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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
Forums
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete in today's market. Just beware because we do have a sense of humor.
I've Just Landed So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts - NWOE Novel Writing Guide
Crucial Self-editing Techniques - No Hostages
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George, "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, and "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many horrid and writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom in the novel writing universe. All topics are unlocked and open for comment.
Margaret Atwood Said What?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of informative, entertaining, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on Youtube. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Members of the Algonkian Critics Film Board (ACFB) include Kara Bosshardt, Richard Hacker, Joseph Hall, Elise Kipness, Michael Neff, and Audrey Woods.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read fascinating articles and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side. Also, check out the UMS SFF short story contest. Now taking entries.
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. If you're in the early or middle stages of novel writing, you'll get a lot from this. We cannot thank her enough for this collection of literary dissection.
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2024
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New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
- New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
- New York Write to Pitch Conference Reviews
For New York Write to Pitch or Algonkian attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Assignments include conflict levels, antagonist and protagonist sketches, plot lines, setting, and story premise. Publishers use this forum to obtain information before and after the conference event, therefore, writers should edit as necessary. Included are NY conference reviews, narrative critique sub-forums, and most importantly, the pre-event Novel Development Sitemap.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Writer Conferences nurture intimate, carefully managed environments conducive to practicing the skills and learning the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive commercial or literary novel. Learn more below.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
Algonkian Conferences - Ugly Reviews
Algonkian's Eight Prior Steps to Query
Why do Passionate Writers Fail?
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Algonkian Novel Development and Writing Program
This novel development and writing program conducted online here at AAC was brainstormed by the faculty of Algonkian Writer Conferences and later tested by NYC publishing professionals for practical and time-sensitive utilization by genre writers (SF/F, YA, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, etc.) as well as upmarket literary writers.
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7 Great Debut Novels Out This Month: June 2024
The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Monika Kim, The Eyes are the Best Part (Erewhon Books) In this darkly funny psychological horror, a college student must protect her mother and her sister from her mother’s creepy new boyfriend. Like all the other men in their lives, he’s trying to reduce their humanness into stereotypes about doll-like, submissive Asian women, and Kim’s protagonist is certainly not going to let him get away with it. She’s also spending a lot of time having intense dreams about eating bright blue eyes, standing over her sleeping enemies and fantasizing their demise, and generally losing touch with reality in a way that pays plenty of dividends by the novel’s end. Ram Murali, Death in the Air (Harper) This locked-room mystery/comedy of manners takes place at a high-end spa with an exclusive clientele. When one of the resort’s patrons turns up dead, a visiting lawyer is recruited to investigate the murder (in between treatments, of course). Murali’s sly, knowing, and affectionate take on the foibles of the international jet set is as charming as it is compelling. Henry Wise, Holy City (Atlantic Monthly Press) Look out for Holy City, a debut novel of immense power. When a Black man is killed in a small Southern Virginia town, and an innocent man is arrested for the crime, two people who prefer to work alone find themselves working together to solve it. Bennico is a private detective who has been hired by the local Black community, after the sheriff’s department won’t do anything to investigate. Will is the deputy sheriff, and is angry that he’s told to stand down, especially because the crime is highly personal; the murdered man is Tom Janders, a Black neighbor and Will’s old friend, who once protected Will and suffered because of it.—Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads editor Alejandro Nodarse, Blood in the Cut (Flatiron) In Nodarse’s assured debut, a young man at a crossroads tries to save his family’s butcher shop against pressures from all sides. Nodarse conjures up a captivating vision of life in Miami, with shady operators around every corner and family legacies in peril. Nodarse is a writer of great promise, and readers will be clamoring for a follow-up.–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads editor-in-chief Leslie Stephens, You’re Safe Here (Gallery/Scout Press) In this futuristic wellness thriller, a secretive Silicon Valley company has just launched the first wave of wellness “pods”—self-sustaining bubbles in which the wealthy and privileged can find inner peace while drifting along an ocean belt known for its stable weather and lack of storms. The pods are rumored to have major design flaws, and the two powerful figures at the center of the company are in a contest of will to determine who bears the blame for any disasters. One of the company’s best workers is drawn into the intrigue brewing between founders as she desperately races to save her fiancee, encased in one of the pods, from a looming storm threatening the pod’s integrity. Chockfull of warnings about tech gone awry (and also lots of tech that I would frankly love to have in my life). Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer (Berkley) Would you strike up a romance with a potential murderer if he took your book recommendations? In this knowing critique of true crime culture and modern love, a woman begins a romance with a suspected serial killer and becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about her new paramour. I sped through this novel and related to many of its uncomfortable truths about the misogyny within ordinary relationships that makes dating a man accused of horrible crimes who treats you well seem…justifiable? Or at least, rather understandable… Olivia Muenter, Such a Bad Influence (Quirk) Muenter’s Such a Bad Influence is a nasty little gem of a novel with a perfectly shocking twist. Hazel Davis is the underachieving sister of a social media star; when her influencer sibling vanishes in the middle of a live video, Hazel investigates the disappearance, but her quest for her beloved younger sister will lead her to a far darker place than she could have ever predicted. Muenter’s debut is wickedly clever and incredibly self-assured; I can’t wait to see what she does next. View the full article -
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Why Women Love Bad Boys–And What It Means for Crime Culture
It’s a trope that women love bad boys. In third grade, my friends and I were obsessed with the movie Grease where good girl Sandy falls in love with bad boy Danny Zuko. We watched the film again and again, memorizing the songs. I learned something else too, that even good girls desired men who were bad. In high school, I longed for a Danny Zuko of my own and was disappointed by the nice dorks I was surrounded by. In lieu of a bad boy fix, I lusted after fictional monsters like Edward Cullen in Twilight. Edward is straightforward with Bella that he’s a killer, which only makes her want him more. This made sense to me. No one wanted the simpleton at the high school or even the well-meaning werewolf when they could have someone dangerous. As an adult, I started reading true crime and was fascinated by the women that devoted themselves to men accused of serial murder, like Carol Ann Boone, who was impregnated by Ted Bundy during his trial, or the Manson girls who carved swastikas into their foreheads in support of their murderous leader. I judged these women and yet understood that the distance between us was uncomfortably close. In my debut novel, Love Letters to a Serial Killer, the protagonist falls in love with an accused serial killer. I’m different from her in the way in that I have never fallen in love with a killer myself, but I understand how it could happen because I have repeatedly found myself attracted to men, both fictional and real, that have an aura of badness to them. With such men, the badness is the appeal. I’m not alone in this. Recently, I was watching an episode of the Bravo reality series Southern Charm and one of the cast members repeatedly says “I like bad boys” as an explanation for why she continues to love her terrible ex-boyfriend. It’s easy to talk about this trope on individual terms, to say “she has terrible taste in men” or “she runs towards red flags.” I think there’s more to it than that. While I don’t want to suggest that women who fall in love with men that they know are bad for them aren’t in charge of their own decisions, I think that this type of desire is incentivized from a young age because it allows men who misbehave to not only get away with such behavior, but be considered “sexy” for it. There’s a term, “Overton Window,” that describes the spectrum of acceptable behavior that’s usually applied to the government. A shift in the window either to the right or left means a change in what is acceptable. Unintentionally or not, when we idolize killers, even fictional ones, like Joe Goldberg from You or the protagonist of Dexter, we move the window of acceptability a little wider. As far as I’m aware, no one I know has ever fallen in love with a serial killer. I have, however, had close friends date men that demeaned them, flirted with other women, and repeatedly ghosted them. Rather than this behavior being a turnoff, it only increased their desperation for returned affection. Before I met my husband, I was the same way. In retrospect, it feels so illogical. Why did I want men that I knew had the power to hurt me? What was so unattractive about people that were good? Even within my marriage, I’ve continued to lust after fictional bad boys including the entire cast of Succession and the male love interest of several romantasy series. I watched Barry Keoghan in Saltburn and thought “Ah, yes, this is the type of weird little freak that I want.” It’s easy to judge women who go after men that are bad for them, but I don’t think that is should be argued that this trait is a rarity. Whether they are watching Grease, Twilight, You, or any number of media that idolize badness, women are taught from a young age that monstrous men are sexy. In my novel, the protagonist takes this attraction to the extreme by actually attending the trial of an accused killer. While the majority of us haven’t done this, how many hours of our lives have we dedicated to watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, or reading books about men who have done evil things? If the choice was presented before you between a date with a bland nice man or someone mean and hot, who would you pick? Be honest. There’s something appealing in the badness. None of this is a coincidence. As much as we might claim otherwise, we live in a culture where bad boys are idolized. Instead of solely critiquing the women that become trapped in their web, maybe we should think more about the things that push them there to begin with and who benefits from it. Why should men be good when they can be bad and women will love them for it? *** View the full article -
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The Jewel Thief and the Prince of Wales
Long Island and Manhattan • 1924 A man in a tuxedo and winged collar navigated a room filled with black-clad men and elegant women in Parisian gowns, sparkling with jewels. He docked alongside a group of guests who had formed a cordon around a punch bowl. Someone offered him a drink, and as names were exchanged the newcomer identified himself as Gibson. Dr. Gibson. He had thick black hair, blue eyes, and the chiseled good looks of the matinee idols seen—but not yet heard—in the movie houses. Some guests may have done a double take as he passed; he was a dead ringer for the British actor Ronald Colman, who had been catapulted to Hollywood stardom the previous year in The White Sister, starring opposite silent-era legend Lillian Gish. One of the punch bowl’s defenders was short and slim, with sandy hair, and needed no introduction. His boyish face was tilted slightly downward, betraying his shyness, and his puppy-dog eyes had been staring out from the pages of every newspaper in the United States for days. Gibson, who scoured the society pages of New York City’s papers as meticulously as a prospector in search of gold or precious jewels, had recognized him from across the room. Edward, the Prince of Wales, was almost a week into a much-ballyhooed American holiday. Eager for a break from his royal duties, the heir to the British throne had headed for “that slender riotous island,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald would describe it in his soon-to-be-published novel, The Great Gatsby, “which extends itself due east of New York.” Long Island. The September 1924 royal holiday coincided with a late-summer heat wave. The prince was the guest of honor at dinners, dances, and cocktail parties in the imposing mansions of the island’s elite. He went riding and played polo on their manicured grounds. He boarded their yachts to skim the waves of Long Island Sound. He golfed their private courses and plunged into their swimming pools. A fox hunt with a pack of about a hundred hounds was organized, to make him feel at home. “Never before in the history of metropolitan society,” claimed a columnist for the New York American, “has any visitor to these shores been so persistently and so extravagantly feted.” Standard Oil executive Harold Irving Pratt and his wife, Harriet, threw a garden party for the prince and two hundred guests at Welwyn, their country estate at Glen Cove, which overlooked the sound and was considered “one of the show places of Long Island.” But they were soon upstaged by Clarence H. Mackay, a financier and heir to a mining fortune, who hosted a dinner and dance for the distinguished visitor and almost one thousand worthies at Harbor Hill, a replica French château with six hundred acres of grounds. A platoon of workmen spent days trucking in potted orange trees and installing strands of yellow electric lights, transforming the outdoor dining area into “a fairyland” fit for a prince. “A royal fete for a royal guest,” gushed Washington, DC’s Evening Star. Not to be outdone, iron and steel magnate James Abercrombie Burden handed the prince the keys to Woodside, a Georgian mansion near Syosset that could have been transported intact from the English countryside. One New York newspaper gave it a new name: Burden Palace. The prince and his entourage were also free to drive the automobiles Burden kept on-site, a fleet that included five chrome-grilled, bug-eyed Rolls-Royce limousines. The Cedars, the estate of Oklahoma oilman Joshua S. Cosden and his wife, Nellie, in Sands Point, however, turned out to be the biggest draw for the prince. The mansion, overlooking a wide white-sand beach, was a rambling, colonial-style confection of porches and columned verandas, with two tiers of dormers and eyebrow windows peeking out from its barnlike gambrel roof. Its owners offered the prince something the Burdens, Pratts, and other Long Island hosts could not: familiar faces. His cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Lady Edwina, along with his close friend Jean Norton, wife of the future Lord Grantley, were staying at The Cedars. When the Cosdens hosted a late-night party in early September, the prince and his aides commandeered one of the Burden cars and drove over. It was there, in the midst of what one press report termed a “small but jolly” gathering, that Gibson met the prince. Gibson also caught a glimpse of the Mountbattens—the “dark, handsome naval officer,” he recalled, and the “lovely Lady Mountbatten, a pearl of international society”—as they chatted with other guests. The party was the kind of modest, laid-back gathering the prince had been craving since his arrival. This was a holiday, not an official visit; his only commitment was to attend an international polo championship being staged on Long Island, to cheer on the British team. Edward had been traveling the world as Britain’s goodwill ambassador—cutting ribbons, making speeches, and shaking hands to shore up wartime alliances and drum up trade deals. He wanted a break. “He is here to play,” one of his aides, Tommy Lascelles, reminded the reporters and photographers documenting his every move. “His royal highness is entitled to some time to enjoy himself.” The prince was the first of what would become a twentieth-century phenomenon: the royal celebrity. And he was furious to discover that American journalists were more aggressive and relentless than their British counterparts. “These Yank pressmen are b––s,” he griped to his private secretary in unroyal language. “One does resent their d––d spying.” The most eligible bachelor on the planet had turned thirty in June, and the American papers were obsessed with the notion that “Prince Charming” had come to their shores in search of a bride. “Would you marry an American girl if you fell in love with one?” was one of the first questions a reporter fired at him when he reached New York on board the liner SS Berengaria. And there were plenty of candidates eager to meet him or to catch his eye. ARMY OF LOVELY WOMEN SEEK HIS PRINCELY SMILE, shouted a headline in the New York Daily News. Hundreds of women “forgot decorum,” as one journalist put it, and stood on their seats at Belmont Park to catch a glimpse of him as he watched the thoroughbred races from the judges’ box. When Gibson first spotted the prince at the Cosdens’ party, an older woman was monopolizing the guest of honor’s time, no doubt extolling the beauty and virtues of a daughter or niece. The prince had been listening politely, a cocktail in his right hand and his left arm gracefully folded against the small of his back. But it was not the woman vying for the prince’s attention that caught Gibson’s eye; it was the expensive jewelry adorning the necks and wrists and fingers of so many others. “I’m a judge of that sort of thing,” he admitted, “and I couldn’t help but admire what they wore.” Years later, he still remembered an antique Chinese piece he spotted that night, fashioned from hand-hammered gold and set with a single diamond. Someone in the prince’s group suggested they “get away from the women” for a while. Gibson piped up and suggested “a sortie to gayer places,” that they drive into Manhattan and “see the town.” Gibson offered to be their guide. A couple of the men surrounding the prince objected, and the idea was dropped. But Edward was not willing to pass up the opportunity to sample New York’s nightlife. “Wales does things spontaneously and when he chooses,” noted one of the American journalists covering his visit. “That is part of his charm.” The prince took his new acquaintance aside. For once, he was free of the reporters who relentlessly shadowed him. This was his chance to see New York as a tourist, not as a future king. “Dr. Gibson,” he asked, “is that little lark still on?” *** “Hello, suckers!” Those were the first words most patrons heard after they climbed a flight of stairs and slipped inside one of New York’s most famous speakeasies, a greeting shouted over the din of the crowd by a brash blue-eyed blond woman who was clearly in charge. The awning over the entrance door below, on West Forty-Fifth Street, identified it as the El Fey Club, but everyone in New York called it Texas Guinan’s place. Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan was a former vaudeville and movie star who had reinvented herself as a nightclub manager. Texas-born, which explained her nickname, she had appeared in The Gun Woman, Code of the West, The Wildcat, and dozens of other westerns. When bootlegger Larry Fay opened the El Fey earlier that year, he hired Guinan to recruit musicians and dancers, emcee the floor shows, and welcome customers with her cheeky trademark greeting. A “formidable woman,” was the verdict of critic and journalist Edmund Wilson, “with her pearls, her prodigious glittering bosom, her abundant and beautifully bleached yellow coiffure, her bear-trap of shining white teeth.” A saucy Mae West prototype, she presided over her domain, mused one journalist who dropped by, “like a gorgeous tamer who had just let herself into a large cage of pet tigers.” As many as two hundred could be packed into the club’s narrow, smokefilled room, but no more than a half dozen couples could sardine onto the tiny patch of dance floor. A jazz band and Guinan’s outsized personality attracted the likes of actor Al Jolson, boxer Jack Dempsey and, on this night, a future king of England. Guinan, ever the cheeky self-promoter, would later boast to audiences that she had once hosted the world’s most famous prince, “a little fellow who never had a backyard or a dirty face.” The prince had convinced a few of his companions to join Gibson on the lark. Their destination was Broadway. The White Light Belt, New Yorkers called it, or simply the Big Street. The grid of avenues and cross streets of the theater district—an area known as the Roaring Forties, with the El Fey at its epicenter—was jammed with restaurants, nightclubs, and cabarets. This was where “society, the stage, the movies and the wealth and the fashion of the town go,” noted the Daily News, “in the hours when the gay set is at its best.” Alcohol flowed as if Prohibition had never become the law of the land. To stymie the federal agents who conducted periodic raids, the El Fey stashed its liquor in the building next door, passing bottles into the club as needed through a hole in the wall that could be concealed with a loose brick. The El Fey was known for the young, scantily clad dancers who performed and, between numbers, mingled with the men in the audience. “It was a bacchanalian feast, a Roman orgy, a politician’s clambake, all rolled into one,” recalled one of Guinan’s friends, the theater producer and publicist Nils T. Granlund. A newspaper illustrator would later imagine the prince and Gibson seated at a table and offering toasts to a lineup of bob-haired showgirls in low-cut outfits, one of them wearing a top hat presumably plucked from the royal head. The caption: “Princely Fun.” At the El Fey and other stops, Dr. Gibson would recall, the prince’s companions referred to him as Mr. Windsor, “a high-ranking member of the British diplomatic corps.” The subterfuge suited the prince’s guide. He wasn’t a doctor, and his name wasn’t Gibson. They hopped from the El Fey to what Gibson billed as “a swell spot” on East Fifty-Ninth Street. The Club Deauville’s “atmosphere of mystery,” press reports noted, attracted “many socially prominent New Yorkers.” Members of the house orchestra, Clark’s Hawaiians, navigated between tables as they took requests and played music from the islands. It was a slow night, with only a few tables occupied and the occasional couple fox-trotting around the dance floor. Someone offered the prince a lei, which he draped around his neck. He praised the fine tenor voice of one of the singers, then asked the band to play his favorite Hawaiian song, a chart-topping hit that year called “Aloha ‘Oe” (“Farewell to Thee”). Gibson grabbed a seat beside the prince, and they chatted, about nothing in particular—Broadway shows, popular tunes of the day, how Prohibition made it so hard to find decent liquor, even in fun-loving, booze-soaked New York. Gibson helped himself to champagne but noticed that the prince drank little. A third stop was the Florida Club, on West Fifty-Fifth Street, where a piano was set up in the middle of the room and the group took in a musical review. The two men hit it off. The prince struck Gibson as “a real fellow. A real sport.” They were almost the same age. Both were unmarried, and both had served in the war—Gibson as a medic in the US Army, the prince as an officer in the Grenadier Guards, who toured front-line trenches to boost morale. Gibson’s posh accent masked his working-class roots in Worcester, Massachusetts. He seemed to know everyone who mattered, dropping names of the rich and famous with ease. His wit, charm, and flawless manners were those of a well-educated, well-bred member of a family that was wealthy and important. And in a tux—the work clothes of his trade—he looked the part, too. For a nighttime foray like the one to the Cosden estate, Gibson “dressed faultlessly in evening clothes,” his future wife, Anna Blake, would note. “He always looked handsome in them.” Gibson said his goodbyes around half past five, barely an hour before sunrise, hailed a taxi, and returned to his Manhattan apartment. The prince and his companions piled into their car for the thirty-five-mile trek back to the Burden estate. The royal tour of Manhattan’s nightlife was soon the talk of the city. The borrowed car was spotted near Texas Guinan’s, on a street off Broadway. A suspicious journalist traced the plates and discovered it belonged to the prince’s host. “He went in disguise to one of the white light jazz palaces on Broadway,” noted one account. “Nothing could prevent his instinct for fun bringing him into close view of the twinkling lights and engaging characters of New York’s night life.” *** A king-in-waiting had managed to enjoy a few fleeting hours of freedom by pretending to be Mr. Windsor. He never suspected that his guide had been playing a part as well. Gibson had not been on the guest list for the Cosdens’ party. Before meeting the prince that night, he had parked his red Cadillac coupe on a secluded lane at the edge of the estate, bypassing the fieldstone gatehouse at the entrance to The Cedars. He crouched in the shrubbery in his tux until he saw an opening, then emerged—“as spick and span in my dress clothes as any guest,” he later boasted—to mingle with people chatting and drinking nearby on a brick terrace. As a waiter passed, he scooped up a cocktail and joined the conversation. He soon slipped into the darkness and wandered alongside the mansion until he found a secluded spot. He climbed a rose trellis to the roof of a porch. Above him was a second-floor window, left open on the warm summer night. Grasping the ledge, he hoisted himself inside. He pulled on a pair of white silk gloves, ensuring that he left no fingerprints, and crept from bedroom to bedroom. He checked the tops of dressing tables and quietly slid open bureau drawers. He could hear muffled voices and music from the party below. If anyone came upstairs and spotted him in the hallway, he knew what to do—he would pretend to be lost or drunk, or claim he was looking for the bathroom. He could find no jewelry worth taking. The fortune in gems he had come for was either locked away or on display downstairs. He returned to the open window and was about to climb out when he realized a few guests had gathered under the porch while he was inside. A waiter was refreshing their glasses, and they appeared to be in no hurry to move along. There was only one other way out. He followed the hallway to the main staircase and descended into the heart of the party. When a young woman coming up the stairs smiled at him as they passed, he was certain he looked like any other guest. Gibson’s real name was Arthur Barry, and he was one of the most brazen and successful jewel thieves in history. He was a bold impostor, a charming con artist, and a master cat burglar rolled into one. During the Roaring Twenties, with the posh estates of Long Island and New York’s Westchester County as his hunting grounds, he swiped diamonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds, and other glittering gems worth almost $60 million today. His victims included a Rockefeller, bankers and industrialists, Wall Street bigwigs, and an heiress to the Woolworth five-and-dime store fortune. A skilled “second-story man,” Barry could slip in and out of bedrooms undetected, sometimes as the occupants were sleeping inches away, oblivious to his presence. He hobnobbed with celebrities and millionaires as he cased their mansions and planned some of the most audacious and lucrative jewel heists of the Jazz Age. He outfoxed investigators, eluded the posse of police and private detectives trying to hunt him down, and staged a spectacular prison break to reunite with the woman he loved. He was touted in the press as a “Prince of Thieves” and an “Aristocrat of Crime.” Life magazine would proclaim him “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived.” Barry smoothed his hair into place, straightened his bow tie, and headed for the punch bowl to launch his night on the town with the prince. He now knew the upstairs layout of the Cosden mansion. He would be back. ___________________________________ From A Gentleman and a Thief © 2024 by Dean Jobb. Reprinted with permission of Algonquin Books. View the full article -
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Five Favorite Fictional French Flics
My protagonist in the Countess of Harleigh mysteries, Frances Hazelton, generally takes on crime in late Victorian London. She’s an amateur sleuth, so police procedures don’t take on a huge role in the story, but even if I don’t show them to the reader, I need to know what those procedures are. How is Inspector Delaney, my London cop, going about his investigation, while Frances works the case in her own way? The police in my mysteries don’t bumble and fumble—they are professionals even if they stretch the rules now and then to allow Frances or her husband, George, access to evidence or crime scenes. After all, when the crime happens among the aristocracy, it helps to have assistance from inside that tight knit group. Over time, Frances and Inspector Delaney developed a working relationship. Then I ruined everything by sending Frances and her husband to Paris, where, of course, they have to deal with a murder. Delaney can’t go with them, and since Frances and George are not the police, I had to create some police authority for them to work with—a French Flic. I came up with Daniel Cadieux, a Parisian down to the bone, regardless of the Belgian surname. Charming and confident with a dry wit, Cadieux is definitely his own character, but I’ll admit to studying many of the French detectives who came before for inspiration. Here are some of my favorite fictional French flics and their methods of investigation. Detective Chief Superintendent Jules Maigret, created by Georges Simenon Maigret began his career as a police officer in his 20s. In the novels I’ve read, and the 90s British TV series, Maigret was between 45 – 55 years old. He’s a big guy in well-cut suits, an overcoat, and bowler, and frequently smokes a pipe. His method of investigation is to get into the head of the killer and ultimately empathizes so much that he regrets the need to arrest them. However, Maigret is so much in the killer’s head, and his own, that his character wouldn’t make a good partner for my amateur sleuth. With Maigret on the case, no one else is needed, just a certain amount of patience. If you need daily updates, he’s not your man. Chevalier Auguste Dupin, created by Edgar Allen Poe Dupin first appeared in 1841 in the short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Like Maigret, Dupin’s method of investigation relies on close observation and through his logic seeks the simplest of conclusions from those observations. I’m cheating a little here because Dupin is not a member of the police—even though he knows the prefect—but a private investigator. Though he lives in reduced circumstances, he is from the upper class and is a Knight in the Légion d’honneur. He is a mathematician, a poet and a solitary individual. The workings of his mind are revealed through his friend the narrator. If you want a detective who is simply brilliant, Dupin would fit the bill. Monsieur Lecoq, created by Emile Gaboriau Monsieur Lecoq arrived on the literary scene in 1868 as a detective employed by the French Sûreté. His character is clearly based on the non-fictional Eugene-Francois Vidocq, the criminal who started his career on the right side of the law when he was recruited as a prison informant. He produced such good results that he was released to form a detective unit within the police. He hired ex-criminals and used their combined knowledge of the underworld to great success. The character Lecoq, young and energetic, also uses his criminal background to inform his investigations. He enjoys the challenge of finding the solution to a case in the smallest of clues. Though I skipped the criminal background, this character may have the most influence on my Inspector. Inspector Gabriel Hanaud, created by A.E.W. Mason Inspector Hanaud first appeared in 1910 in the novel At the Villa Rose. Subsequent books released sporadically over the next 36 years, likely due to two wars, with the sixth and final book published in 1946. The author has been quoted as saying he wanted to create a detective as physically unlike Sherlock Holmes as possible. Hanaud is stocky with broad shoulders as opposed to Holmes slenderness, but his personality is also in opposition to Holmes. Hanaud is open and friendly. He trusts his intuition and occasionally turns to psychology when working on a case. A very likeable character who gets results and may have been one of the inspirations for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Inspector Jacques Clouseau, created by Blake Edwards Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther series did not appear in any books, but is such a famous fictional French police officer, I had to include him. Bumbling, fumbling, with such a ridiculous French accent that even the French characters in the movies failed to understand him. Clouseau created chaos with every step, but miraculously always managed to catch the culprit. Over the series, he was successful enough to be promoted to Chief Inspector. While I enjoy a little humor and would love to write lines as hilarious as some of Clouseau’s, my inspector is a secondary character and someone like this would definitely steal the show. *** View the full article -
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June’s Best Psychological Thrillers
It’s hot Wet Bulb summer! So pick up a psychological thriller and read it next to the pool, close to the fan, and late into the night. June’s best suspenseful tales feature delightfully unreliable narrators, wickedly funny skewerings, and intricately plotted reversals. Thanks, as always, for reading the column, and without further ado—the list! Olivia Muenter, Such a Bad Influence (Quirk) Muenter’s Such a Bad Influence is a nasty little gem of a novel with a perfectly shocking twist. Hazel Davis is the underachieving sister of a social media star; when her influencer sibling vanishes in the middle of a live video, Hazel investigates the disappearance, but her quest for her beloved younger sister will lead her to a far darker place than she could have ever predicted. Muenter’s debut is wickedly clever and incredibly self-assured; I can’t wait to see what she does next. Lucy Foley, Midnight Feast (William Morrow) This one is being billed as Midsommar meets Fyre Festival and I couldn’t agree more! Foley’s latest takes place during the opening weekend of a luxurious new getaway promising healing crystals, private beaches, and “forest baths” at a steep price. But you can’t put a price on inner peace, at least, not when so many disparate forces are praying for the resort to fail. The locals are pissed, the staff have their own agendas, the guests are not whom they seem, and the forest is full of rage and ready for vengeance. Nicola Yoon, One of Our Kind (Knopf) Many have ventured into the “neighborhood that is not what it seems” category of suspense, but no one has done it better than Nicola Yoon. At the start One of Our Kind, Jasmyn and King Williams move into a highly selective gated community catering to wealthy and successful Black families. Jasmyn soon finds, however, that despite the neighborhood’s claim to be a Black utopia, none of her new neighbors are interested in social justice or, indeed, Black culture as a whole. The town’s secret, when finally discovered, is both completely logical and absolutely jaw-dropping. Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer (Berkley) Would you strike up a romance with a potential murderer if he took your book recommendations? In this knowing critique of true crime culture and modern love, a woman begins a romance with a suspected serial killer and becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about her new paramour. I sped through this novel and related to many of its uncomfortable truths about the misogyny within ordinary relationships that makes dating a man accused of horrible crimes who treats you well seem…justifiable? Or at least, rather understandable… Peter Swanson, A Talent for Murder (William Morrow) Swanson always delivers perfectly calibrated suspense alongside the thrills of a truly clever mystery. In his newest, A Talent for Murder, an archival librarian begins to suspect the man she married may be carrying out a series of murders around the country. Her unique skills, along with some help from an old grad school friend, soon throw her deep into an investigation. Swanson drives the story to a smart conclusion that will keep readers guessing to the end. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads editor-in-chief Susie Orman Schnall, Anna Bright Is Hiding Something (Sparkpress) In this Silicon Valley-set thriller, Anna Bright is about to achieve her wildest dreams of success—as long as no one finds out that the biotech she’s shilling doesn’t exactly work as advertised. She just needs to outwit the board, tamp down internal dissension, and keep the journalists printing whatever she tells them. The story is obviously based on Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos, but there’s a wider aim to Schnall’s vision, as she spins her inspiration into a visceral takedown of misogyny and double standards in the tech industry. Lori Brand, Bodies to Die For (Blackstone) I devoured this novel faster than the winner of a body-building contest drinks water after their win (a joke you’ll totally get if you dive into this searing critique of diet culture and the pressures of professional body-building). Lori Brand has had a long career in fitness that has led to her embracing strength, not weight-loss, and I’m pretty sure this book is the most physically—and emotionally—healthy thriller I’ve read in some time. I may even sign up for a boxing class now… View the full article -
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10 New Books Coming Out This Week
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ace Atkins, Don’t Let the Devil Ride (William Morrow) “Ace Atkins’s killing honesty sets a new standard for Southern crime fiction.” –New York Times Book Review Joseph Kanon, Shanghai (Scribner) “As in his spy novels, Kanon demonstrates a mastery of closed-in drama. Such is the jabbing understatement of the dialogue—what’s withheld matters more than what’s said—that it holds you in suspense as much as any action scene. The contrast between his impeccable control and the nightmarish chaos of this time and place gives things a powerful edge. Kanon goes to China with stirring results.” –Kirkus Reviews Richard Lange, Joe Hustle (Mulholland) “Joe Hustle may be the best novel yet from the always reliable Lange: a harrowing and occasionally hilarious character study in resilience. This is a home run.” –Publishers Weekly Flynn Berry, Trust Her (Viking) “In Edgar winner Berry’s harrowing sequel to Northern Spy…[her] moving depiction of a fractured family whose love runs as deep as its rifts should please existing series fans and win her new ones. Espionage buffs will find much to enjoy.” –Publishers Weekly Robert J. Lloyd, The Bedlam Cadaver (Melville House) “Riveting… A jaw-dropping mystery that grips from the first page and doesn’t let go. This continues the author’s winning streak.” –Publishers Weekly Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer (Berkley) ““…[A]n unhinged, humorous nail-biter that meets satirical social commentary for a wild, engrossing thrill ride.” —Seattle Times Dean Jobb, A Gentleman and a Thief (Algonquin) “Dean Jobb has long been a master of narrative nonfiction, rummaging through the past to uncover lost gems of history. And in this mesmerizing tale about a Jazz Age gentlemanly thief, Jobb has found his own perfect jewel.” –David Grann Monika Kim, The Eyes are the Best Part (Erewhon) “A tense, harrowing nightmare of a novel. Monika Kim gives us unraveling sanity, grotesque obsession, and the suffocating ignorance of toxic men. A terrific debut! I can’t wait to see what she does next!” –Christopher Golden Shan Seraffin, The Paris Vendetta (Mysterious Press) “Shan Serafin’s The Paris Vendetta is a smart, high-octane thriller that delivers from the first page to the last. An American in Paris is accused of arson and murder and becomes the subject of a furious manhunt. Think Jason Bourne caught in a blizzard of bullets in beautiful Paris.” ― James Patterson Christie Watkins, Moral Injuries (Harper) “…propulsive…[Watson] shines in her portrayal of medicine as an imperfect blend of art, science, and emotion. Fans of medical fiction will admire this.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article -
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How Peter Swanson Cultivates His Talent for Murder
To read a Peter Swanson book is to become immersed in a slightly askew world – people are still people, yes, but many of these individuals inhabit their own tangled realms, not the least of which is the scheming, cheating, lying one where said people frequently make bad decisions. But there’s more: killers. Always killers. They’re all here in Swanson’s delicious new novel, A Talent for Murder. Spoiler alert: this article contains what some might construe as a spoiler. After a prologue that ends in a sudden death, we meet Martha Ratliff, a spinsterish librarian who has married a man named Alan Peralta after a quick courtship. Alan is a traveling salesman who goes to educational conferences flogging “novelty clothing items” such as t-shirts with slogans on them: MATH TEACHERS AREN’T MEAN. THEY’RE ABOVE AVERAGE. But at times, Alan acts strangely, and Martha comes to realize she really doesn’t know him all that well. When he returns from a conference, she watches him from a window as he gets out of his car. “…it was like she’d never seen him before. His face had an almost cold, ruthless look to it. She told herself that she was seeing him from a distance, and that he was tired, but still, it was alarming to witness an expression on his face that she felt she’d never seen before. After gathering his luggage and locking his car, he then stood for a moment looking toward the sunset, his jaw slack, his eyes empty and uncaring. Then she watched him take a deep breath, swelling his chest. He shook his head and his expression changed, back to the vacuous sweetness of the Alan she knew. He even smiled, as though he were willfully transforming himself. Then he headed indoors.” Martha wants to believe that perhaps Alan is just an odd fellow, but the incident eats away at her. Soon, sorting laundry, she notices what looks like a spot of blood on one of his shirts. Instead of broaching the issue with Alan, she goes online and finds with a little research that a woman was believed to have committed suicide at the same location where Alan had been at the conference. Finally, at dinner, she asks him point blank about the spot on the shirt. His squirming response isn’t exactly reassuring. “You think I’m some kind of serial killer, Martha?” he responds. “It was an obvious joke, but something in his tone made Martha’s flesh crawl a little bit.” Her curiosity increasingly piqued, she soon discovers several more instances of women, many of them sex workers, dying in various ways, correlating with Alan’s presence at more than a few conferences. She decides she needs a confidant and reaches out to a college friend, Lily Kintner, for support. With the introduction of Lily, (oh-so wily) Swanson begins mostly alternating chapters with Martha remaining in the third person and Lily narrating her part of the story. Swanson is on record saying he enjoys creating new characters, and he would have to fall in love with a character to “bring them back in another book.” Well, it’s now clear he’s more than just a little smitten with Lily. She appeared in two previous novels, The Kind Worth Killing (2015) and a sequel, The Kind Worth Saving (2023). Says Swanson: “Lily Kintner wasn’t even supposed to be the main character in The Kind Worth Killing, but as I was writing she began to take over the story. I suppose that has something to do with me falling in love with her as a character. She was compelling to write, and it also didn’t hurt that so many readers have told me that she is one of their favorite characters in all of my books.” And why is Lily always in the first person, while, with one exception, (Henry Kimball, a detective who knows Lily) all the other protagonists remain in third person? Asked about the challenges and pleasure that might be for the author in using both tenses in the same story, Swanson acknowledges, “It’s funny because if I was writing The Kind Worth Killing now I would probably put all the characters in the third person, but when I began that book the story was going to be a cat and mouse between two characters (wound up being closer to five) so I thought we needed to hear their voices. But at this point I am very used to writing Lily in the first person. Henry is a little different, partly because in A Talent for Murder he’s been sidelined a little bit, so it made sense that he was no longer in the first person.” In grad school, Lily had helped Martha extricate herself from a sick love affair with the charismatic but depraved Ethan Saltz, a visiting writer in creative nonfiction. Ethan cruelly seduced Martha into a variety of often deviant sexual experiences, and he’s a manipulator of the highest order. In a sly, clever aside, Lily shadows Ethan and Martha in a college bar, carrying a copy of Angela Carter’s classic short story collection, The Bloody Chamber, which takes traditional fairy tales, as the inspiration point for often gory, shocking retellings – with the kind of behavior in them Lily clearly relishes. Role models, of a sort. The history between Lily and Martha is strong, and suffice to say, the two team up. Is Alan a serial killer? In typical Swansonian fashion, the spectacular twists begin, and Part 1 of the story ends on a piercing note. So, does Swanson plot out these intricate stories entirely in advance? Not exactly. “Well, I have the beginning of the story and I often have the end. It’s the middle that I usually have to figure out. And that part I basically make up as I go along, trying to let the characters push the narrative. I do think it’s important when writing crime to know who the villain is and what they are up to (often they drive the story), but I’ll admit that the bad guys (and girls) occasionally change midway through the book.” There are many thriller writers out there who just throw out twist after twist in the story and for this reader, destroy any credibility they have in terms of caring about the actual reading experience. Swanson keeps us on our toes, and never less than adroitly. And in that vein, what inspires him plot-wise? Do, say, news items give a kernel of a story? “Firstly, my plots definitely don’t come from newspapers or true crime, neither of which interest me at all (at least in relation to my job as a mystery writer). But what I try to do is make sure that the plot I’m working on is complex enough to support a full-length novel. “Often I think that there needs to be two central ideas at work as opposed to just one. And then, instead of thinking about twists, I think about reveals, about when to let certain elements be known to the reader. It’s a tricky process so I just sort of feel my way through it. But there is one mantra that I always say to myself, which is, if you want to surprise the readers then find a way to surprise your characters. That seems to help.” In Part 2, while Alan isn’t marginalized, the spotlight focuses on the diabolical Ethan Saltz. He’s quite the successful serial killer, it seems – since college he’s up to 26 victims…and counting. He leads a double life, as Robert Charnock, “an art dealer with a residence in Philadelphia. The real Robert Charnock had been a germophobic recluse who was currently at the bottom of a kettle pond in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.” He’s married to Rebecca Grubb, a woman who is compliant and unconcerned about what he does when he leaves for “art buying trips.” “The best part of having a wife,” he muses, “was that men without wives were always a little suspicious. Wives were gatekeepers, really, telling the world that the man they had married had been thoroughly vetted and passed some sort of test. This only worked if the wife in question had character. And Rebecca had character. In her case, that meant she had money and clout…She was his disguise.” The story becomes a high stakes dance between Lily and Ethan, with a lengthy cameo from detective Henry Kimball, an associate, so to speak, of Lily’s from the past. Ethan’s desire for revenge for Lily helping Martha break away from him in college sneaks up to him during a session on Facebook – Martha shows up in his (fake-named) feed. He becomes mesmerized by the beacon of his hideous desire. Swanson’s novels are filled with little expository details, many of them laugh-out-loud funny. Lily and Martha initially reconnect at a faux Irish pub called Tipsy McStaggers. As the suspense rachets up, Ethan is stalking Lily. He needs a place to “browse” while he waits for her to appear: “There was a bookstore called Stone’s Throw, but people noticed browsers in bookstores. It was probably filled with lonely [local] women hoping to find some man flipping through the latest Margaret Atwood book so they could strike up a conversation. The best stores to browse in if you didn’t want to be noticed were drugstores. “Everyone shopping in drugstores was in their own little bubble of solipsistic anxiety, just hoping to get out of there as soon as possible. No one wants to run into a neighbor while holding a tube of hemorrhoid cream.” Rather self-effacingly, Swanson says, “To be honest, any time I’ve tried to be funny in a book it falls flat.” (He’s clearly the only one who feels that way!) “But I love humor in crime novels—sly humor in the Patricia Highsmith vein—and I’m glad to hear that you find it in my books. I think it lands there naturally because on my sensibility. My biggest non-writer influence is Alfred Hitchcock and no one knew how to inject humor into crime stories more than he did.” Wanting to know more about his writing process, I said I can imagine you in the supermarket waiting in line to pay and overhearing someone say something that “speaks” to you. Does this ever happen? “I do listen in on people’s conversations,” replies Swanson. “It’s the reason that I can’t write in coffeeshops. And, yes, certain things speak to me, and that somehow gets translated into my personal style of writing. But, honestly, I couldn’t define it. My early stuff—my early writing—sounded like whoever I was reading at the time. Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Ruth Rendell, etc. But somewhere along the way something emerged that was my own voice. I think it’s just a matter of taking the time and being willing to write garbage. But now I feel like I have my own voice, for better or for worse.” And literary influences? The Kind Worth Killing feels like a homage to the talented Ms. Highsmith, with Swanson’s own distinctive flavor…speaking of the homage, I can’t imagine a better one to crime fiction in general than Eight Perfect Murders! “Sometimes I think the central theme of all my books is the inspiration I have found from other writers especially in the field of classic crime and mystery. Whenever I begin writing a new book, I privately come up with the novels I’m hoping to pay homage to. “For The Kind Worth Killing I was thinking very much about Patricia Highsmith, and how she created characters that existed in this grey murk of morality. “For Every Vow You Break I was channeling my inner Ira Levin. And for Eight Perfect Murders I was thinking about a lot of authors, really just delving into what it’s like to be an obsessive reader of crime. For that reason it’s my personal favorite book I’ve written because my research for that novel was essentially re-reading all my favorite books.” What about TV/Movie rights, or anything in production? If we were in Britain, you’d have a series for most of the stories, right? “Nothing in production right now, but some things are in pre-production. I’ve learned, in my short stint as a published writer, to not get too excited about the possibility of a TV series or a film getting made. It rarely happens. That said, and because you asked me about British TV, there is a chance right now that my novella, A Christmas Guest, might wind up on UK television at some point.” After ten very satisfying, very well received novels – including the novella, are you running out of steam? What are you working on now? “I’m about to finish a first draft of what I hope will be an interesting story. I won’t say too much about it except that it tells a murder story (and a marriage story) but tells it backwards.” Yet another innovative concept. Who would doubt it will be “interesting?” Much of the pleasure of reading Swanson is seeing his characters reflected in a cracked fun-house mirror. Swanson’s carnival may leave you a little dizzy, but you’ll be back – ticket in hand – as soon as it returns to town. View the full article -
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Egyptomania and English Country Houses
In our new mystery The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, the vastly wealthy aristocrat father of runaway heiress and artist Juliette is obsessed with all things Egyptian, and this obsession influences her own paintings. This is inspired by real events—the symbolism of Ancient Egypt fascinated the surrealist circle of the 1920s and 1930s (of which our fictional Juliette is part), appearing in the work of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and Leonor Fini, among others. In fact, Fini’s work, Little Hermit Sphinx, in London’s Tate Modern, inspired the fictional painting in which Juliette inserts hidden references to her family’s terrible secrets. The symbols of Ancient Egypt also inspired some elements in our descriptions of the grand country house where Juliette was born—something we also borrowed from real life. The influence of Egyptomania—the fashion for all things Egyptian that swept across Victorian Britain, accelerating with the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in 1822, which finally meant that hieroglyphics could be translated, and reaching fever pitch with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922—can be seen in some of Britain’s grandest houses. Of course, the wealth and the power by which British collectors were able to accumulate Egyptian artefacts in such quantities was very much a product of Britain’s global power, and this is a history both entangled and enabled by the history of Empire (Egypt was first an informal and then a formal British protectorate between 1882 and 1922). It is easy to understand why so many in Egypt and around the world feel that treasures in national collections in the UK, such as the Rosetta Stone, ought to be repatriated, as well as those that still remain in private hands. This is something that wasn’t acknowledged in the 1930s, when The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby begins—but, we explore in the novel, has rightly become a central issue in contemporary discussions. Biddulph Grange Egyptomania was not confined to the great indoors. The Egyptian section in these famous Victorian gardens in North Staffordshire, UK, was created from 1859 to 1862 and draws heavily on the fashions of the time. Owned by wealthy landowner and keen botanist James Bateman, who collected plants from all over the world, the garden features an Egyptian court, complete with a pair of sphinxes guarding the entrance of a tomb-style structure with a fairly terrifying statue of a baboon inside and a huge topiary pyramid behind. Cairness House This 16-acre house in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, recently sold for a very reasonable £1.25 million (sadly, not to us). Considered one of the finest examples of Neoclassical architecture in Britain, it was built over a decade at the end of the eighteenth century, with the great Sir John Soane responsible for its final aspect. The standout feature of this ten-bedroom house is the tomb-shaped Egyptian Room (designed in 1793), one of the earliest surviving of its type in the world. It is decorated in a complex mix of hieroglyphics, numerological, Masonic, and Pagan symbols that are said to form a secret (as yet undeciphered) encrypted message. Kingston Lacey This stately home houses the largest private collection of Egyptian artefacts in the UK, amassed by John William Bankes (1786-1855). Cambridge graduate Bankes, an unexpected heir to the vast Kingston Lacy estate, was a passionate explorer and meticulous recorder. During his travels in Egypt from 1815 to 1819, he amassed a detailed collection of notes and drawings of ancient monuments, which became a hugely important record as many became damaged or were lost. There are over 100 objects still on display in the house’s Billiards Room, including amulets, scarabs, bronzes, shabti (statues placed in Egyptian tombs) and papyri. There is a huge marble obelisk in the gardens and, most fascinatingly to us (and something we have echoed in our book), in 2007 an unmarked crate in the basement was discovered packed with fragments of pottery and papyri. Didlington Hall This now-demolished 80-bedroom grand estate in Norfolk was owned by William Amhurst Tyssen-Amherst, who amassed a collection of ancient Egyptian art so large that he built a 2,500 sqft museum for it, guarded by seven statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet. Visitors included the Prince of Wales and novelist H. Rider Haggard, and most interestingly, animal painter Samuel John Carter and his young son, Howard, who was completely captivated by the collection. That little boy was, of course, Howard Carter, who would go on to discover Tutankhamun’s tomb. Highclere Castle Famous now for being the filming location for Downton Abbey, Highclere has a significant Egyptian collection. George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, financed and participated in the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb with Howard Carter, which led to an unparalleled collection of Egyptian artefacts, including statues, jewelry and mummies, golden funerary masks, canopic jars, and pottery. After the Earl’s untimely death in Cairo—rumoured to be caused by the dreaded Tutankhamun’s curse—the collection became a point of intrigue and fascination. *** View the full article -
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Bifurcated Stories
Writers must make the decision to choose a perspective from which to present a story, picking a point of view and a narrative voice. Often in drafts they try one or another to find which feels right. But once the choice is made the story is essentially locked into that singular outlook. An option, rarely used, is to include more than one in what might be called a bifurcated presentation. I can think of two examples, Joyce Carol Oates’ retelling of Henry James novella “The Turn of the Screw” and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s original telling of Benito Mussolini’s one-day and night visit to an Italian home in “The Guest.” Both stories employ the typographical formatting of two columns side-by-side on a page, each offering a contrasting view of what is taking place in the other. Such a method becomes a challenge for the reader, literally asking where the eye should focus and asking the mind to cope with two sources of information at the same time. I suppose this can be a version of multitasking, juggling the simultaneity of a dual gathering of related but contrasting information. If the reader read through one column completely and then did the same with the other, that would defeat the writer’s purpose of ongoing balancing of the two versions, pinging and ponging to make immediate comparisons while in a state of living in two fictional worlds at the same time. Oates offers parallel points of view: the haunter's and the haunted's. This example, two passages that appear side-by-side, here one after the other as they were probably taken in by the reader—first the left and then the right: A thicket for us. Giant bushes, Spongy ground. The pebbles fade. The girl backs away from me. Wide staring smile. Her face protruding plump. Something about her wet mouth that is fearful … but I cannot stop, it is too late, I cannot stop my hand from reaching out to here … There! He approaches her, His back stiff. She draws away, teasing. Giant bushes will hide them from me. Panting, dizzy. I will be sick. He has taken hold of her now—yes, he has touched her—the two of them drawing back, back, back, almost out of sight—they will hide themselves from me—it is going to happen, it is going to happen— Essentially, the reader gets the experience for the perspective of the actor—the man grasping the girl—and of the observer, who is vicariously participating in the act with similarly intense emotions. Stevenson, who was inspired by Oates, identifies the basic subject of “The Guest” as “the embrace of fascism and Mussolini by the Italian people.” In one column, we get the thoughts and actions of those in the hosting household told from different perspectives and in the other the thoughts of the visiting il Duce himself. For this story, I’ll choose another sensual comparison, the very young girl on the left and Mussolini on the right: His hand brushes my cheek and I am a statue. I am the statue in the square—the lady with the smooth white face—with arms that fold across her chest. The guest brushes my cheek with his hand. Her eyes are open and yet I think she is sleeping. Perhaps sleeping. Yes, perhaps she is just walking in her sleep. Her jaw is square like that of a boxer. Yet she is delicate. I think both delicate and wild. Her eyes are open and she stares as if with purpose. Intent perhaps on the purpose of her visit. Her visit. This child (for she is a child) has come to my room in the night. This comparison offers what the girl feels and, at the same time, what the observer believes he sees. The reader has access to both minds. The bifurcated method is tempting because it allows the writer to tell two stories simultaneously. The fact that examples of this approach are so rare reveals the approach is so daunting few try and even fewer succeed. But why not have a go? -
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American Psycho and the Rise of Capitalist Horror
The first time I read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, I abandoned it two-thirds finished. Listen, I was a freshman in college. Very fresh into college, actually—it was orientation week. With a few empty days of freedom before classes started, on my first week away from home, I decided to pick up a book about a finance bro turned remorseless murderer. Up until that point, I’d hardly been able to tolerate even fairly benign scary movies, but dark stories always fascinated me. This one was far more gruesome and horrifying than anything I’d read before—I ended up hiding the book in a drawer and sleeping on the floor of a dorm-mate I barely knew because my roommate was out of town and I was afraid to be alone. Just over a decade later, while revising my latest novel, youthjuice, I found myself thinking about American Psycho again. I was trying to write a horror story set against a glamorous backdrop—a beauty and wellness company in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood—dealing with consumerism and the pursuit of physical perfection. I was searching for that perfect balance of sharp social satire and stomach-turning body horror. Naturally, I found myself thinking about the book I’d abandoned as a younger reader and writer. Revisiting American Psycho, I saw just how funny it was. Better yet, that humor reinforces and amplifies the horror—it’s one thing to depict a cunning murderer, it’s another take us through his inner monologues about Huey Lewis & the News and his extensive morning routine (a precursor to the popular “Get Ready with Me”–style videos that overpopulate YouTube) in between slaughters. Patrick Bateman is a monster, but a strangely relatable one who deals with petty jealousies and boring dinners with colleagues. On my second (and first full) read-through of Ellis’ third novel, I finally understood why it became a modern classic. Two common complaints pop up in reader reviews of American Psycho—some say it’s too banal, too focused on the dull details of what designer suit so-and-so is wearing or what everyone is eating at Texarkana; others object that it’s gratuitous, the violence too over-the-top. However, both are equally necessary: the book wouldn’t work if either the banality or the violence was dialed down. In Bateman’s endless recitation of details, you can feel the attempts to stifle his true nature and murderous impulses under a torrent of what he views as normality. This lends tremendous comic power to the scenes when he slips up and reveals himself in public. Consider the famous moment when a woman at a club asks what he does for work and he says, “Murders and executions, mostly.” The joke, of course, is that she mishears him as saying “Mergers and acquisitions” because it’s too loud and—illustrative of one of the book’s central themes—she’s not really listening, anyway. I have never found another novel that blends humor and brutality quite so effectively, without minimizing one or the other. The jokes are almost as chilling as the deaths for what they say about the soullessness of ’80s New York yuppie culture. In the decades since, it’s only become clearer how the destructive systems Ellis satirized have metastasized. I never worked on Wall Street, but as a beauty editor in my early– to mid-twenties, I spent time in a similarly status-obsessed environment, where people my age were getting “preventative” Botox, having their blood drawn for creams made of their own plasma, and dutifully recounting the minutiae of their daily lives—what they wore, ate, said, and put on their faces—for audiences on social media. Suddenly, the banal consumerism so viciously mocked in American Psycho was everywhere. Now, when you search “Patrick Bateman morning routine,” you can find an AI-generated itemized list of the steps, presented as if to be followed. While working on youthjuice, my updated, feminized spin on capitalist horror, I found the only way I knew to accurately capture this absurdism I witnessed in the beauty industry was a similarly sardonic, cynical, and bloody point of view. Horror is uniquely equipped to reflect the realities of an often unreal-feeling world, and that’s in part because the genre can hold so many things at once: blood-and-guts, comedy, lyrical prose, complex characters, social commentary. Without that visceral reading experience in the first week of college, I’m not sure I ever would have found my way to horror writing. But picking it up so many years later, I was delighted to find American Psycho’s multilayered cultural commentary, aspects I missed as a less mature reader. I may have traded the certain emotional vulnerability that allowed me, as an anxious teenager, to feel the book so deeply I was convinced Patrick Bateman was about to step out of my dorm room closet and wear my skin. In its place I gained a healthy cynicism that allows me to appreciate the fullness of its craft. Now I carry that balance into my own work, bringing my own blend of satire and gore. I hope Patrick would be proud. *** View the full article -
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Quiz: Can You Identify These Femme Fatales from Classic Crime Novels?
In our recent trilogy of quizzes on this site, this one going to be the most challenging. Ain’t it just like a dame. Like the quizes that came before it, this one is part quiz, part trivia. Under “questions” I have listed many descriptions of femme fatales from crime novels. And you have to guess which book each description comes from. Now, because this category might be incredibly hard otherwise, I really mean it when I say: these are classics. I’ve stuck to the most famous crime and mystery novels. You don’t have to rack your brains for femme fatale-types, like Circe or Salome or Lady Macbeth. I’ll also say that you should feel free to guess characters from the same author, and even from the same book. Sometimes, there’s more than one femme fatale in the midst. The answer key is way down at the bottom. As you take the quiz, I’d write down your answers next to the corresponding questions’ numbers (on a sheet of paper or in your notes app) and then grade yourself in one swoop when you’re done, so that you’re not constantly scrolling down and up again as you go, thereby risking seeing some of the other answers. I think it’s toooo hard to ask you to remember the name of each femme fatale; the book should be enough. If you can only get the author, give yourself half a point. If you CAN guess the name of a femme fatale, give yourself an extra point! Also, be forewarned: some of these descriptions are… ahem, a bit sexist. Well, happy quizzing! __________________________________ Questions: 1. “Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her. ‘Meet my wife.’ She didn’t look at me. I nodded at the Greek, gave my cigar a kind of wave, and that was all.” 2. “Her face was beautiful. More beautiful than the photograph. Wavy hair so light brown that you might have called it blond from a distance, and eyes that were either green or blue depending on how she held her head. Her cheekbones were high but her face was full enough that it didn’t make her seem severe. Her eyes were just a little closer than most women’s eyes; it made her seem vulnerable, made me feel that I wanted to put my arms around her—to protect her.” 3. “A voice said, ‘Thank you,’ so softly that only the purest articulation made the words intelligible, and a young woman came through the doorway. She advanced slowly, with tentative steps, looking at Spade with cobalt-blue eyes that were both shy and probing. She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow. She wore two shades of blue that had been selected because of her eyes. The hair curling from under her blue hat was darkly red, her full lips more brightly red. White teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made.” 4. “She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn’t look too healthy.” 5. ““Oh, she has turned all the men’s heads down in that part. She is the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet. So say the Serpentine-mews, to a man. She lives quietly, sings at concerts, drives out at five every day, and returns at seven sharp for dinner. Seldom goes out at other times, except when she sings.”” 6. “She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full. She had a drink. She took a swallow from it and gave me a cool level stare over the rim of the glass. ‘So you’re a private detective,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know they really existed, except in books. Or else they were greasy little men snooping around hotels.'” 7. “’She’s money-mad, all right, but somehow you don’t mind it. She’s so thoroughly mercenary, so frankly greedy, that there’s nothing disagreeable about it. You’ll understand what I mean when you know her.'” 8. “All these Spanish houses have red velvet drapes that run on iron spears, and generally some red velvet wall tapestries to go with them. This was right out of the same can, with a coat-of-arms tapestry over the fireplace and a castle tapestry over the sofa. The other two sides of the room were windows and the entrance to the hall. ‘Yes?’ A woman was standing there. I had never seen her before. She was maybe thirty-one or -two, with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair. She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas. She had a washed-out look.” __________________________________ . . . . . . . Answers down below. . . . . . . . Keep scrolling! . . . . . . . Answer Key: 1. Cora Papadakis: The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain 2. Daphne Monet: Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley 3. Brigid O’Shaughnessy: The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett 4. Carmen Sternwood: The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler 5. Irene Adler, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Arthur Conan Doyle 6. Vivian Regan (née Sternwood): The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler 7. Dinah Brand: Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett 8. Phyllis Nirdlinger: Double Indemnity, James M. Cain View the full article -
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Lovin’ the Southern-Fried Crime Films of the 1970s
The 1970s was an odd decade for movies. Following the late 1960s counterculture movement and consciousness-raising that translated into films like 1969’s “Easy Rider,” the 1970s were a time of great artistic merit, as exemplified by the “Godfather” films, huge box-office blockbusters like “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” and a steady stream of drive-in fare best represented by horror films and so-called “blaxploitation” films. And then there were the Southern-fried, often-seedy but always entertaining crime films set in redneck towns surrounded by swamps and crossed only by lonely highways. These were the kind of movies you were lucky to find at a drive-in double feature with a Roger Corman film – many of them were Corman films – and they were successful enough to spawn many other films, some of which, like “Smokey and the Bandit,” were big box-office hits. Because they were so cheaply produced, they made a lot of money, but their sometimes-unsavory marketing or word of mouth made them an under-the-radar guilty pleasure. The Southern-fried drive-in flicks even influenced the James Bond movies. (I’ll explain, I promise.) There’s been a current of Southern ennui, malaise and corruption in novels, TV and movies for as long as there’s been a Southern United States. On TV, Andy Griffith’s Andy Taylor was the exception to all those stories about corrupt Southern lawmen, but his North Carolina town was filled with colorful characters, oddballs, town drunks and folks from the hills who got liquored up and started playing banjo or throwing rocks. (Imagine if Andy had taken a hard line with those offenders? That’s a whole different kind of show.) The Clampetts, who moved to the Hills of Beverly, popularized the hick stereotypes, as did the soda pop Mountain Dew, which was born not far from me here in Knoxville and was once labeled with a hillbilly drinking from a jug. One of the best known, relatively early big-screen treatments of Southern crime and corruption came in 1958 with “Thunder Road,” starring Robert Mitchum as a moonshine runner. With a little luck and a strong tailwind, I can throw a Mountain Dew bottle from where I am right now and hit the original Thunder Road. I feel this Southern entertainment streak acutely, obviously. As a newspaper reporter for decades, I covered Indiana politicians who were only slightly less charismatic but just as corrupt as Willie Stark, whose exploits were first recounted in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel “All the King’s Men.” The 1949 film version featured Broderick Crawford as Stark and is a template for later Southern corruption films, as is “Thunder Road.” In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, those templates, archetypes and a few others I’ll detail here were used to solidify the idea, for moviegoers around the world, that the South was a fetid, corrupt and dangerous place. Sometimes those ideas were accurate, but usually not. But they sure sold tickets. The good ol’ boy who hits hard There is no better example of the Southern good ol’ boy in movies than Burt Reynolds, who hailed from Florida, made a living in Hollywood and then came to represent the rowdy Southern boy cliché like no one else. Reynolds made his mark in westerns and crime dramas for movie and TV before striking gold in 1972 with “Deliverance,” director John Boorman’s film version of the James Dickey novel. Reynolds played one of four men lost in the Georgia backwoods who, when hunted, become as murderous as their hillbilly adversaries. The unsettling banjo scene and the threat of male rape were used to make the film as off-putting and terrifying to modern audiences as possible. “Deliverance” launched Reynolds’ film career. “White Lightning” followed in 1973, along with its sequel, “Gator,” in 1976. Reynolds played other roles, from tough cops to comedic and romantic leads, but it was those three movies that not only solidified his stardom but led to his casting in “Smokey and the Bandit” in 1977. As Bobby “Gator” McKluskey in “White Lightning” and “Gator,” Reynolds was not just a good ol’ boy but the archetype Southern avenging angel. In the first film, he’s in an Arkansas prison for running moonshine but escapes when he hears his younger brother has been killed by evil sheriff J.C. Connors, played by Ned Beatty, Reynolds’ “Deliverance” co-star. The “Gator” films – the second directed by Reynolds – have some Southern comedy but they’re thick with atmosphere and crime: not just moonshine but corrupt and evil sheriffs and politicians as well as drugs, prostitution and murder. By comparison, “Smokey and the Bandit” is a movie made for a children’s matinee. The Southern girl who fights back If there was a woman in 1970s cinema who was the feminine equal of Reynolds, it was probably Pam Grier, whose beauty kept some from recognizing her steely determination. But for the Southern-fried version of Grier, look no further than Claudia Jennings. A lot of women in exploitation films of the 1970s were either victims or objects of desire, but some could kick ass. Grier sure could in films aimed at the urban box office. Jennings was an object of desire and an avenger like Reynolds, and she was most memorable in films steeped in Southern sweat and swamps. Jennings was Playboy’s playmate of the year in 1970, after having worked in the Playboy offices, and no doubt her work for the magazine taught her how to navigate treacherous waters. She broke out as the lead in the roller derby drama “Unholy Rollers” in 1972 and “Truck Stop Women” in 1974 and took a few roles in comedies until making her place in drive-in history in 1974 with “’Gator Bait.” Gator Bait (1973) Following in the wake of “White Lightning” but in advance of “Gator,” “’Gator Bait” was cheap and looks it. Jennings, as a barely-dressed swamp dweller named Desiree Thibodeau, is a poacher of alligators. That makes her a target for Sheriff Joe Bob and his son, a deputy named Billy Boy. But when men led by Tracy Sebastian as Big T victimize Desiree’s family, Desiree aims for revenge – and gets it. (Desiree was called “’Gator Bait” in the movie, by the way, because her father, also an alligator poacher, tied a rope around young Desiree and threw her into the swamp to attract gators. And you think your parents were tough on you.) Jennings made impressions with moviegoers in “Moonshine County Express” in 1977 and the Roger Corman-produced sci-fi film “Deathsport” in 1978. She had a part in “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” but one of my favorites of her films was “The Great Texas Dynamite Chase,” released in 1976. A film that “Thelma and Louise” owes a debt to, “The Great Texas Dynamite Chase” stars Jennings as Candy and Jocelyn Jones as Ellie-Jo. Candy breaks out of prison and armed with some aging and faulty sticks of dynamite, robs a bank. Ellie-Jo, a teller, decides to join her and the two, Bonnie and Bonnie style, travel around the state, robbing banks simply by lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite. The dynamite often fizzles. Sometimes it does not, and neither does the movie. The film reinforces that the two women can’t trust (most) men and can rely only on each other. It’s almost a remake of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” although with a happier ending. Jennings’ death in 1979 at only 29 years old cut short not only her life but a promising career. I would have loved to have seen her in the type of latter-day roles that Grier filled, and I would have loved to have seen a bank-robbing reunion of 50-something Candy and Ellie-Jo. It was not to be. Sidekicks were along for the wild ride A few other women had an impact in Southern crime films in the 1970s – Angie Dickinson as the mother of two rowdy young women in “Big Bad Mama” comes to mind – and Dickinson got some support on screen from her sidekicks, played by Tom Skerritt and William Shatner. That film demonstrated that sidekicks could transform into adversaries, but with no disrespect to Shatner and Skerritt, no one played a better sidekick than singer, songwriter and actor Jerry Reed. Reed had a role in the 1975 comedy “W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings,” which starred Reynolds and was directed by John G Avildsen, a year before Avildsen made “Rocky.” The chemistry between Reynolds and Reed clicked and when Reynolds directed “Gator” he asked Reed to join the cast. A year later, Reed would play Cledus, Reynolds’ sidekick, in “Smokey and the Bandit” and its sequel and Reed moved into the lead role in the third film in the series, which featured Reynolds in a cameo. Reed had the country chops not only for the music industry but for films. He went on to play himself or thinly-disguised versions of himself for the rest of his Hollywood career. He was never more amiably chilling, though, than in “Gator.” Reed played “Bama” McCall, an old friend of Gator’s who has become the crime boss of a small Georgia town. Gator is used by federal authorities to take down Bama’s empire of drugs and prostitution, but Gator is motivated to bring down his friend’s empire after he’s horrified by the underage prostitutes at Bama’s place. “Gator” isn’t as good a film as “White Lightning,” and that’s partly because the sequel lacked one of the strongest elements of the original: Beatty as a ruthless lawman. The long, corrupt arm of the law – and a few good lawmen The TV series “The Dukes of Hazzard” debuted in 1979 and co-opted many of the themes of Southern crime movies, namely the good ol’ boys, the booty-shorts-wearing female lead and the corrupt town boss and sheriff. The show took all the menace out of the latter characters, of course. By the close of the 1970s, it would have been hard to make those corrupt lawmen really stand out. By that point, we’d seen all kinds of southern badge-wearers. Macon County Line (1974) In 1974’s “Macon County Line,” we saw a Clampett – Jethro Bodine himself, Max Baer Jr. – as a menacing deputy who, after the film ambles along for an hour, decides the three leads are responsible for his wife’s death and seeks revenge. In a comedic vein, the “Smokey and the Bandit” films gave us Jackie Gleason as Sheriff Buford T. Justice, who upped the film’s comedic quotient with his inept efforts to catch Reynolds, Reed et al. We saw incorruptible lawmen like the great Ben Johnson as J.D. Morales, a legendary investigator with the Texas Rangers in “The Town That Dreaded Sundown,” a pseudo-documentary about the hunt for a serial killer in 1940s Texarkana, Texas. Johnson is great, as always, as the drawling, matter-of-fact lawman. Released in 1970, “tick … tick … tick” gave us former football great Jim Brown as the first Black sheriff of a small Southern town. When lawlessness threatens the peace, the cop gets an assist from the previous sheriff, played by George Kennedy. Probably the most famous real-life lawman portrayed in films of the 1970s and beyond was Buford Pusser, a county sheriff in Tennessee who carried a two-by-four and tried to clean up the Dixie Mafia and its domain of drugs, prostitution and gambling on the Mississippi state line. Pusser, who survived assassination attempts only to die in a 1974 car crash, was the inspiration for a series of movies that began in 1973 with “Walking Tall.” But the most memorable lawman in Southern-fried 1970s flicks had to have been Ned Beatty as J.C. Connors, whose killing of Gator McClusky’s kid brother kicks off the plot of “White Lightning.” Beatty is the personification of small-town evil in the role. Despite his too-tight, short-sleeve shirt and his pocket protector and his rants about hippies and communists, we take him seriously because Reynolds’ Gator takes him deadly seriously. Oh, and how did the Southern movies of the 1970s work their way into films about James Bond, the quintessential British spy with the license to kill? Well, it’s not like Southern sheriffs weren’t a cliché before all these Southern-fried crime films started coming out around 1970, but the producers of the Bond films saw an opportunity to include a Southern sheriff, J. W. Pepper, played by Clifton James, in “Live and Let Die” in 1973. Pepper was comic relief, not unlike the blustering Buford Justice played by Jackie Gleason in the “Smokey and the Bandit” movies. Audiences no doubt found Sheriff Pepper jarring in the Bond film, even though it was set in the South. Bond fans were either amused, irritated or confused when James returned as Pepper in “The Man with the Golden Gun” in 1974. The sheriff and his wife took a trip to Thailand and ran into Bond there. And that was probably as far afield as any 1970s Southern movie lawman strayed from his jurisdiction. View the full article
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