Black Mirror has returned with six captivating episodes that masterfully explore technology's darker potential. This season marks a welcome return to form for the Netflix phenomenon. While no season has ever truly disappointed, last season's supernatural tangents with "Mazey Day" and "Demon 79" felt like an identity crisis. With society teetering on the edge of technological revolution—from implantable bio-tech to artificial intelligence—it's refreshing to see the series reconnect with its dystopian roots. Without further ado, my definitive rankings of all six Season 7 episodes: 1. "Eulogy" The crown jewel of Season 7. Paul Giamatti delivers a career-highlight performance as Phillip, who employs revolutionary memory-probing technology to recall his ex-girlfriend Carol's long-forgotten face after her unexpected death. The episode brilliantly examines how memory becomes subjective and how past decisions shape our present reality. This bittersweet tour-de-force will force you to confront your own past relationships, while somehow leaving you with a glimmer of hope. 2. "Common People" Possibly the most quintessentially Black Mirror episode ever created, this brutal examination of our subscription-based economy is difficult to watch, but well worth it. Rashida Jones shines as a public school teacher who receives a life-saving brain implant, only to discover the data streaming that keeps her mind operational comes with a predatory pricing model. Her "common" tier plan forces her to sleep 16 hours daily so her brain can function as a server, while also injecting random ads into conversations with loved ones. The increasingly desperate measures her husband (Chris O'Dowd) takes to afford an upgrade are both heartbreaking and disturbingly plausible. 3. "Plaything" "Man murders to save Tamagotchi" sounds like a satirical headline, not a compelling Black Mirror premise—yet Charlie Brooker extracts remarkable pathos from this concept. "Plaything" explores isolation, violence, and our understanding of consciousness while maintaining the addictive quality of true crime. The accompanying interactive game isn't just a gimmick; it's genuinely entertaining and unlocks supplementary scenes that enhance the viewing experience. 4. "USS Callister: Into Infinity" That this sequel ranks fourth speaks volumes about this season's quality. While "Into Infinity" relies less on its Trek inspiration than its predecessor, it maintains the original's energetic pacing while launching its crew into the chaotic world of online gaming. As a game developer, I found some industry portrayals slightly clichéd. (Note to Writers: No software engineer ever self-identifies as a "coder"—they're "engineers" or "programmers," period). Nevertheless, it's an exhilarating adventure that leaves me eagerly anticipating a potential third installment. 5. "Hotel Reverie" Issa Rae stars as Brandy Friday, who steps into the iconic role of Alex Palmer in a remake of the fictional black-and-white film that shares the episode's title. But, of course, this isn't your typical remake—Friday performs within an AI recreation of the original, alongside digital reconstructions of the original cast. When a technological glitch extends her stay, she develops feelings for her digital co-star. While the romance is touching and the golden-age Hollywood setting visually stunning, logical inconsistencies prevent total immersion in this otherwise enchanting world. 6. "Bête Noire" Small discrepancies can trigger existential crises: an email you swear you sent vanishes from your outbox; everyone insists your favorite childhood restaurant had a different name. This episode explores the weaponization of such mental gaslighting. What if someone could alter reality to fit their narrative, specifically to drive you mad? Despite a compelling buildup, the reveal veers too far into the magical for a series anchored in more grounded technological speculation. Though "Bête Noire" ranks last on my list, it's still enjoyable and earns its place in a remarkably strong season.

Thrilling news, sleuths! The Thursday Murder Club movie has released production photos. People Magazine, which has the exclusive coverage, shared several photos this morning of the cast, which includes Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, and Naomi Ackie. The movie, which is directed by Chris Columbus and which is set to premiere on Netflix on August 28th, is an adaptation of Richard Osman’s runaway bestseller of the same name. Jonathan Pryce, Richard E. Grant, and Henry Lloyd-Hughes also co-star. Here are the photos: “People” Exclsive: Celia Imrie, Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren, and Pierce Brosnan in ‘The Thursday Murder Club.’ Photo: Giles Keyte/Netflix People Exclusive: Celia Imrie, Naomi Ackie, and Ben Kingsley in ‘The Thursday Murder Club.’ Photo: Giles Keyte/Netflix People Exclusive: Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren, and Pierce Brosnan in ‘The Thursday Murder Club.’ Photo: Giles Keyte/Netflix Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Helen Mirren in ‘The Thursday Murder Club.’. Photo: Giles Keyte/Netflix Read the entire piece here, featuring quotes from the cast! View the full article

This is my opening scene. The second time I stepped foot in the Ocean Grove Public Library, I was a murder suspect. The first time, I was simply trying to get out of the rain. Already two miles from my dorm, I was suddenly pelted with raindrops from all directions, my wet hair whipping into my eyes and mouth. I had been hoping to grab a picnic table by the bay, but I saw the sign for the library and changed direction. I was halfway through my first semester at nearby Presidio University, a junior transfer student, and was hoping to find someplace without distractions where I could grind through the assignments that were starting to overwhelm me. Although the library felt peaceful as I stepped in from the storm, it was busy. The children’s room on the right was filled with toddlers rocking and bobbing like tiny drunks while a woman dressed in a huge ruffled skirt and an old-fashioned bonnet led them in song. It looked like fun. Definitely more fun than writing a paper about soft drink preferences for my statistics class. I found an empty table and tried to get to work. But instead of reading my assignment, I took in my surroundings. Storytime was over, so toddlers and caretakers were milling around, chatting, chasing each other (toddlers, not caretakers) and creating a constant buzz. People were wandering the aisles and checking out books. All normal library stuff. But the person I couldn’t take my eyes off was the librarian. She sat at the reference desk in what had to be a custom chair, at least half again as wide as an average office chair, several inches taller, and covered in rich red leather. Even sitting, I was sure she was taller and wider than any woman I’d ever seen. The golden yellow paisley of her blouse and the rich purple of her cardigan were striking, but what made her most interesting was her presence. She sat in that chair like a queen on her throne. The desk had a sign that said “Ask Me Anything.” Common in libraries, I’d seen them in many I’d visited as a child. We’d moved a lot and I’d learned that librarians loved to help. Some liked to help so much that I could get them to practically do my homework for me. Others were less susceptible to my charms and asked more questions than they answered. But nearly all of them were kind, and for a lonely, curious child, the reference desk was a refuge in every new town. So, the sign wasn’t unusual, but this librarian was. There was a long line of people waiting to sit in the chair across from her. They would lean forward to ask their questions quietly. The librarian’s eyes would take them in, then perhaps close for a few seconds. Sometimes I thought she’d fallen asleep. She never looked at the computer to her right or got up to get a book, just spoke quietly, or wrote a few words on some scratch paper with what looked like a fountain pen. I was peering over my laptop screen instead of at it, finding yet another way to avoid my homework. I didn’t want her to catch me staring, but my curiosity, always my downfall, made it hard not to watch. Once she had given an answer, every single person appeared incredibly grateful. Several people tried to take her hand, and that was the only time she would move, rolling her chair backwards, out of their reach. One young woman with a pink mohawk and tattoos of mermaids on both calves cried as she left the desk, but she also walked a little taller than she had when she approached. What question had she asked? As I watched, the librarian’s eyes slid over and looked directly into mine. Heat rose up my cheeks as I turned my eyes down to my screen. Ugh! She didn’t miss a thing. Finally focusing on my assignment, I realized I had stumbled on an opportunity to get some extra credit. I could earn ten extra points if I could find a unique source of statistics about soda. I had seen the sign for the local history collection when I came in. Maybe this librarian could help me find something, an old newspaper article on what people here liked to drink or an advertisement for a hometown favorite. Talking to this librarian seemed like the best way to kill two birds, or at least have an interesting conversation. When the chair before her was finally empty, I approached. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Arlie. Can you help me with some questions?” “That’s what I’m here for,” said the librarian, without a smile or any other movement of her face or body. She also didn’t introduce herself, but her nametag read “Nora.” “I’m working on a project for school. I need populations and demographics at the county level for all fifty states.” “Census.gov.” Ok, I did know that. “Can I get all of that summarized in a table?” “Census.gov.” Darn, she was that kind of librarian, not going to do my homework for me. “And, soda preferences, both geographically and by race, age, and gender?” “There are several studies, one done in 1986, one in 2001, and the latest in 2015, all published in Marketing Digest and available through Statista. We don’t subscribe here to scholarly databases, but the Presidio University library has access. And if you want to get an A, you should pay close attention to Georgia and North Dakota. Dr. Henkel grew up in North Dakota. He loves to talk about their unique tastes in soda.” “What? How do you know I’m in Dr. Henkel’s class at PU?” “He does the same project every October. If you’re truly trying to avoid homework, go to Sigma House, mention pickles, and you can get an A paper for $400 or a B for $300. At least that was the going rate last year. I don’t condone their activity, but if Dr. Henkel is too lazy to make even the slightest deviation in his assignments, you can hardly blame the students.” This was not the type of information I was used to getting from a librarian. I didn’t believe in cheating, but it was good to know I had options. “Ok, thanks? I was just hoping for some extra credit. Do you have any local information that would be helpful? I see you have a local history collection.” She finally made eye contact with me, then looked me up and down slowly. “No one has ever asked me that before. In fact, we do.” She picked up her phone, hit one number, and asked someone on the other end to bring her a copy of “the 1919 Pop Wow report.” “Sal will bring you something you can use in just a minute. Any other questions?” I couldn’t help it. I was intrigued. I loved asking questions. “Why are people so emotional about the answers you give them here? This doesn’t seem like a normal library.” “I don’t believe in ‘normal.’ And why do you ask so many questions? What is it that you really want to know?” “Answers. I like answers.” “Hmm. Here are some answers. You recently transferred to PU From UCLA. A strange move, unless you flunked out or were kicked out. I don’t think it was either. You just moved here, but you’ve visited before. As a child, probably. A trip to the aquarium. A fond memory. Perhaps with a loved one you’ve lost. You moved a lot as a child, and you are comfortable with change. Perhaps more comfortable than you should be.” With that, she rolled her chair back and hoisted herself out of it. As she lumbered toward the hall behind the desk, she turned once to look at me, as though she was committing my face to memory. Why was I so intrigued by this large, middle-aged librarian? And how did she know so much about me?

I grew up in the world of antiques—my mother and father published ‘the bible of the antiques world’ The Miller’s Antiques Price Guide, and my mother was a specialist on the BBC Antiques Roadshow. But I had only ever seen the genteel side of the industry until I was eleven yours old. Our family home was a Tudor manor house in the English countryside and was filled to the brim with my parent’s art and antique collections. On one summer morning we awoke to find a window open—we had been burgled. The day was filled with police officers asking my parents questions and taking everyone’s fingerprints for elimination purposes—which was hugely exciting for me and four sisters as we got to keep copies. One statement always stood out to me about that morning, and it was the whispered ‘stolen to order’. My mother had a large collection of blue and while ceramics and only the most expensive items were stolen and never recovered. The thief knew what they were taking. I have been fascinated with the art, antique and antiquities black market ever since—the side of the industry you don’t see on the Antiques Roadshow—and this interest has been woven into the fiction books I have written. The theft and illicit trade of art date back centuries and it shows no sign of abating. From conquerors looting cultural treasures as spoils of war to the Roman sack of Corinth, to the Nazi looting of Jewish art collections during World War II, the trade has thrived. By the mid-20th century, international conventions like the 1970 UNESCO Convention aimed to stem the trade in stolen cultural property, but enforcement, unfortunately, remains a challenge. Art trafficking has been a persistent problem for centuries, and like most industries, it is ever evolving. With the arrival of the internet, the 21st century has brought new dimensions to this illicit activity, making it easier for criminals to operate and harder for authorities to track them. Online marketplaces, auction platforms, and social media have become key venues for the illicit trade of art and antiquities. For instance, e-commerce platforms have been scrutinized for inadvertently facilitating the sale of illicit artifacts, often mislabeled or poorly documented. In other cases, private social media groups act as black markets for high-value items. The destruction and looting of cultural heritage in conflict zones have been among the most visible aspects of art trafficking in the 21st century. The wars in Iraq and Syria saw the systematic looting of archaeological sites and museums. Groups like ISIS not only destroyed priceless artifacts for propaganda purposes but also trafficked antiquities to fund their operations. This type of trafficking is not limited to the Middle East. Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America have also suffered widespread looting of cultural sites, often driven by political instability, weak law enforcement, and demand from international buyers. Art trafficking has a profound human and cultural impact, for the theft of cultural heritage robs communities of their history, and as such, part of their cultural identity. For indigenous peoples and marginalized groups, the loss of sacred artifacts can be particularly devastating. Efforts to recover and repatriate stolen works are not just about restoring objects to their rightful owners; they are about preserving the stories and traditions that these objects embody. In this sense, the fight against art trafficking is also a fight for cultural survival. Art trafficking has also increasingly become entangled with organized crime networks. These groups see stolen art as a lucrative commodity with relatively low risk compared to drugs or arms trafficking. High-value artworks can also be used as collateral for other illicit deals or as a means of laundering money. For example, European law enforcement agencies have uncovered connections between art traffickers and the drug trade, particularly in countries like Italy and Spain. In South America, indigenous artifacts have been smuggled alongside narcotics, highlighting the multi-faceted nature of modern trafficking networks. So, how do we fight back? One of the most significant obstacles in the fight against art trafficking is the difficulty of establishing provenance—the documented history of an artwork’s ownership. Without a clear and traceable record, stolen or looted items can easily be passed off as legitimate. Forged documents further complicate the process, allowing traffickers to exploit gaps in the art world’s due diligence. Art trafficking is a transnational crime, often involving multiple jurisdictions with varying legal frameworks. This makes cooperation between countries difficult, especially when it comes to recovering and repatriating stolen works. In some cases, legal loopholes and the lack of uniform regulations allow traffickers to exploit differences in national laws. The demand for rare and unique artworks drives the illicit trade. Wealthy collectors, private buyers, and even institutions have been known to purchase items without adequately investigating their origins. The secrecy surrounding many high-value art transactions further fuels the problem, with private sales and auction houses often resistant to sharing information about buyers and sellers. Despite these challenges, efforts to combat art trafficking have gained momentum in recent years. Key initiatives include: Organizations like INTERPOL, UNESCO, and the International Council of Museums (ICOM) play a crucial role in coordinating international efforts to combat art trafficking. INTERPOL’s stolen art database, for example, helps track missing works and share information across borders and programs like UNESCO’s “Emergency Red Lists” identify categories of objects at high risk of looting, providing a resource for authorities and collectors to identify and protect endangered items. Perhaps the best news is that there is a growing emphasis on ethics in the art market. Museums and collectors are increasingly scrutinized for their acquisition practices, with calls for greater transparency and accountability. High-profile cases of repatriation, such as the return of the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, reflect a shift in attitudes toward honoring cultural heritage (long may this continue!). Auction houses and galleries are under pressure to adopt stricter due diligence measures, while professional organizations like the Art Loss Register offer services to verify the provenance of works. However, the market’s inherent secrecy continues to pose challenges. As the art trafficking world continues to evolve, so too must the strategies to combat it. Greater collaboration between governments, institutions, and the private sector will be essential, as will the adoption of new technologies and ethical practices. By addressing the root causes of trafficking and reducing demand for illicit art, the international community can work toward a future where cultural heritage is protected and celebrated rather than exploited. But there is hope. With continued vigilance and innovation, the art world can move closer to dismantling the networks that threaten its integrity and in doing so preserve art, antiques and antiquities for generations to come. *** View the full article

The movie I, Tonya, starring Margot Robbie, has an unforgettable scene where little Tonya’s mother (played by Allison Janney, who won an Oscar for the role) hits her daughter with a hairbrush while another skating mom watches in stunned horror. “You think Sonja Henie’s mother loved her? I made you a champion,” LaVona smirks. It’s a chilling moment, not just because of the cruelty but because of LaVona’s conviction. But it also reveals something far more common than we’d like to admit: the way ambition can metastasize in the space between mother and daughter. Control, possession and projection masquerade as love and support, especially in worlds built on image and discipline—worlds like ballet. And anyone who’s ever watched an episode of Dance Moms knows exactly what I mean. One of the protagonists of my novel The Shadow Girls, Georgina, may not swear quite as much as LaVona, but make no mistake: she shapes her daughter’s body, life, and career with the same single-minded intensity (albeit with fewer cigarettes). She’s in charge of Anna’s food, Anna’s grueling schedule… Anna’s future? Until the proverbial black swan event (see what I did there?) threatens to shatter it all. Anna falls and breaks her metatarsal, with weeks to go to her big performance. And no one was there to see what exactly happened. Set in a prestigious ballet school where ambition runs in bloodlines and perfection is simply the price of admission, The Shadow Girls is about the daughters who carry their mothers’ hopes and the ones who try, and fail, to get free from them. Georgina’s daughter, Anna, is the school star, a shoo-in for every big role. Anna may be the one in the searing spotlight, but in Georgina’s mind, the true star has always been Georgina herself. She isn’t just molding her daughter into a reflection of who she once was. She’s rewriting family history and improving upon it as she goes—with herself at the center, naturally. Meanwhile, Naomi, Anna’s classmate and frenemy, finds herself exasperated by her obliging, soft-spoken mom, Dawn, who never pushes, never demands, never fights her battles. To Naomi, this passivity feels like a kind of neglect. But Dawn observes and understands more than Naomi gives her credit for, and she might not be the pushover everyone thinks she is. That’s the other side of the coin: daughters don’t just inherit their mothers’ dreams. They also inherit their disappointments, their failures, and their coping mechanisms, however toxic they might be. Anna gets a crown of thorns disguised as a tiara, while Naomi gets a wide-open field and no map at all. It’s easy to mythologize mother-daughter bonds—to say they’re sacred, special, uniquely intuitive. But what happens when that bond is lopsided? When love is confused with control, or approval becomes conditional? What happens when a mother tries to relive her youth through her child, and the child, in turn, doesn’t realize where she ends and her mother begins? In The Shadow Girls, that’s where things begin to unravel. I already tackled the mother-daughter relationship in other books—my previous one, The Last Thing She Saw, is one example. But Stephanie and Laura’s story centered around generational trauma and forgiveness. In The Shadow Girls, I wanted to write about the other extreme: mothers who would do anything for their daughters, and daughters who never asked for any of it. About the dark inheritance passed down between generations, the kind that doesn’t show up in photos or family trees. Not every mother-daughter story is heartwarming. Some are cautionary tales. Some are tragedies. And some, like The Shadow Girls, fall somewhere in between—tangled, messy, and not so easily escaped. *** View the full article

My mother-in-law heard I was putting pen to paper and crafting a noir thriller. She sent me two Dorothy B. Hughes paperbacks—In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse. I hope they help you on your journey, she said. I thanked her, and right after I hung up, began to read the first novel. Maybe this would finally get me out of my rut; I was trying to write the end of my novel. Who lives, who dies, does the protagonist leave town, what happens to his friends? In Ride the Pink Horse, Sailor, a hoodlum from Chicago, arrives in Santa Fe. It’s past midnight. Unable to find a hotel because of the annual Fiesta, he wanders around town looking for somewhere he can park his tired self, maybe have a drink and a bite to eat. Hughes sets the scene: “He could hear raucous noise this far away, the sardonic blare of a jukebox, the muffled roar of men mixing with liquor, the shrill screams of women mixing with men and liquor.” Sailor doesn’t hesitate and enters the bar. “The pack around the bar was yelling over the juke. The air was fog blue with smoke. Every table jammed, the square of dance floor jammed. Everybody drinking, everybody screaming, the only silence a scowling waiter, scuttling through the narrow space between the tables, a tray on his uplifted paw.” In a Lonely Place is set in Los Angeles, where the protagonist, Dix Steele, is first seen driving along Sunset, cutting “south at Rodeo, swinging back to Wilshire.” He is a former fighter pilot, he is no longer a hero, and he is struggling to adapt to this new reality. A world where Dix no longer has control. This turns into paranoia and ultimately insanity, which exhibits itself in Dix stalking and strangling young women. On the drive he observes: “It wasn’t pretty for long. A few estates and it became a road of shacks, little places such as men built in the mountains before the rich discovered their privacy and ousted them. And then the shacks were left behind and the road became a curving pass through the canyon to some valley beyond.” Then Hughes infuses the narrative with Dix’s state of mind. “It would be lonely up here at night; there were deep culverts, heavy brush, on the side of the road. It was lonely up here now and they passed no cars. It was as if they had entered into a forbidden valley. . .” I was hooked on Dorothy. I needed more. So I walked through Union Square in the thrall of the Green Market, snaked my way through the clustered shoppers’ bodies, shielded my eyes from the sun breaking sporadically through the leaves of the trees in the park, headed down Broadway, and entered The Strand on the corner of 12th. I walked past the tables stacked with paperbacks and hardcovers all the way to the back of the store, took a left, and found the mystery section. I perused the shelves and spotted one single Dorothy B. Hughes novel—The Expendable Man—covered in a thin layer of dust. I reached up, grabbed the paperback, and glanced at the front jacket. It had an afterword by Walter Mosley. Of course it would be Mosley, he also writes about tormented protagonists in his noirs. And he also penned two enlightening books: This Year You Write Your Novel, and Elements of Fiction. They helped kickstart my writing journey. Without reading the back cover I paid for the book and that evening I began to read it. The story follows Dr. Hugh Densmore, a medical intern from U.C.L.A as he drives from Los Angeles to Phoenix to attend his niece’s wedding. Along the way he reluctantly picks up a hitchhiker—a rude, poorly dressed, and thankless teenage girl. The reader wonders why Hugh feels apprehension while waiting for the girl to hop in his car, discomfort at the thought of teenage joyriders returning to taunt him, impatient at standing still by the side of the road. I interpreted this nervousness as that of a grown man worried that he might be seen with a young girl. The story is set in 1963. The tension ratchets up. Hugh drops the girl off at a bus station. She shows up at his hotel demanding he give her an abortion. He sends her away. And only when detectives pay him a visit does the reader find out that Dr. Hugh Densmore is a Black man. One third of the way into the story. A momentous slight of hand, worthy of Houdini. Now we understand why Hugh was acting the way he was. And in 1963 Arizona, although it isn’t the Deep South as Hugh says to himself, a Black man who was seen giving a white teenager a ride—and the same white teenager is found dead in an Arroyo—is guilty until proven innocent. I finished the novel in one day, mesmerized at Hughes’s ability to propel the story and infuse it with angst throughout, from the dialogue between the Black protagonists, the confrontation with the local (white and racist) detectives, down to the descriptions of the desert, the City of Phoenix, the oppressive heat by day, and the icy air at night. Whether it’s Santa Fe in the thralls of Fiesta, Los Angeles at night, or the Sonoran Desert heat, Hughes infuses her scenes with tension, dread, and anticipation. She goes deep into the psyche of her characters, conveying their mood, their mental state. Her dialogue and prose capture the claustrophobic locales, the ambiance, the desolation, and the loneliness of the protagonists, building suspense that propels the story from the first page to the last. And as a white woman in post-war America, she had courage: she wrote stories about men, she wrote stories about racism, she wrote stories about the tensions that percolated just below the surface of daily life in America. I was not the first to make this observation, but it’s worth repeating: Hughes doesn’t write thrillers, she writes about the inherent evil in men’s souls. Mosley concludes his afterword with, “So why has she [Hughes] not been more celebrated? Why hasn’t her work been anthologized like that of so many of her peers?” Good questions, because that’s what I asked myself after reading her novels. I will not answer Mosley’s questions. I will only say that Dorothy B. Hughes deserves her place in the pantheon of brilliant American writers, thriller and non. *** View the full article

It came to my attention only recently that there isn’t a single essay on this website about the 1985 film Clue—Clue, the ur-text for postmodern whodunnits, the consummate cult classic that gained an enormous throng of celebrants in the years since its release and subsequent critical evisceration. “Critical evisceration” is putting it mildly. Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert said “fun, I must say, is in short supply in ‘Clue.’” Kevin Thomas, of The Los Angeles Times, wrote: ‘Clue’ needs all the splash and gimmickry it can get… it’s no more satisfying as a comedy than it is as a mystery.” In her fabulous 2019 retrospective on the film in the magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room, Julia Selinger acknowledges the unavoidable aspect of the film that contributed to its unilaterally negative critical consensus: “is there,” she asks, “a title card more damning than ‘Based upon the Parker Brothers’ Board Game?’” Indeed, in The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote “Like the board game on which it is based, the movie ‘Clue’ is most fun in its early stages.” In The Washington Post, Paul Attanasio suggested audiences should “leave it with one conviction: stick with the game.” And Ebert began his review with the postulation: ‘Clue’ is a comedy whodunit that is being distributed with three different endings, which is sort of silly, since it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference who did it. That makes the movie a lot like the board game which inspired it, where it didn’t make any difference either, since you could always play another game.” These reviewers’ comparing the film to the board game all make Selinger is correct in her assessment; the adaptive framework of Clue doesn’t bode well for a rich cinematic existence. There is no narrative in a board game, even Clue, which offers a stronger inciting incident than most: a man is found dead in his grand mansion, and one of his six guests must be his killer. Clue the movie is pulled in two directions, trying to be a pastiche and a genuine innovation: a madcap whodunnit spoof (à la Neil Simon’s Murder by Death, a decade prior) and a literal board game come to life. The thing is, and I don’t say this often, I do think that in this instance, the critics may have missed the point. Not entirely, though… it is this latter element of the film (the board game come to life) that all its contemporary critics found both equally vexing and ingenious. The film, written and directed by Johnathan Lynn, features three different endings. Three different outcomes to the mystery, just as is possible in the board game. There is no motive in the board game, so one must be supplied for the film to have any meaning. That is, if it strives for meaning. It doesn’t. Instead, it embraces the randomness of a shuffled card deck, offering three random endings that might satisfy the clues in the story as well as the next. This is what Ebert in referencing in the aforementioned quote, the start of his review of the film—an element that, on its own, he found brilliant. “The way Paramount is handling its multiple endings,” he wrote, “is ingenious. They’re playing each of the endings in a third of the theaters where the movie is booked. If this were a better movie, that might mean you’d have to drive all over town and buy three tickets to see all the endings.” He concludes, though, “[w]ith ‘Clue,’ though, one ending is more than enough.” But he was correct in finding creative merit in this aspect of Clue. Writing in 2021, the scholar Milan Terlunen noted that “Clue lays bare the inner workings of all detective stories. Clue‘s multiple endings aren’t just a clever cinematic translation of the board game’s structure — they reveal something crucial about the nature of clues in general.” He goes on to explain that the very point of “solving” a mystery is “the process of distinguishing clues from red herrings… [t]here’s always too much evidence in a detective story, which fits beautifully with the general too-muchness of Clue.” To wit, a frequently-uttered joke in the very Cold-War-preoccupied Clue is the line “communism was just a red herring!”—which refers to the many, many would-be conspiracy theories that pepper the detective work of Clue, just as much as it speaks to the communist paranoia of the actual Cold War, a period in recent history of rampant speculation and accusation founded on nothing concrete, at all. With sly little nods like this, I think the point of Clue is to point out that there’s rarely ever a mystery at all. At least, not in real life. The goofy, madcap aesthetic of Clue is the outfit for a whodunnit, because whodunnits don’t actually exist. This reminds me of Season One of the extraordinary satire-mystery show Search Party, in which [spoiler] a few bored millennials suspect that they are in a whodunnit and start finding clues… and then realize eventually that everything that seems like a clue is in fact a red herring, and there is no mystery at all. Search Party ostensibly takes place in real life, where there are no mystery-like mysteries at all. The fun of Clue is its existence as a playground, where the absurdities of one of our culture’s favorite genres are laid bare. The plot is, as in the board game, simple. Six random guests receive an invitation to attend a dinner party at a remote mansion. We find out quickly that their colorful names are all proscribed aliases, and they must keep their real identities a secret. They—Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn), Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull), Mr. Green (Michael McKean), Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd), Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren)—meet their host (who we find later has been blackmailing them all, for a long time). Their host, Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving, of the punk band Fear, quickly dies), though, meaning that the six strangers, the butler Wadsworth (Tim Curry), the maid Yvette (Colleen Camp), and the cook (Kellye Nakahara) are all equal possible culprits. The police are called, but with a murderer on the loose in the house, everyone takes it upon themselves to try to solve the crime. There are no butler, no maid, no cook in the game (besides Mrs. White maybe, who is sometimes dressed in a chef’s hat). There’s more of everything in Clue: more characters, more rooms, more weapons, more madness. The tagline of the film is: “it’s not just a game anymore,” which is brilliant. It’s true, it’s not just a game, not by a long shot… there’s too much new stuff in there now. But it’s also still a game. The thing about Clue that separates it from whodunnits lies in this term. Clue is a game the way “red rover” and “dodgeball” are games. It’s not a puzzle. Don’t try to solve it. Just have fun. View the full article

The miniseries Dope Thief premiered on Apple TV+ recently, something exciting for crime fiction fans. It’s adapted from the novel by Dennis Tafoya and created by Peter Craig, with Ridley Scott serving as one of the executive producers. Scott also directed the first of the series’ eight episodes. To discuss the book and the series, I talked with Tafoya, and he was quite forthcoming about the long, winding, unpredictable journey Dope Thief took from its initial publication to its appearance as a drama on television screens. Scott: Let me start by saying congratulations on the series adaptation of Dope Thief. Very exciting. But to start, let’s go back to the beginning. You wrote Dope Thief many years ago now — the novel came out in 2009 — and I’m wondering: Can you even remember how you came to write the novel? What were the inspirations and some of the ideas behind it? Dennis: I think at the time I was such a huge fan of folks like Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, Charles Willeford that I knew I wanted to write about crime and criminals. And I loved crime movies, stuff like To Live and Die in LA, and Drugstore Cowboy, and older classics like Gun Crazy and Asphalt Jungle and High Sierra (That searing Ida Lupino line – “What does it mean when a man crashes out?”) Not to mention all the great nonfiction crime with pulpy covers that I consumed, by folks like Jack Olsen and Anne Rule and Tim Cahill. I think that what I loved to read, the movies I loved, coupled with some of my own experiences working in a hospital and conversations with my uncle, who knew a lot of pretty crazy characters and stories from his neighborhood in South Philly, all of that comes together alchemically when you’re writing, trying to make something people might find interesting. Scott: You mention Philadelphia, which is the central location for the novel. But I like too how you incorporate rural parts of Pennsylvania into the story. It’s been years since I read the novel, but I remember thinking as I was reading that the parts taking place outside Philly, in more remote parts of PA, were interesting precisely because it’s not commonly covered crime fiction geography. There was Witness back in the eighties, taking place in Amish country, and more recently Mare of Easttown (however accurate that is in its depiction of small town Pennsylvania), but I recall thinking that I hadn’t ever spent much time in this locale. All this nasty stuff going on outside the big bad city. Was this stuff you’d researched? If I’m not wrong, you’d lived in more rural parts of the state, no? Dennis: Yeah, the book spent a lot more time in Bucks and Montgomery counties, places closer to where I grew up. In the 70’s and 80’s, Philadelphia-area biker gangs like the Pagans and the Warlocks were deep in the meth business, first by controlling supplies of P2P, a key ingredient, then in distribution. Bikers would rent rural farmhouses and cook meth, then abandon them. When I was working in the ER in the early 80’s, a meth lab burned in upper Bucks county and we got calls through the night from people who had a friend badly burned when the lab went up. The nurses tried to get them to bring the guy to the ER or leave him somewhere an ambulance could pick him up, but he was later found dead from his injuries. That story was something I held onto a long time that eventually found its way into Dope Thief. The folks in Dope Thief can be found in any hard-luck area, rural or suburban, like people I hung out with who lived along the Delaware or in working class towns like Warminster or down in Bristol and Langhorne, closer to Philly. Mare of Easttown occupies a kind of funny space – the real Easttown is a rural township near the Main Line, a green space where there’s a huge national horse show every year. The TV show looks more like communities like Eddystone or Marcus Hook. Maybe HBO didn’t like Mare of Eddystone as much. Scott: Ha, who knows? In Dope Thief, the premise, very quickly, is about two guys, Ray and Manny, best friends and both with some prison time in their pasts, who impersonate DEA agents to rob drug dealers. And things go pretty well until, inevitably, they make a big score but it’s against the wrong people. Some very dangerous people. Things spiral from there as they have to elude the ones they robbed and the real DEA. Was this dangerous modus operandi they have something you discovered in research or just made up yourself? It certainly has the feel of authenticity in the book. Dennis: Pretty much all the crime authors I know start with true stories. The DEA scam is something I’d run across before. For some reason there were a lot of folks impersonating police officers in Florida in the 80s, including William Matix and Michael Platt, two guys who started out robbing dealers and ended up robbing banks and getting into one of the most violent shootouts in FBI history. At one point while I was writing Dope Thief, I wondered if biker crews still engaged in the kind of violence I was depicting, and then the Shedden massacre hit the news. Eight members of the Bandidos club had been murdered on a farm in rural Ontario. It at least confirmed that there was still pretty serious violence connected to the biker drug trade. It’s really important to me to get things as right as I can. Obviously I’m turning these things into fiction divorced from the actual lives and motivations of the people involved, but I want for the action of my books to seem like things that might occur in the world these characters inhabit. Scott: So the book comes out, and that’s always at least somewhat exciting, no matter how many books you’ve written, but there’s nothing like putting out your first novel. You have excitement and perhaps some trepidation? What will the reaction be? Will it sell well? What will friends whose reading judgment you respect think? I imagine there must have been a lot swirling around in your head. What were thoughts when the book was released and how did the actual reaction, whatever it was, from other writers, reviewers, strangers, mesh or not with what you anticipated? And what about the commercial aspect. Did that go in any way like you expected, if you were expecting anything in that regard? Dennis: Wow, yes, when you’re waiting for a reaction to your first book you’re imagining all kinds of wild things. It’s a wonderful, but also terrifying time. I used to joke that I was fine with publishing a novel as long as I could stand over the shoulder of every reader and explain what I was trying to do. Ultimately, I found the book was received well enough in the crime community, but pretty much unknown otherwise. That’s when you begin to realize that for most of us, the reward is gaining entry into a fantastic group of writers. I sure wouldn’t mind being a bestseller, but you release this thing into the wild and it finds its way, or not, and that’s ok. Scott: Several years went by, and two more novels by you came out, The Wolves of Fairmont Park, in 2010, and The Poor Boy’s Game, in 2014. Both are set in Philadelphia, and both are very good, by the way. Want to talk a little bit about how you saw your writing “career” going at that point? Like most writers, you had a full time job through all this, but you’re doing what most of us do, carving out time to plug away at your books. And Dope Thief at this point was…what? Optioned already? Dennis: Thanks to my amazing film agent, Brooke Ehrlich, Dope Thief was optioned several times. It’s something that happens for a lot of authors and by no means insures that there will be much movement toward actual production. It usually means a small payment, which can be a nice boost for working authors with day jobs, especially. Or not – one more frustrating version of the option is the ‘shopping agreement,’ where typically no money changes hands. In the case of my second novel, we entered into a shopping agreement with a brand name director who, his staff assured us, ‘wants to see this on screens by September.’ Of course that went nowhere. Anyone who’s been through the process knows that it rarely leads anywhere (a friend of mine uses the term, ‘many chips flying, few trees falling,’ which I think sums it up nicely). It’s fun to dream, though. It’s hard not to take it to heart, but I certainly had no expectation that I’d ever see any of my books onscreen. Scott: How then did it come about that Dope Thief was adapted as a series for Apple TV? This was many years after the book had first come out. Dennis: My agent was in a meeting with Apple execs who were looking for a crime project for Peter Craig. Peter had written the screenplays for The Town and Top Gun: Maverick, among others. She gave them the manuscript for Dope Thief, which was a pretty amazing thing for an agent to do with a twelve-year-old book. But she’s an amazing agent. The wild thing to me was that Peter had been a crime novelist at the beginning of his career and we had friends in common. About eight years earlier, my wife had taken a picture of my book The Poor Boy’s Game in the ‘Staff Recommends’ section at BookPeople in Austin. The bookseller, Scott Montgomery, had written that if you liked my book, you’d like Peter Craig’s Blood Father, which was a pretty wild coincidence. And I had read Blood Father, so I knew Peter understood the characters I wrote about and was a perfect choice to turn my book into a TV show. (It’s also worth mentioning that Scott Montgomery is a treasure). Scott: Then I suppose came a waiting period as the making of the series got underway. So much waiting when you’re a writer, no matter what level of anything you’re involved in. What was that like and were you sort of like, with mounting excitement, ‘Oh, Ridley Scott is the executive producer, so you know this will be a topnotch production. And oh, they cast Brian Tyree Henry as one lead and Walter Moura as the other lead. I can see them as the characters.’ Across the board, I have to say, the casting is very good. Dennis: It was a long process, a long time between the initial agreement and the final contracts and then until production began. For a good part of that there was an embargo on information from Apple, so when I told my friends, oh, yeah, my ten-year-old novel is going to be on Apple TV+, Ridley Scott is producing and directing, and the guy who wrote Top Gun: Maverick was the showrunner, I think I must have sounded delusional. Brian Tyree Henry is one of those guys who’s just always compelling, and I was a massive fan of Wagner Moura from having watched Narcos end to end about five times. And the cool thing is that every single review seems to focus on the chemistry between those two actors. And the relationship between Brian’s character and Kate Mulgrew as his mother. I think of every character that made the leap from the book to the show, she was my favorite. The character of Theresa is based on (and named after) my grandmother, and it was very cool to get a chance to tell Kate Mulgrew that her performance really captured how I remember her. Like Kate’s character, she took no shit. Scott: Kate Mulgrew is great. And I agree: the relationship between her character and Brian Tyree Henry’s character is one of the best things about the show. I love how at first it’s not spelled out what exactly their connection is, but you come to understand it gradually. And it’s very real, how they rib and pester each other like people who are that close really do. I also like the Vietnamese drug trafficker’s character a lot. He’s got a kind of self-control that’s admirable. Very well-played by Dustin Nguyen. So the production is finally underway, and everything is on track and then the Writer’s Guild strike hit, suspending production. An understandable strike, and as a writer you must have been on the writers’ side, but a part of you must also have been thinking, “I can’t believe this. Will it get finished?” Back to…waiting. Dennis: I was 100% on the side of striking writers and actors, but sure, it was stressful waiting it out, though nothing compared to people whose livelihoods were on the line. Everyone involved felt strongly that Apple would continue production, but it was good to get confirmation when they started to shoot again. Ultimately, they filmed four episodes before the strike and four after, with a delay of almost exactly a year in between. Dustin Nguyen is an incredible presence. He does have that quality of understated power that is perfect for the role of Son Pham. All of the Vietnamese cast members are top-notch. I was on set the day they filmed the second episode scenes where Ray visits Son’s house, and it was so much fun to watch. The two kids, played by Emma Lewis and Jaba Keh, were total troupers, never missing a beat and flawlessly recreating their lines and moves as the crew filmed the same actions over and over from different angles. And Phong Le, Son’s bodyguard, was so wonderfully sinister, though in real life he’s such a kind, thoughtful guy. I also have to mention Kieu Chinh, who plays Dustin’s mom. She’s a legend who’s been acting in Vietnamese and American movies since the 60’s. Scott: It’s been a long journey from the novel’s publication to its coming to the screen as a series, but if nothing else, it does show that once a novel is out in the world, it doesn’t truly die. You never know what will happen to it. And now there’s a new edition of the novel, thanks to the series, which is a pleasing development. Before we end, though, I’m curious. Did you get to watch any of the completed episodes with Peter Craig or any of the cast members or anyone else involved in the series’ making? Dennis: No, I watched a screener at home. In the spirit of complete disclosure, I had to wait for the regularly released version to get the complete experience because I’m hard of hearing and needed the subtitles. Even so, watching the first episode at home with my wife was definitely one of the most surreal and gratifying experiences I’ve had in my writing life. Though nothing will top getting an email from my seventh-grade English teacher giving me a very belated ‘A+’ for the novel. Scott: If that’s not validation, what is? All this has to charge the batteries. And so, fresh off the excitement of all this happening, what’s next? Do you have a new novel in the works? Dennis: I’m working on a novel set in the late 1940s, about a gang of vets committing armed robberies in the Southwest. Doing a lot of research and there are some characters based on real figures of the period. It’s an area and a time I love, and writing it is an excuse to hang out in the desert again. If it all goes to plan, there’ll be characters having drinks at the Zebra Room and then wild firefights in little Mojave towns. Hope people find it fun. View the full article

When writing violence, when does the violence become too much? When reading violence, when does the reader stop caring? If your answer is when it doesn’t serve the plot, then you can kindly hit the bricks. If your answer is that it happens to the “wrong” character, I urge you to fall into a manhole. If your answer is that it’s “needlessly cruel” then my question back is compared to what? My book rekt was called “edgelord” and I’m not entirely sure what that means. Instinctively, I became frightened at the accusations that I was uneducated or unskilled or some incel troll type, but then I realized that that specific self-reflection was the problem. It’s no secret that these days, with the rise of BookTok, BookTube, and #tropes, labels and categories are everything. While I’m sure this is linked with SEOs and shelf talkers and building audiences, what it has mostly done is make an automated labeling system. Off the top of my head, in the genres I work with, I know this much: “elevated horror” suggests “literary” and, thus, award friendly; “transgressive” means taboo and boundary pushing but not without “merit”; and “edgelord” means vile garbage. Going deeper, “splatterpunk” might suggest the amount of blood and bones in a work, and the word “punk” might suggest someone progressive, young, and community minded. But the term “edgelord” suggests that the blood and bones are coming in bad faith. Again, I ask you: compared to what? Is there a series of parameters one must achieve before they earn their violence? How many chapters of poetic backstory does there have to be before someone’s shot in the head? How dimensional must a character be before a brick cracks their skull in? What workshops and MFAs do I need to have attended before writing a massacre? And, perhaps more to the point, how many words do you devote to the scene? What’s the perfect amount? To call someone an edgelord is to excise them. It suggests that the subject matter they have brought to the story is not worth engaging with. They didn’t reach the literary qualifications to justify a hate crime scene. Or, specifically in my scenario, my 100 or so snuff film descriptions didn’t pass some arbitrary test. But, believe it or not, I’m not mad. It seems to me that, as of late, we’re all hoarding our empathy and looking for any reason to not let a book rattle us. It seems to me that, as of late, we’re all hoarding our empathy and looking for any reason to not let a book rattle us. If I have 10 Empathy Tokens, I cannot waste one on a story whose author’s intent is to shock and provoke. An ‘edgelord’ label suggests that there is no heft to the writing. There is “no point.” The gore and guts “don’t serve a purpose.” It’s just provocative and shocking and this and that. Why would I waste my empathy tokens if the violence doesn’t have a point? About a year or so ago my cousin was hate-crimed on the train and now carries a taser. I’m not certain what the point was then, but I spent a token. rekt takes place at my alma mater Florida State University where, as of typing this, a school shooting just occurred. What was the point? I spent a token. Not to mention I was there in 2014 when another shooting occurred. I spent tokens then too. So, maybe right there is a good argument, and I mostly agree. The world is already so pointlessly violent and upsetting and we’re already giving out Empathy Tokens faster than we can generate them. When we sit down to write, maybe there’s something noble in trying to make sense of it. In adding reason to the violence, making it easier to digest and understand and grapple with. But is that honest? There’s a good stretch in rekt where our main guy terrorizes young women, gets them drunk, and shows them AI videos of their own deaths. It could be true that the ‘point’ was showing his toxic masculinity and downward spiral, showing how his choices affect others. Could I have done that in a paragraph? Maybe. But did I want to drag the reader through the mud? Yeah, I did. Because otherwise they wouldn’t have felt it. And maybe feeling it is the point. Sometimes the shock to the system gives it heft. In a horrible horseshoe paradox, sometimes the mindlessness of the violence is the most honest part of all. Everyone loves to quote the Stephen King hierarchy of scares: to terrify is the goal, to horrify is second best, and to gross-out is base and cheap. But King also said that Clive Barker was the future of the genre and Barker’s debut collection featured “Rawhead Rex” – a massive penis monster that ate babies, so the jury is out regarding the so-called scare-tiers. My point is that an edgelord is not an edgelord until they’re called one, and they’re usually labeled as such in a knee jerk reaction. But let’s aside the question of violence for now and talk about the other undeniable connotation of the ‘edgelord.’ It’s that their politics are bad. Look, I get it. These days, every day is an ideological (and sometimes literal) knife fight for basic human decency. When you sit down with a work, you don’t want to witness the sludgy crawl of a lunatic manifesto, and you definitely don’t want to spend an Empathy Token on them. But here’s the thing: where’s the trust? Genre is a safe space, but that should not be confused with safe content. In fact, I argue it’s the opposite. Because genre is a safe space, the writer should feel comfortable stepping out into troubled waters. This is not to say “a marketplace of ideas” or any of that other coded, dog-whistle language, but if we’re engaging with ‘violent subject matter’ then we should be brave enough to deal with it in all directions. if we’re engaging with ‘violent subject matter’ then we should be brave enough to deal with it in all directions. Are you afraid to write the stabbing scene? Or the racist slur scene? Are you afraid to indulge in the lurid POV of the local pervert? Are you afraid to accidentally give a convincing argument for the bad guy who chops up little kids? Or, even more worrisome, are you a POC and/or queer author who feels backed into a certain story? My brother in Christ, I trust you. I walked to the horror section, I read the synopsis, I paid hard cash. I do not come to your books to teach me morality. I come to you to be honest. I want the problematic plots, the questionable storylines, and the vaguely offensive concepts. Why? Because I feel safe in the genre. It’s 100% true that genre writing is political and progressive. But you should rest assured that the onus of learning is on me. I’m an adult man. I’m educated, well adjusted, and know between right and wrong. I’m not coming to you to learn how to love my queer relatives or treat POCs with decency. I’m not coming to learn why capitalism is bad or why minorities deserve rights. I know all these things. If you want to give me a story that flies in the face of these things, that goes way over the line, I’ll happily grapple with these ideas. I believe in radical self-reflection. Exploration is not an endorsement. How can I know my values if you don’t challenge them? How can I know what I stand for if you don’t upset me? Voices from all over should feel emboldened to explore the subject matter that they want. Only in this way, can the genre improve and readers can begin to cross pollinate. I read Mónica Ojeda’s Nefando where young artists upload videos of their own child sex abuse to the internet for others to see. Was it shocking? 100%. Did I feel like Ojeda was robbing me of my tokens? No. It was nice to spend them, even if my reload time took a bit. I read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Pages and pages and pages of rape and murder. Did I think he was trying to “get me.” Yeah, I do. Was it part of the experience and worth it? Totally. And yes, I ran out of tokens during that one but that was also the “point” of it. I read Michael J. Seidlinger’s Anybody Home? Did that book intentionally keep me at arm’s length? Yes. And it was challenging to feel so helpless and it made me look inward to what I value when depicting violence. It felt good to see my own convictions take shape. Convictions that I had never asked myself about before. It’s a bummer to think that if someone pitched those authors as “edgelord” I might not have picked them up. I might not have learned about myself. And, look, far be it from me to put my name up with those authors; they’re legends and heroes. And I’m not going to win, fighting the edgelord label. But maybe I can convince writers to just embrace it. Write extreme. Get lurid. Don’t back away. And to readers, maybe I can convince you to stop hoarding your tokens. It’s nice to spend them. Think of it like you’re investing in the genre and yes, yourself. *** View the full article

A well-known exercise designed to expose implicit sexism: you are asked to think of a doctor, a lawyer, a soldier, any number of high-powered and widely lauded careers – and mostly likely the mental image you conjure will be one of a man. Now turn this exercise on its head. Think of a criminal. Think of a thief, a stalker, a killer. Almost invariably, you thought of a man in this version of the exercise as well. The American carceral state spares no one its mercurial brutality, but the stories we are exposed to about incarceration are overwhelmingly the stories of men. When we think of incarcerated people in general, we rarely think of women. It’s true that women comprise only 10% of the incarcerated population. One-quarter of people arrested in the United States are women, and women are responsible for 20% of violent crimes and 37% of property crimes committed annually. While these figures position women as a minority within the carceral system, those numbers are hardly statistically insignificant. To compare, people with blue eyes account for 10% of the global population. Surely we can all think of at least one blue-eyed person we know. Women face unique challenges both while incarcerated and after release – some of which are easy to surmise, others of which more difficult, and all of which are underpublicized. While incarcerated, women experience sexual abuse and coercion so frequently that, in a report about the epidemic of abuse in women’s prisons, Human Rights Watch states plainly “…being a woman in U.S. state prisons can be a terrifying experience.” (One must frankly question if this needed to be said aloud, as if we could not fathom how the misogyny and threat of violence women encounter in everyday life would be amplified behind bars. Women are brutalized and water is wet.) Incarcerated women also receive disciplinary action at a rate that far exceeds their male counterparts. These woes extended beyond the prison grounds. The unemployment rate of all formerly incarcerated people in 2008 exceeded that of peak national unemployment during the Great Depression. It remains about five times higher than the unemployment rate of individuals who have never been incarcerated. Despite legislative efforts in some states to “ban the box” asking about criminal history on employment applications, discrimination against formerly incarcerated people remains a common practice. Women, particularly Black women, suffer most from this stigma in their job searches, with incarcerated women being unemployed at a rate of six to seven times more than their counterparts who have avoided incarceration. This is to say nothing about the universal challenges faced by all women in the workplace: the gender pay gap, the motherhood penalty in career advancement, America’s appalling lack of maternity leave, the inescapable burden of being perceived as less competent than male colleagues, so on, so forth. Ad nauseam. In an America that frequently touts its (alleged) commitment to the sanctity of the family, one would also be remiss to gloss over the carceral state’s barbaric treatment of mothers and pregnant women. Three-quarters of incarcerated women are mothers, with two-thirds of these mothers having children under the age of eighteen. Compare this to the roughly 50% of incarcerated men who are fathers. Saying that incarceration shatters families is nothing groundbreaking. Mothers, however, are much more likely to be the sole caretakers of their children, and their incarceration generally visits more far-reaching consequences on their families. Only 18% of incarcerated mothers report sharing their children’s caretaking duties, compared to two-thirds of incarcerated fathers. When a father is incarcerated, his child will likely remain in the care of the child’s mother; when a mother is incarcerated, her child will likely be placed in the care of grandparents or, more frequently than we would like to imagine, in the nightmarish American foster care system. This cruelty starts earlier than we should be able to fathom. Up to 9% of women in prison are pregnant at the time of their incarceration, and they will receive little to no prenatal or postnatal care. In every state except New York, these women will be separated from their newborns shortly after birth. These women will, of course, likely receive no counseling to help them manage the animal grief a mother-child separation brings – a separation that should break anyone’s heart just to consider. The crimes of incarcerated women are real, but so is their pain. So is their humanity. Why, then, do their stories remain vanishingly rare in the modern fiction landscape? Even in crime fiction, why do we struggle to center these women? I have my suspicions. Chief among them is this: we have been conditioned to view incarcerated people are morally black instead of morally gray, and while we abide and even occasionally enjoy morally gray women, we do not like our women morally black, even in fiction. When I started writing this article, I searched “books about incarcerated women” in Google to see what I could find. Only works of nonfiction came up, most notably the household name book-turned-Netflix-sensation Orange Is the New Black, first published nearly fifteen years ago. Okay, I said to myself, I’ll change up my phrasing a little. So I typed in “books about ex-felon women.” To my amusement (and frustration), this search yielded a selection of ex-convict romances – and yes, all of the ex-convicts in these books were men. Maybe this speaks to the fallibility of the Google search engine, but I would argue it also speaks to the startling lack of incarcerated women in fiction. Their stories remain all but nonexistent. When I wrote Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter, I wanted to look the dark underbelly of female rage in the eye. For me, this meant writing about a woman whose anger went beyond sassy one-liners and being cutely labeled as “stabby.” Women are capable of violence and brutality. Women are capable of the unthinkable. It has been my experience that considering this makes people more uncomfortable than they are willing to admit, and I, for whatever deep-seated psychological reason I should probably plumb further, enjoy making people uncomfortable with my writing. So why not write about a woman who tried to murder her own mother and spent five years in prison for it? Providence Byrd is a formerly incarcerated women – but like every other formerly and currently incarcerated woman, she is more than the consequences of her crime. She is a devoted sister and friend, a lesbian, a tattoo artist, a survivor. To understand her humanity is to understand that she is capable of violence and hungry for revenge, but also that she feels love, sorrow, joy, pain, and all the other emotions add richness to our world. Like other formerly incarcerated women, her story is layered, complicated, unconventional, and undeniably human. Women need not be paragons of virtue to have stories worth telling. *** View the full article

Three hours. That’s how long it took the state of Alabama to kill Joe Nathan James by lethal injection in 2022, setting a new record for the longest execution in United States history. James’s autopsy showed puncture wounds and bruising at the knuckles and wrists, indicating that executioners had tried (and failed) to insert an IV in those locations. It revealed puncture wounds in his musculature, nowhere near the anatomical vicinity of a vein. And it documented a deep, jagged incision that pathologists suspect occurred when James flinched as executioners were attempting to perform a “cutdown”—a surgical incision used to expose a vein for IV access when all else has failed. James’s autopsy told the story of an inept execution and torturous death, but the state of Alabama told a story of success. According to Alabama’s spokesperson, “Nothing out of the ordinary” had happened. And the worst part? He wasn’t wrong. In Alabama, horribly botched executions by lethal injection are not, in fact, out of the ordinary. Botched executions—executions that go seriously wrong in some obvious way—happen all the time. Two months after the long and laborious death of Joe Nathan James, Alabama punctured Alan Miller eighteen times over the course of ninety minutes in the name of a “humane” death by lethal injection. The state finally stopped the execution, and two months later, it stopped another—the execution of Kenny Smith—when, once again, executioners could not access a vein. Alabama’s governor took the unprecedented step of temporarily halting executions in the state pending a “top-to-bottom review” of lethal injection. Then the state decided to try something new: death by nitrogen gas. Alabama botched that execution too, subjecting the same Kenny Smith to a twenty-two-minute execution in which he gasped for air, writhed, and convulsed so violently that the gurney itself shook. Nitrogen gas is its own train wreck, but let’s not forget the reason for Alabama’s latest move: the problems with lethal injection. Other states are struggling too. In 2014, Oklahoma took over forty-five minutes to execute Clayton Lockett, who woke up in the midst of his own execution and tried to get up off the gurney. The next year, it injected Charles Warner with the wrong drug. Those two incidents inpired a six-year break from executions in the state, but Oklahoma broke that fast in 2021 with the execution of John Grant, who went into full-body convulsions and repeatedly vomited on the gurney after being injected with the drugs. And the list goes on. Arizona conducted three executions by lethal injection in 2022—its first since 2014’s botched execution of Joseph Wood, who gulped and gasped over six hundred times as he died—and Arizona botched all three, leading the newly elected governor to halt further executions in the state pending an independent review of lethal injection. Ohio’s governor also has put executions on hold, explaining in 2019 that lethal injection was putting public health at risk. The state had been buying drugs for lethal injection on the sly through its Department of Public Health and Addiction Services, and when the companies that sold the drugs found out, they threatened to stop sales to Ohio’s state agencies altogether—a move that the governor stated “would put tens of thousands of our citizens at risk.” Tennessee’s governor has temporarily suspended executions too, this time because of revelations that the state had been violating its own execution protocol since 2018. Lethal injection accounts for nearly 98 percent of all executions in the United States. This is how states execute—and it is also why they don’t. Over the last decade, problems with lethal injection have done more to slow executions than any of the death penalty’s other problems, perhaps more than all of them combined. The irony is thick. What was supposed to be a kinder, gentler, more humane way to die at the hands of the state is now responsible for more torturous deaths than any other execution method in our nation’s history. And what was supposed to be a way to make executions easier to carry out has now made them infinitely harder. Why is lethal injection such a hot mess? This is the question I set out to answer as a death penalty researcher. I couldn’t understand why lethal injection—ostensibly the most humane execution method yet devised—kept leading to torturous deaths. We use drugs to euthanize pets every day, and we know how physician-assisted suicide works. If drugs can be used to humanely end life in these other contexts, why are states so breathtakingly bad at doing it here? But the short answer is that most everything I thought I knew about lethal injection was wrong. Lethal injection is nothing like what people think. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are the tip of the iceberg. They are the suffering that we see. Yet there is also suffering that we don’t see. A 2020 study of over two hundred lethal injection autopsies found that 84 percent showed acute pulmonary edema—lungs filled with froth, evidence that prisoners had drowned in their own fluids. As one court put the point, we are essentially waterboarding people to death. We’re just doing it with drugs under a façade of peaceful slumber. But the tale told here is even bigger than the executions themselves, for behind the scenes is where it unfolds. Who knew (I didn’t) that states were deciding what drugs to use by Google searches. Or that the lethal injection drug combination that every state used for thirty years was made up off the top of some guy’s head. Or that the people pushing the syringes aren’t doctors. Or that states were getting drugs for lethal injection (at least until the DEA confiscated them) from a drug distributor run out of the back of a London driving school. States tell us that lethal injection is humane, and when all goes as planned, that is how it looks. The scene is serene and distinctly medical, adding an aura of competence and careful oversight. The white coat enjoys a credibility not associated with the black hood. But the visual is largely stagecraft—what Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Garry Wills has called the “dramaturgy of death.” The gurney, the scrubs, the fact that executioners swab prisoners’ arms with alcohol before inserting the needle that will kill them—it’s all just theater. Backstage is a much uglier truth of medicine run amok. People think lethal injection is a mostly humane execution method that sometimes goes wrong for reasons we can’t quite understand. It is not. Botched executions are not random glitches, but rather the spillover effects of a system that is deeply broken. Lethal injection not working well is how lethal injection works. Why, then, do states stick with it? Granted, a few states are moving to other execution methods—some old, some new. But most have stuck with lethal injection like glue, despite a track record of torturous deaths and a mountain of difficulties at every turn. What explains their dying devotion? The answer lies in the fact that lethal injection is special. Every other execution method—hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber, and firing squad—lays bare the brutality of the state that kills in our name. Lethal injection hides it. With lethal injection, we don’t have to deal with the sight of blood, or the smell of burning flesh, or the sounds of suffering—all potent reminders of what the state is actually doing. Instead, we get to tell ourselves that prisoners are just drifting off to forever-sleep, and that has made it easy for us to not think about what the state is doing. Out of sight, out of mind. The death penalty in America is a highly symbolic issue whose utility lies more in politics than crime control, as criminologist David Garland has powerfully shown. For most Americans, support for the death penalty is support in the abstract. Lethal injection keeps the death penalty abstract. It allows the political uses to flourish while hiding the brutality that executions entail. These are the secrets of the killing state—all that we know from litigation files, scientific studies, investigative journalism, autopsy reports, research across a number of fields, and statements by the people involved. We are now over forty-five years into the lethal injection era, and most Americans still have no idea what states are doing in their name. It’s time they found out. _______________________ Excerpted from Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection by Corinna Barrett Lain, with permission from NYU Press, 2025, www.nyupress.org View the full article

As human beings, we use narratives to make sense of the world around us, even when very little does make sense. We tell ourselves stories in order to both comfort and entertain. And time and time again, we find that we turn to detective fiction during times of upheaval. During dark times, people tend to seek out escapist forms of entertainment to distract themselves from what is going on in the wider world. After the First World War, people increasingly turned to games like bridge, mahjong and crossword puzzles and this “play fever” quickly transferred to detective novels. Murder mystery writers began to write books that were puzzles to be solved and that complied with the fair play doctrine – the concept that the reader should have a fair chance to solve the mystery before the grand reveal. The trick was to provide the reader with enough clues so that they could have, as TS Eliot put it “a sporting chance to solve the mystery”. Detective novels from the Golden Age, and their authors, were concerned with a fairness that doesn’t exist in the real world. Life is so much simpler in a whodunnit where everyone knows their role and where the story – while it may be new and exciting – will always feel ultimately familiar and comforting. Detective novels come with solutions, conclusions, a person you can point a finger at. There will always be someone to blame. Someone to haul off to the scaffold. As George Grella writes in his essay Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel, “Once the murderer leaves, the world of the novel begins to approach its former peacefulness…cleansed of guilt, free of complication and obstacles, recreated anew from the shambles of a temporary disorder…the happy and orderly end toward which the detective has been working.” But of course, real life isn’t like that. It might be tempting to view everything in life as a mystery that needs to be solved. And indeed, tempting to believe that everything has a clear and single explanation. We like puzzles because there is always a solution. We like detective stories because we know that in the end there will be a satisfying reveal: a simple narrative that allows everything to make sense. During the Golden Age period, murder mystery-style party games like Wink Murder and Murder in the Dark became very popular. This gamification of death took the power, the sting, out of a terrible tragedy and emphasised that of course none of this was actually real – it was in fact just a game. The perfect antidote for a public dealing with the aftermath of World War One. More recently, during our own unsettled times, we have seen the success of crime logic gamebooks like GT Karber’s Murdle series, the popularity of escape rooms and the boon in jigsaw puzzle sales during the pandemic. In 1944, the American literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote a piece in The New Yorker entitled “Why do People Read Detective Stories?” His conclusion was that the popularity of detective fiction in the years between the World Wars was down to an “all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster which it seemed hopeless to try to avert because it never seemed conclusively possible to pin down the responsibility. Who had committed the original crime and who was going to commit the next one?…Nobody seems guiltless, nobody seems safe; and then, suddenly, the murderer is spotted, and—relief!—he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain—known to the trade as George Gruesome—and he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly how to fix the guilt.” More recently, people have flocked once again to detective fiction – especially Golden Age-style novels. In July 2020, as bookshops in the UK were reopening, The Guardian reported that nearly 120,000 more crime and thriller books were bought in the last two weeks of June 2020 than compared to the same point the previous year. Crime was, during this period, the UK’s most popular book genre. In 2023, the Crime Writers’ Association announced the addition of a Whodunnit Dagger to their awards for classic or ‘cosy crime’ novels, another sign of their increasing prevalence. And The British Library’s series of Crime Classics have continued to sell well with Mystery in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon became a number one bestseller for Waterstone’s. In my novel Fair Play, I use the fair play rules together with the familiar structure of a Golden Age detective novel – with its murder, its suspects, its Watson and its reveal – to explore the emotions around grief. In the aftermath of her brother’s sudden death, the main character Abigail dips between real life and the imaginary world of the detective novel. In both worlds she is looking for answers – for clues – to understand her circumstances. The murder mystery provides her with a familiar pathway amidst the unpredictability of real life and also much-needed comfort in her time of grief. In a detective novel, we know that as each chapter goes by, we are getting closer and closer to a conclusion – to the answer we have been searching for. Or at least that is what Abigail is hoping. As Dorothy L Sayers writes in her book Begin Here, published during the Second World War: “We are lost and unhappy in a universe that seems to make no sense, and cling to science and machines and detective fiction, just because, within their limited fields, the problems do work out, and the end corresponds to the intention.” *** View the full article