,” had just as much right to be there . . . but not the might. In some instances, enough pressure was applied that homesteaders realized they had no future in the region, so they picked up and moved on. Less subtle methods were to set a nester’s barn on fire or to poison his cattle. Sometimes, the only way to get rid of the truly stubborn residents was to kill them and leave their bodies in remote spots. Thus originated the term dry gulching, with ravens and vultures benefiting along with the big ranchers. For the homesteaders who managed to stick it out, stealing cattle was seen as self-defense, though sometimes it was not quite stealing. As Charles Kelly notes, “With so many thousands of cattle roaming the country there were always some who managed to escape roundups and carried no brand. These mavericks, according to the law of the range, belonged to the man who first put his mark on them.” The beeves could be driven into Brown’s Hole, branded, and then pushed back out onto the open range. Word got around that Brown’s Hole was a good place not only to conduct secret cattle collecting and branding but also for humans to hide out. A man did not necessarily have to be a criminal to find his way there; he might just want to find some sanctuary from troubles back east or south and think about starting over. But in the 1870s and 1880s, there were men who committed a variety of crimes, including bank and train robberies, and if lawmen were on their trail, the isolated beauty of Brown’s Hole was a safe haven. Marshals, sheriffs, and their deputies were not brave or foolish enough to enter the sheltered valley. To gain entry, there were two trails from the north and one from the south—all of them perfect for an outlaw ambush. One government agency that did maintain access to Brown’s Hole, even through snow and sleet and rain, was the U.S. Postal Service. The hole may have seen no tax collector, elected government, or school system, but the mail got through. A man named Parsons owned a store in the Utah section of Brown’s Hole, a portion of which was used as a post office. During the winter months, the mail was brought in and out from the Mormon town of Vernal, which was fifty miles over Diamond Mountain, and the rest of the year, it came and went via the Green River. Otherwise, if you did not have a stamp (but maybe a bounty) on you, you stayed clear of Brown’s Hole. By the mid-1890s, while much of the American West was being settled and was tamer than in previous decades, with the more famous criminals dead or in prison, the remote valley had become one of the three main stops on the very busy Outlaw Trail. ___________________________________ From Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West by Tom Clavin. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. View the full article

special note: I have changed the book I will be working on. This is another book, called Sleuthing on Set. OPENING SCENE - Introduces protagonist and her soon-to-be mentor, setting, tone, stakes, and side conflict. I was picking out grapefruit in the produce section of Ralph’s Supermarket, my cart already full, when I received a call from Sebastian’s school. I immediately felt an emptiness in the pit of my stomach, as hearing from the school usually wasn’t good news. “Ms. Lang, it’s Mrs. Turbeline from Vineland School. I need to talk to you about an incident on Friday. Sebastian was threatening some of his classmates with a pair of scissors and he cut one of the girls’ homework sheets in half. He was laughing as this was happening, but I spoke with him afterwards and he seemed very angry, though he wasn’t sure why,” she said, her voice sounding grandmotherly. “How’s the counseling going?” “I thought it was going well. That’s what the therapist has told me. I don’t know what got into him on Friday, but I’ll talk to him tonight. I’m very sorry.” I had been at my wit’s end with Sebastian’s moods and behavior that year. I tried to keep my voice low and cupped my mouth so other shoppers wouldn’t overhear me. “I’d like to have you come in for a meeting this Friday at noon with his kindergarten teacher and some of the other staff who work with him. I’m going to refer him for some testing, exploring the possibility of him receiving some special education services.” I was a little taken aback. Frazzled, I left my full cart near the bananas and stepped outside to talk more openly. I felt a headache coming on, and rubbed the back of my neck. I had always thought special education was for intellectually challenged students, but I was certainly open to any type of help available. The meeting was confirmed for Friday. “I don’t know much about special education, and I can’t believe it’s come to this, but I’ll look into it before our meeting. Thank you,” I said. After I hung up, I was disoriented and bewildered and unable to move for a few moments. My hands felt sweaty, and I wiped them on my black pants. The sun was in my eyes, and I was squinting. “Excuse, me, I don’t mean to intrude, but I overheard you in the market, and I’m so sorry if this is rude but it sounded like you’re having some issues with your child.” An average built middle aged man in khakis and a polo shirt stood before me. He blinked profusely, took his glasses off briefly, and then rubbed his eyes. I quickly sized him up. Something about him looked very familiar. “I went through something very similar with my daughter, and I just wanted to let you know you’re not alone in the fear and confusion. I believe parents need to stick together and be more open about these issues.” “Thank you for your kind words. It’s just stressful right now because I’m getting ready to move across the country, to start a new job and a new life I’m going to hate, and I’ll have to get my son into a whole new school and arrange for help for his problems out there. It’s going to be a lot.” I felt overwhelmed and started to choke up right before this stranger. Where I knew him from finally clicked. He frequented the Starbucks I commonly wrote at; I saw him all the time. “Why are you moving if you’re so unhappy about it, if I may ask? By the way, Tom Friedman.” Something about him didn’t creep me out. He seemed like a legit person and not some kind of perv. I grabbed the sunglasses from my bag and slipped them on. “Sydney Lang. I’ve been out of college for a few years now, trying to make my dreams happen, and it’s not working. I am not going to be able to support my son out here anymore, it’s just way too expensive, so I had to be realistic and look for a stable job. It’s the right thing to do.” I noticed I had started to bite my nails, so I put my hands in my pockets. “By the way, I think I know you from the Starbucks on Lankershim. I write there all the time.” “Yes, I go there almost every day,” he said. “By the time I pass by that intersection, I need a refill on my Americano. So, what kind of work do you do now?” “I’m temping. I have nothing steady. My goal was to get a job in film or TV writing but after trying for a few years I have no choice but to give up. It’s depressing.” “Movies and TV? Interesting. I’m the production manager on a limited series coming out on the Brighton Network this fall. We need a couple of new PAs if you’re interested. Cool show and weekly paychecks.” A production assistant was basically a glorified gopher, but a good way to get a foot in the door to the industry. It sounded appealing to me. “I’m very interested. How long will the job go on for?” “There are eight weeks left.” “That sounds great. Today is June first and I’m set to leave on September first. So, I have time to do it.” “Great. I can help get you acclimated and maybe even help you out with your writing goal.” Tom blinked again, and I realized he probably had some kind of a tic. I explained to him that I was writing a feature film script, one that I had been working on for almost three years, and that it was almost complete. The information about the show sounded phenomenal. It was called High Caliber, starring award winning actress Kenya Mortimer Smith portraying Ursula, a woman who worked in a funeral home who was a self-appointed sleuth, investigating the suspicious deaths that came through. We agreed that I would show up at the production office the following morning and we’d try things out. I left my groceries in the store to rush home, and drove away feeling more hopeful than I had in weeks. I had a perma-grin.

Algonkian assignments submitted.docx

Chapter 1 “Don’t make me do this.“ His voice is low and deep. He raises his head, revealing his deep brown eyes peering from underneath the brim of his worn hat. He is unshaven, and he grinds his teeth before spitting his chew off to the side in a slimy brown stream. He wipes his chin with his red handkerchief and stuffs it back into his back pocket, ready for the next spit. With gravel in his gut, he cocks his head and growls louder. “You know what will happen.” The early morning gray fog carries the scent of eucalyptus trees. The sea gulls cry out overhead, welcoming the morning. The sun peeks over the mountain, and I am ready for the day. I secure my stance, stay at the ready, and breathe in deeply to fill my lungs with the morning air. Red’s grisly voice does not scare me, his trophy belt buckle does not intimidate me. I am ready, strong, and I can do this. “Don’t make me do this.” His skin is as rough as leather with the lines to match. His hardened visage has many tales behind it. He stands his ground and does not move a muscle. He watches me like an eagle watches its prey. “Coward!” I yell back at him with all the courage I can muster. My fingers tighten, my heart races and my breath fills my chest. I can do this. This time, it’s mine! I will not back down, I will do this, and no one can change my mind. There is no backing down. “You’re just a scared old man!” Red’s faded old jeans and flannel shirt hang limply on his boney old frame. His prize possession, that trophy silver buckle with the engraving “Kings Ranch” holds his belt closed, and holsters his peacemaker long barrel at his side. “Don’t make me do this, you know what will happen. I will give you one last chance, dang it, to back down.” “Lilly-bellied lizard! You’re afraid, old man!” I tighten my grip and lean into my words. I would not, could not, let him hear my voice quiver. I only hear my blood racing through my body and my heart pounding. “Coward!” “Ok, I warned you.” Red turns his head and spits one more time. He squares himself off, twists his boots into the dirt, and gets a good foothold. His hand hovers over his peacemaker, and he turns slightly to the side. Our eyes lock, and a silence falls over us; the moment is frozen in time, like a photograph. Fast as lighting, Red’s peacemaker slips from his holster, swings around, and fires a single shot.

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * J. Lincoln Fenn, The Nightmarchers (Gallery) “The Nightmarchers creeps up on you stealthily like a primordial vine, wraps itself around you, and before you know it, you are consumed in its elegant prose and unable to put it down. J Lincoln Fenn weaves a tale that unfolds, layer by layer, revealing terrible and fascinating secrets at every level until you reach its devastating core.” –Kate Maruyama Louise Penny, The Grey Wolf (Minotaur) “This series has always excelled.” –New York Times Book Review Jennifer Graeser Dornbush, Frozen Lives (Blackstone) “Jennifer Dornbush has crafted a thriller that haunts the mind and can keep you deep in the pages into the wee hours! A not-to-miss psychological mystery with twists and turns throughout.” –Heather Graham Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, Feast While You Can (Grand Central) “[A] tantalizing novel. . . With arresting body horror, electric suspense, and intense sex scenes, the story moves at a breakneck clip. This carefully calibrated tale of queer desire is a feast for the senses.” –Publishers Weekly Olivia Blacke, A New Lease on Death (Minotaur) “This pair of amateur detectives just works, and readers will root for them and the friendship they’re building.” –Booklist Tod Goldberg (ed.), Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir (Soho) “An engaging Hanukkah anthology that scrambles the holiday’s traditions into eight so-bad-they’re-good nights.” –Paula Woods, Los Angeles Times Nick Cutter, The Queen (Gallery) “This fast-paced and suspenseful story…is one of the most entertaining novels readers will encounter this year…disturbing on every level…Readers will be engulfed by the story from the moment they open the book, while the echoing hum of what they just experienced will buzz around in their heads long after they finish…Cutter is at the top of his game here, providing an intensely visceral and gripping tale.” –Library Journal Mike Fu, Masquerade (Tin House) “A surreal, queer, coming-of-age mystery set between New York and Shanghai.” –Time Emma C. Wells, This Girl’s a Killer (Poisoned Pen) “In her fierce and feminist debut, Emma C. Wells combines taut thriller plotting with sharp, sassy humor and introduces an indelible antiheroine I’d follow anywhere. Cordelia Black is the ultimate girl’s girl, and as far as I’m concerned, she’s done nothing wrong ever in her life. All hail the new queen of the ‘Good for Her’ genre!” –Layne Fargo CJ Skuse, In Bloom (HQ) “This darkly comic novel…has the potential to become a cult classic.” –Daily Mail View the full article

Darwin and the Northern Territories, or just NT, are just about as remote as you can get in Australia – you’re basically, once you get across the Torres Island Straits, up near Papua New Guinea. You’re looking at the Timor Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria – and let’s early on note Alexis Wright’s novel 2006 Carpentaria which, while not strictly crime, is about argumentative conflicts between the aboriginal people in the area and the violence brought to the region by large-scale mining companies. Carpentaria won the prestigious Australian literary award, the Miles Franklin, in 2007. The NT covers 520,385 square miles but with a population of barely 250,000 (approximately one per cent of Australia’s total population!), over half of whom live in the territory’s capital, the coastal city of Darwin, with most of the rest in and around the inland town of Alice Springs. About a quarter of the territory’s population is aboriginal. A huge place with not a lot of people, but still a great crime writing tradition…. “Outback Noir” has become a global phenomenon to rival Gothic Noir or Tartan Noir in the last decade. Crime readers who’ve never been anywhere near Oodnadatta, Tibooburra or any Aussie Outback towns, let alone Australia itself have become familiar with the small town infighting, machinations, and murders thanks to authors like Jane Harper, Peter Papathansiou, Chris Hammer and Patricia Wolf. Australian TV has adapted many of these – Mystery Road, High Country, Scrublands…. So here’s some NT Noir…. Matt Nable’s Still (2021) is set in Darwin, in the summer of 1963 and a body found in shallow marshland. The cast of characters includes Outback cowboys and local cops amid the tangled mangroves and half-dead pubs of the region, which didn’t exactly get to see the Swinging Sixties. Darwin’s history also runs through Judy Nunn’s Territory (2002) where priceless treasure lost in the sixteenth century when a Dutch ship, the Batavia, is wrecked off the West Australian coast and the survivors rescued by local aborigines. Into this comes the story of the Galloway family, station (massive farms in the NT) owners, and the story of Darwin itself, from the day it was bombed by Japanese fighter planes during World War Two (Darwin was where the Japanese intended to land and conquer Australia). Also, not quite your usual crime novel, but well worth a read, is Megan Jacobson’s The Build-Up Season (2017). Seventeen-year-old Ily is growing up with a violent father and abused mother. Consequently, she doesn’t know how to do relationships, family or friends. Then her love-hate friendship with Max turns into a prank war and she nearly destroys her first true friendship with fellow misfit Mia. A tale set atmospherically against the humid build-up to Darwin’s wet season (which stretches from November to April with a yearly average 62 inches of rain giving the region its often lush environment in the north). More in the vein of recent Outback Noir is Kerry McGinness’s Bloodwood Creak. A killer is roaming the roads of the NT picking up strangers (missing backpackers, tourists and solo travellers are a staple of Outback Noir stories). One missing girl’s cousin searches every road stop and tourist trap she can find south of Darwin for the man the media have dubbed ‘The Outback Killer’. Bloodwood Creek is a real trawl through the small towns and remote spots of the NT. Philip Gwynne’s The Build Up (2008) – Detective Dusty Buchanon, a female cop in the very male world of the Northern Territory Police Force, finds herself in the stifling pre-monsoon trying to identify a body found in a billabong (for non-Aussies – ‘a pond or pool of water that is left behind when a river alters course or after floodwaters recede’ – near a Vietnam veterans’ camp site. To Dusty it’s the chance she’s been looking for: a spectacular case to revive her flagging career. If you’re looking for a series set in the Northern Territories and around Darwin, then SR White’s Detective Dana Russo books do the job. The series starts with Hermit (2021). In the Outback Detective Russo finds a dead body and the prime suspect is a man who disappeared without trace 15 years earlier. In Prisoner (2022) a corpse is found ‘crucified’ amidst a murky swamp in northern Australia. The victim is a convicted rapist, just released from prison. The killer might seem obvious, but Russo digs deeper. Arguably White’s Dean Russo series really took off with the public with the third book in the series – Red Dirt Road (2023) — In Unamurra, a drought-scarred, one-pub town deep in the outback, two men are savagely murdered a month apart — their bodies elaborately arranged like angels. It seems likely a local committed the murders, but the investigation is stalled. Russo is called in to restart it. And finally White Ash Ridge (2024). It’s a boiling Outback heatwave and White Ash Ridge s a small hotel nestled in the Australian wilderness. Five guests – one murdered – four suspects. Australia is a major producer and consumer of true crime. The Northern Territories is no exception. So we should mention Dan Box’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2023) about a young Indigenous man who claims he was wrongly convicted of murder in the Northern Territory. Box, a journalist, himself becomes a character in a complicated, self-aware story about family tragedy around Zak Grieve, who grew up in an outback town, and was convicted of murder despite even the judge saying he wasn’t there when it happened. And finally, something a little different. Benjamin Stevenson’s original and funny Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect (2024) The conceit is that an Australian Mystery Writers’ Society has invited six authors to a festival aboard the Ghan – the famous Darwin to Adelaide train – 53 hours 15 minutes to travel the 1,851 miles. The invited authors are a who’s who of crime writing royalty, and Stevenson, a lowly debut author. The others include a forensic science writer, a blockbuster writer, a legal thriller writer, a more literary writer and a psychological suspense writer But when one of the authors is murdered, six authors become five detectives. But are crime writers naturally good detectives? And are crime writers also the best equipped people to actually get away with murder. The Northern Territories can be spectacularly beautiful – lush tropical and gorgeous unspoilt coast. But it can also be a harsh place, where tough people make a tough living, where aboriginal and settler communities come into conflict and those small towns so familiar from the many Outback Noir novels that have become bestsellers proliferate. View the full article