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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- 47
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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- 24
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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?- 91
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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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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read a few fascinating articles, learn something useful, and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side.
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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?- 242
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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. More Information
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On the Invention of M. Dupin
This is a transcript of a talk that was given, by Dr. Olivia Rutigliano, at New York University Law School’s Poe Room Event, on May 19th, 2023. Briefly, from 1845-1846, Edgar Allan Poe lived in a building on the site where NYU Law’s Furman Hall now stands. The Poe Room Event is a twice-annual event, open to the public, that invites scholars and artists to put together a presentation honoring Poe’s legacy. This speech contains spoilers for the stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and “The Purloined Letter.” * The subject of today’s talk takes us to Paris, in the 1840s. A gruesome double-murder has taken place one night in a home along the Rue Morgue, a street in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris. The victims are two women, Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye. The body of the younger woman is found stuffed inside a chimney. She has marks on her neck from strangulation. Her mother’s body lies in the backyard, with numerous bones broken. Her face is badly mutilated, and a tuft of reddish hair is stuck in her fist. She has such a deep gash in her throat that when the police lift her body to carry it away, her head falls off. The residents of the street had been awoken at night by screams—about “eight or ten” neighbors and two gendarmes had, together, forced themselves inside to see if everyone in the home was all right. Running up the stairs, they still hear noises from somewhere above, but by the time they reach the fourth floor, everything has gone silent. The police determine that the murder took place there—on the fourth floor of the house, which has been thoroughly ransacked and where strange pieces of evidence remain: tufts of gray human hair on the fireplace, gold coins all over the floor, and a straight razor, which is by now caked in blood, lying on a chair. A safe is open. And complicating things is that the room is locked. The concerned neighbors and constables had needed to break down the door. The police speak to many witnesses, who explain that they heard several voices coming from the house. One voice was male and was speaking French (which they know because they heard the cry of “mon dieu”), but no one can agree on the language that the other speaker has used. The police are entirely stumped. But there is one man who is not. And his name is Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. This is the premise of the mystery at the center of a short story called “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It was published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, written by the American author Edgar Allan Poe. And it is thought to be the first true, the first pure, the first modern detective story in history. Which makes Dupin the first modern detective. Dupin is a chevalier—which means he has been given the Légion d’honneur, a knighthood, at some point in the past. He is a young man, from a once wealthy family that has since ceased to be so. He is presented to us by the story’s unnamed narrator, an Englishman. And they meet in the most appropriate of settings: searching for a book. They meet in an “obscure library in the Rue Montmartre.” The narrator says that “the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion. We saw each other again and again.” Our narrator says of him, “This young gentleman was of an excellent, indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes. By courtesy of his creditors, there remained in his possession a small remnant of his patrimony; and, upon the income arising from this, he managed, by means of a rigorous economy, to procure the necessaries of life, without troubling himself about its superfluities. Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained.” The two strike up a friendship, and since the Englishman does not have permanent lodgings for his stay, they agree to live together. Dupin moves into the narrator’s home, which is “a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain.” They live in a home full of books, decorated “in a style which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our common temper.” And it is there where Dupin and his friend open a newspaper, the Gazette des Tribunaux, one morning to learn about the ghastly horrors that took place in a home across the river, a home on a street called the Rue Morgue. The article, simply called “Extraordinary Murders,” chronicles the gruesome scene. For days, the papers will overflow with coverage into this mysterious, grisly circumstance—relaying interviews with twelve people who knew the deceased or lived nearby. No one can agree on the language being spoken in the room. And everyone confirms that no person had entered the house all night. The police arrest a young clerk named Adolphe Le Bon but have not explained why. And after reading everything—the testimonies, the descriptions— Dupin asks his friend what he has made of all of this. Dupin’s friend doesn’t believe that it’s possible to figure out the identity of the killer from any of the evidence. Dupin begs to differ. Friends with the prefect of police, he grants them both entry to the crime scene. The scene is the same as they have read in the papers. And Dupin walks around, narrating what he is seeing. He explains to his friend that what they are doing is unprecedented “in investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked ‘what has occurred,’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before.’ Dupin does not see a mass of conflicting details, but a collection of details that all point to the same thing, in their conflict. The interviewed neighbors are people from all over Europe, and they all think they are hearing languages that others, speakers of those languages, think are other languages.” “Now, how strangely unusual must that voice have really been, about which such testimony as this could have been elicited!—in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognize nothing familiar!” This is because, with the exception of the Frenchman’s “mon dieu,” “…no words—no sounds resembling words—were by any witness mentioned as distinguishable,” he says. Dupin also divines that the murderer must have escaped via the windows—the back windows. It is the only explanation as to how all the doors could have been locked, and the home not entered from the street. Dupin and his friend stand there, trying to figure out the entity that might have been able to climb up and down the side of a building, make humanlike sounds without saying words, and be strong enough to do serious damage to two women. The mother has had her head nearly severed by the grip of a straight razor, while the daughter has thumbprints and fingernail gashes on her throat. Dupin’s friend thinks it must be a madman. But Dupin realizes that it is not a man at all. The handprint on the daughter’s neck is too wide. The hair in the mother’s fist is too coarse. The killer, Dupin divines, is an orangutan—an orangutan who must have been captured in the wild and brought to Paris in captivity, only to escape. Dupin puts an ad in the paper, claiming that he has found an ape. Someone answers the ad—a sailor. This is the Frenchman whose voice could be heard along with the unintelligible grunts of the ape—who had chased his escaped, and unfairly treated pet, as he fled away from the sailor, into another house. The man tells Dupin that the orangutan had attacked the two women he randomly encountered there in his frenzy, before escaping out the window again. Because Dupin has found the sailor who can recount the tale, he is able to convince the police to release the wrongfully imprisoned man. * Dupin was such a success that would appear again in two more stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” published from 1842 to 1943, and “The Purloined Letter” in 1844. Readers were enchanted by his unique deductive abilities. His narrator begs him, “Tell me, for Heaven’s sake, the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter. Dupin practices a heightened method of analysis referred to as “ratiocination”—a purely intellectual method of observing things in great detail and being able to imagine how those things would have interacted. Some who do not understand it find it to be a little supernatural. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the narrator tries to put a pin in exactly what the process is. Here is some of his legwork: “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis… As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.” “The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse.” Basically, he explains, “the extent of information obtained; lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation.” Poe would later refer to all three Dupin stories as his “tales of ratiocination.” Dupin is not a policeman, and he is not a private detective. He is a true amateur. But his gifts, and his insistence on using them to solve the puzzles that arise in life, cement his tale as literature’s first modern detective story. As literary critic A. E. Murch writes, the detective story is one in which the “primary interest lies in the methodical discovery, by rational means, of the exact circumstances of a mysterious event or series of events.” Critic Peter Thoms elaborates on this, defining the detective story as “chronicling a search for explanation and solution,” adding, “such fiction typically unfolds as a kind of puzzle or game, a place of play and pleasure for both detective and reader.” The well-heeled Dupin is an armchair detective who solves puzzles because he can and because he likes to. He sees things that no one else can see, draws conclusions that for many others are too far outside of the box. If Poe had not solidified the conventions that we recognize as marking the modern detective story, others likely would have done the same not long after. Literature was on its way to this discover; certainly, there had been a long lineage of characters who operated similarly, tracking down stolen objects and cracking impossible puzzles, and, like Dupin, doing so as private citizens, rather then as agents of the state. In 1747, Voltaire wrote a philosophical novella exploring the theme of problem-solving, Zadig ou la Destinée, featuring a wise young man in Babylonia whose knowledge gets him in trouble but often ultimately saves him. In William Godwin’s 1794 novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a scathing indictment on the so-called justice system’s ability to ruin lives, state-sanctioned investigators are disavowed in favor of non-traditional problem-solvers. In 1819, the German novelist E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote Das Fräulein von Scuderi, in which a nosy woman named Mlle. de Scuderi (who might be considered a predecessor of Miss Marple) finds a stolen string of pearls. And no nineteenth-century detective lineage would be complete without Eugène-François Vidocq, a criminal-turned-criminologist who lived from 1775-1857 and who founded and ran France’s first national police, the Sûreté nationale, as well as France’s first private detection agency. His life inspired countless (swashbuckling) adaptations, including an American adaptation published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1828, entitled “Unpublished passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police,” which Poe very well might have read. Interestingly there’s a character in that story named “Dupin.” Ahem. Poe had been experimenting with the conventions of detective fiction, himself. Many of his horror stories had also relied on the kind of third-act reveal, a twist—but one that is not figured out. Poe seemed to discover that the difference between a detective story and a horror story was the inclusion of a character who could make sense of the mysterious events going on. Horror stories are mysteries without someone to explain them. I submit that in his stories leading up to the Dupin tales, Poe had been experimenting with “bad” or “failed” detectives, in this way. In 1839, he wrote the short story “William Wilson,” which features a man driven mad by the perception of his own doppelgänger, who does not realize until he fatally stabs him, that his doppelgänger was his own reflection—himself. In 1840, he wrote “The Man of the Crowd,” a story about a man who believes that there is a man walking around London who is able to change his appearance subtly to blend in with the different groups he encounters. The narrator believes that something about this ability is ambiguously criminal and he pursues that man until he cannot do it anymore, unable to figure out what it is that the man wants or has done. Thus, until his stories about a detective searching for clues, many of Poe’s stories come to act as clues in the mystery of an author searching for his detective. It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of Poe’s discovery—not only for his career, but also for history. Detective fiction is commonly regarded as decidedly non-academic. But academia would be nowhere without Poe or Dupin. The famed Columbia drama professor Brander Matthews wrote, “The true detective story as Poe conceived it is not in the mystery itself, but rather in the successive steps whereby the analytic observer is enabled to solve the problem that might be dismissed as beyond human elucidation.” It was not long—only about a century—before scholars began to become to drawn to Poe. Indeed, Dupin’s greatest impact might lay outside of mystery novels, and inside the broader, later field of literary criticism. Dupin’s ability to read extraordinary meaning into clues makes him rather the first semiotician (or scholar devoted to figuring out the relationship between language and meaning), elucidating the relationship between signs, signifiers, and ‘signifieds’ more than a century before Ferdinand de Saussure published his work on the subject in 1966—particularly because Dupin finds his clues through linguistics rather than physical objects. (For more on Poe and semiotics and much more, I recommend the edited collection The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading.) A reminder that, in “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he deduces the whole solution because of two words allegedly spoken during the crime; “Upon these two words [‘mon Dieu!’]…I have mainly built my hopes of a full solution of the riddle.” Poe knew that he was onto something, with Dupin. So he wrote a sequel. By that “The Murder of Marie Roget” begins, Dupin is a minor celebrity. The story of how he solved the Murders in the Rue Morgue has catapulted him to fame. But domestic life has gone on as normal… as usual, Dupin regales his narrator friend with his ratiocination, all the time—often seeming to predict what his friend is thinking and finishing his sentences. His friend has remained astounded at the way Dupin has been able to solve the Rue Morgue murders but does not imagine that his friend’s parlor trick will ever be used in such a serious manner ever again. Until a year later. That’s when Dupin reads in the paper that the body of a beautiful young woman, a perfume saleswoman who had previously gone missing, has been found floating in the Seine. Dupin’s friend gets a detailed account of the police investigation from the prefecture and brings it home. Together, they read everything they can about it. ““I need scarcely tell you,” said Dupin, as he finished the perusal of my notes, “that this is a far more intricate case than that of the Rue Morgue; from which it differs in one important respect. This is an ordinary, although an atrocious instance of crime. There is nothing peculiarly outré about it. You will observe that, for this reason, the mystery has been considered easy, when, for this reason, it should have been considered difficult, of solution. And yet, despite its ordinariness and therefore its complexity, Dupin can solve the whole thing without leaving his home. From what he has read, he can recreate the entire affair in his mind—and names the murderer. Poe thought this was an even more interesting story than his previous detective tale—partially because he had based it on a real tragedy, the murder of a beautiful young woman, a tobacco store employee, named Mary Cecilia Rogers in 1941. Her body was found in the Hudson. Poe believed that, in fictionalizing her story, he was getting at the heart of the mystery, not unlike his detective. He attempted to sell it to magazines claiming that he had solved the mystery of Mary’s death, via his story. The impertinence of that claim aside, Poe believed that there was much more to represent, regarding an amateur detective, an armchair detective’s ability to think through a crime to the point of solving it. His final Dupin story, “The Purloined Letter,” is the epitome of this interest. By this time, Dupin is so well known that the police prefect asks for his help. The queen has had a letter stolen from her bedroom by a sneaky associate of hers, who has now been using it to blackmail her. The police have searched that man’s rooms but have found nothing. They are desperate. The prefect returns a while later, promising Dupin 50,000 francs if he can help them locate the letter. Dupin asks the prefect to write the check right there, and he does. At that moment, Dupin produces the letter, himself. Dupin’s friend is astounded—how had he found it? Dupin explains that he had divined that the blackmailer had anticipated that the police would search high and low for the note, and so hid it in plain sight. Dupin had visited the blackmailer and searched for a letter in an obvious place. He found it—noticing that it was disguised by having been folded inside out and re-sealed it with a new seal. He returns the next day, and, in time with a distraction he has arranged, switches out the letter for an imitation he has made himself. That year, in 1844, Poe wrote to a friend that “The Purloined Letter” was the best of his three tales of ratiocination. And he was right. The scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbit suggests that its superiority lies in its complete move away from the sensational towards the intellectual. Indeed, let’s observe the progress of the Dupin stories. The first one, a true “sensation” story, was designed to shock as much as amaze. The second combines the sensation of the first (the surprising, gruesome discovery of the corpse of a beautiful woman) with tremendous mental gymnastics. And finally, “The Purloined Letter” is purely an intellectual exercise—the epitome of the detective story as a puzzle, a riddle, a game. It is because of this final story, more than the others, that Dupin changed the course of mystery fiction. There were several mediocre film adaptations of the first two stories, but that’s not what I mean. Not only did he create the gentleman sleuth archetype which would become so ubiquitous in mystery fiction’s Golden Age during the first half of the twentieth century, but he also provided a model for the detective story to be, first and foremost, more concerned with the puzzle of the mystery, than the material concerns of the associated crime or death. Most obviously, though, Dupin provided a template for what the intellectual sleuth would look like—a template that was borrowed, time and time again. Dupin is a brilliant man whose roommate chronicles his incredible feats of crime-solving, most of which he does not need to leave his home to complete. Years later, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Each [of Poe’s detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed… Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” Indeed, Doyle construed his detective Sherlock Holmes as an intellectual descendant of Holmes, having Watson (who also participates in a lineage offered by the Dupin stories, but of Dupin’s supportive narrator/chronicler and friend) cite Dupin upon first witnessing Holmes’s deductive genius.’‘You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin,’” he tells Sherlock Holmes in their inaugural novella, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. ‘“I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”’ And yet Holmes is snide about this bit of praise: “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin. Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.” Except, of course, that he was. Holmes doesn’t know it, but he, himself, wouldn’t have existed without Dupin. Virtually none of the detectives in the stories we know today would have existed without him. Thank you. View the full article -
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The Best Reviewed Books of the Month: April 2024
A look at the month’s best new releases in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers, via Bookmarks. * Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow) “Winslow has written a near-perfect saga: He’s created great characters who grow and develop while remaining true to their essence, and a sweeping story that morphs and expands over time, with the stakes escalating until they reach nosebleed heights at the end.” –Alma Katsu (Washington Post) Karen Jennings, Crooked Seeds (Hogarth) “It’s been years since I read a book that strained the Likability Principle so viscerally … This novel couldn’t be any more overwhelming if it came in a scratch ’n’ sniff edition … The real artistry of Crooked Seeds lies in Jennings’s ability to make this story feel so propulsive … Urgent.” –Ron Charles (Washington Post) Dervla McTiernan, What Happened to Nina? (William Morrow) “Painfully gripping … Despite its title, the central question posed by this disturbing, enthralling book is less concerned with what happened to Nina (you’ll find out soon enough), but how the parents — all broken, terrified and desperate in their own ways — respond to the exigencies of the moment. The last scene will make your blood run cold.” –Sarah Lyall (New York Times Book Review) Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (Harper) “A monumental edifice of a book that at first glance seems somewhat daunting … Entire eras materialize in artful sketches while the portrait of Fleming acquires texture and shade with each trial and triumph.” –Anna Mundow (Wall Street Journal) Rena Peterson, The King of Diamonds (Pegasus) “As much a sociological study of upper-crust Dallas society as a true crime story, enlivened by [Pederson’s] sprightly writing style … King of Diamonds is an enjoyable read, in large measure because of Pederson’s extensive, high-quality research, obtaining compelling info from and about her subjects.” –Curt Schleier (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) View the full article -
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The Five Best Novels About Hauntings
My theory is that everyone has one of these stories. Perhaps it was a place you grew up in where random objects would vanish – you swore you put your keys on the sideboard and now there’s just a blank space where they were. Maybe your girlfriend lived in a house that produced unexplainable sounds – ‘no, there’s no one upstairs, it just sounds like someone is walking up there sometimes.’ Or perhaps it was a tiny but powerful thing – you walked into the ruin of an old church on a fiercely sunny day only to feel a chill settle over your bones. You’re not supposed to be here. This place is bad. For me, stories about hauntings have two key ingredients. The first is one often shared with crime and thriller novels: the past encroaching on the present. Usually, someone in the past has done something unforgivable and not experienced any consequences, and it has ramifications in the present. In your classic crime or thriller novel, a detective, amateur sleuth or unreliable narrator will be the agent looking to uncover what happened, and ultimately bring those consequences to bear. In a novel about a haunting, it’s usually a ghost who fulfils this role. Or a whole team of ghosts. The second ingredient is location, location, location. Hauntings are often about places, and it was this idea that was the seed of The Hungry Dark. We’re familiar with haunted houses, haunted hotels – haunted graveyards, naturally – but what if the Bad Place was a wild place, a place of nature? The idea of the Bad Place is one that has intrigued and excited me since I picked up my first Stephen King book (Needful Things, I was ten) and I personally find that the greatest scary books really understand this idea. Here are my five favourite books about Hauntings (which are really books about Bad Places, and Terrible People): The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson It is probably illegal to have a list about hauntings without including the grandmother of the modern horror novel. Shirley Jackson was the undisputed queen of the unsettling undercurrent, and by the time Eleanor arrives at Hill House with all her mental baggage, we already know that something is terribly wrong, and that the house is going to draw it out of her like a poison. Except it won’t be a healing experience. The Haunting of Hill House also contains probably the greatest opening lines in a novel ever: ‘No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.’ Please read that and tell me you are not terrified of Hill House. I still wake up in a sweat sometimes with the words ‘Hill House, not sane’ bouncing around my head. Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel Now you could say that I am throwing out my thesis in my second example, because surely Hilary Mantel’s wonderful book about a genuine psychic haunted by the ghosts of her past is not about place at all, but about Alison herself, a woman slowly run ragged by the diabolical men, long dead, who made her childhood a living hell. I would argue that it is still very much about place. In Beyond Black, the very landscape of England feels haunted as Alison flits between pubs and working men’s clubs, plying her trade. Here, you feel, you can’t walk down the road without being accosted by some dreadful little spirit. And the idea of England being thick with spirits and strangeness is present in Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy too. I think Mantel understood the nature of haunting better than any of us. The Shining by Stephen King The Overlook hotel might be the ultimate Bad Place novel. You know the story already: Jack Torrance agrees to be the winter caretaker at an isolated hotel, bringing his wife and young son with him. Only there are dark forces at work in the Overlook, and they want Jack to stay forever, and ever, and ever… Stephen King is probably the master of the Bad Place novel, and I’ve no doubt that my love for them comes from an early exposure to his work. From Castle Rock, the chaotic New England town that draws weirdness to it like a magnet, to Derry, home to a psychotic child-eating cosmic clown, King delights in creating locations that bring out the very worst in people. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver In the 1930s, a young working-class man called Jack signs up for an expedition to the arctic region of Svalberd and through a series of unfortunate events finds himself manning an outpost there alone, through the unending darkness of an arctic winter. And of course, he isn’t quite alone, after all… If you’re afraid of the dark and you feel like scaring yourself silly, Dark Matter is the novel for you. Here, the intensely logical Jack tells himself there is nothing to fear – the darkness never hurt anyone, right? – but he hasn’t contended with the bloody history of the bay of Gruhuken, and the fact that some Bad Places never forget. Cold and claustrophobic and genuinely haunting. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters The Little Stranger feels like your classic haunted house story, one that could perhaps rub shoulders with M. R. James or Charles Dickens (when Dickens was in a spooky mood). A country doctor befriends the well-to-do family at Hundreds Hall, a rambling country house long since past it’s best, and is on hand when strange happenings start to make the place unliveable. It feels like a classic haunting, but being Sarah Waters, it’s much more complicated than that. Under the surface the tensions of class, sexuality and trauma pull at the narrator until tragedy strikes, and the reader is left wondering: what exactly was the malevolent force at Hundreds Hall? *** View the full article -
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G’day, From An Apparently Terrifying Continent
Would the real Australia please stand up? Are you a tropical paradise of blue skies and golden beaches, the Great Barrier Reef, koalas and kangaroos? Or are you the perilous continent of venomous snakes and enormous spiders, dense bushland and parched desert where travellers venture and never return? It’s clear which scenario thriller and crime writers are drawn to. Australia has long been mythologised as a dangerous exotic land, the landscape presenting the ideal setting for an eerie thriller not unlike that of Nordic noir. In reality, how frightening is it to live here? On TikTok there’s an avalanche of clips showing gigantic Australian spiders; there’s a frisson of excitement in the thousands of comments generated. While the spiders aren’t actually that large (the angles exaggerated for horrific effect), it’s a fact that we’re home to the world’s most venomous, the Sydney funnel-web. I’ve seen plenty of Huntsman and Redback spiders at home, and simply give them a wide berth. Most of the world’s most venomous snakes live in Australia (85%), although the only snake I ever encountered was during a visit to Canada. Australia is one of the most shark-infested countries in the world too (behind the US). The yearly worldwide shark attack summary (yes there is such a thing), says there were 15 “unprovoked incidents” in 2023. And let’s not forget the temperature. In summer, temperatures can soar to around 40°C (104°F). The highest temperature ever recorded was 50.7 °C (123.3 °F), in 1960 in Oodnadatta, South Australia – where my father in law was born. Is it any wonder that the Australian population clings to the cooler coastline? About 87 percent of the population lives within 50 kilometres (31 mi) off the coast. We’re like people hovering near a doorway for a quick escape. Roads are closed and towns cut off when we’re ravaged by bushfire or flood. This sometimes means arduous detours (in the thousands of kilometres) for food and other deliveries; major routes such as the Nullarbor Highway can be shut, and travellers forced to hole up in roadhouses for days. Australians are well versed in the rules of outback driving. If you break down; never abandon your car. Always pack plenty of water. Share your travel plan with others, so if you don’t turn up on time, they know to raise the alarm. You can’t rely on a cell phone in the outback – not to call for help, or to help you navigate. Most of Australia’s land mass has no mobile coverage at all. Like the population, it hugs the coast. But it’s important not to demonise this beautiful country, its flora and fauna. Every living thing plays a part in the ecosystem, and in this climate crisis the last thing we need is an extermination attitude. It’s also important to reflect that Australia was colonised, the indigenous did not cede this land, and there have been successive waves of immigration. To what extent did the colonisers and bewildered immigrants contribute to the lore of a frightening Australia? My own parents arrived here as children – my mother from Finland, my father from The Netherlands. Even though I was born here (in the world’s most isolated capital city, Perth), I’ve always felt apart. I wonder how my parents influenced that; English is their second language, they had to adjust to the climate, the culture, the distance from everything they knew. I inherited a sense of being an alien here, observing but not participating. But perhaps that’s part of being a writer… I’ve had my fair share of roadtrips – another popular setting in Oz literature, and in fact the inspiration for The Rush, my outback thriller. Like many teens, I left home to study at a capital city university. Whenever I wanted to visit family or friends, I faced a four-hour roadtrip north. I passed through many tiny country towns, but for the most part, the scenery was fields of crops or plains of orange sand. Eventually, I returned home and worked for a federal politician and there were more roadtrips. Our electorate took up an incredible 92% of South Australia. That’s 904,881 square kilometres (349,377 sq mi). Still later, I worked for the South Australian Tourism Commission. As a website editor and writer, I travelled over the state, absorbing its beauty and trying to translate that to the online page. (It’s an irony not lost on me, that many readers of The Rush have declared they’re “never” coming to South Australia or never camping in the outback. I believe it’s said with tongue-in-cheek, but to think of all the effort I put into attracting tourists, and now it’s coming unstuck…) With all of this seeping into our psyches, is it any wonder Australian writers have produced haunting thrillers that leverage the landscape? Like Jane Harper’s The Lost Man, set on a vast cattle property in Queensland, and where in the opening scene a man has died of exposure and dehydration. There’s Shelter by Catherine Jinks, No Country for Girls by Emma Styles, and Out of Breath by Anna Snoekstra – all exploring Australia’s secluded pockets, remote from help or technology, high on risk. The film world has mined similar territory, with movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (an eerie school excursion into the bush, where two students and a teacher disappear); Mad Max (on dystopian outback roads); The Reef (young people terrorised by a Great White Shark); and another Ozploitation example in The Boar (a family stalked in the outback by…you guessed it). The Rush draws on many of this island’s dangers and myths, as well as my own decades of remote driving and unsettling experiences. It follows four young people on a roadtrip from Australia’s south to north; Adelaide to Darwin. Rather than the quintessential outback experience of heat and sunny skies, they encounter unseasonal rain and flooded roads. My characters quickly learn that the world is very different beyond their suburban cocoon. And I hope, rather than deterring people, that such stories can captivate and actually attract tourists. That’s what occurred – believe or not – after the worldwide success of Wolf Creek, the 2005 horror film about three abducted backpackers. If you do make your way down here, come say g’day. *** View the full article -
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“God Bless All of You, God Bless America, and God Bless ‘Big Fat Liar’”
Recently, Paul Giamatti received an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Holdovers—Alexander Payne’s period film about three loners stuck at a boys’ boarding school during holiday break. He was previously nominated for a supporting role in Cinderella Man in 2005. Many, including myself, are still enraged that he was not nominated for his expressive and powerful performance in Sideways, Payne’s 2004 dark comedy about two friends who go on a trip to wine country and wind up reckoning with their lives and choices. But allow me to suggest that Giamatti, an actor of boundless talent and irrepressible commitment, should have received his first Oscar nomination in 2002, for a performance in a Nickelodeon Studios kids’ movie called Big Fat Liar. Half of the people reading this will automatically agree. You know what I mean. You will remember. The other half of you won’t know what I’m talking about at all. To this half of you, I ask… nay, I beg: hear me out. HEAR me out. “Big Fat Liar. B.F.L. Bfl, as it’s come to be known.” The film is a cornerstone in the cinematic repertoire of persons who subliminally know the back half of the phrase that begins “call me, beep me,” who remember the Rachel McAdams-Ryan Gosling kiss at the MTV Movie Awards, who can recall seeing purple and green Heinz EZ Squirt bottles in the supermarket. In other words, the youngest millennials and the eldest zoomers. What’s it about? Everything. It’s the kind of splashy, kid-friendly studio fare that they don’t make anymore: a hilarious, grandiose adventure about two wiseass kids, and it’s also (like many movies aimed at kids from that era), a tribute to great movies from the 20th century. Frankie Muniz (2002, baby!) is a fourteen-year-old kid named Jason Shepherd. He lives in a nice Michigan suburb, skateboards to school, hangs out with his best friend Kaylee (Amanda Bynes). But he also complicates his blissful existence by lying constantly, using his silver-tongued gift of gab to slide around the rules, get himself out of undesirable situations, and ultimately… wind up in big, big trouble. Our story, which was directed by Shawn Levy, begins when Jason fibs to get out of handing in a school paper but gets caught in the lie. He’s given a very, very brief extension of a few hours from his teacher (Sandra Oh), and is hit with a stroke of genius. He begins to pen (furiously, due to the time-limit) a short story about a compulsive liar and the trouble it gets him in, which he calls “Big Fat Liar.” He names the main character after his dog. It’s all very ad-hoc. And it’s full of intriguing framing language like, “Kenny Trooper was the world’s biggest liar… they say a little lie can grow bigger and bigger… one man will pay the price.” If it sounds to you like the tagline to a movie or the VO in a trailer, then you’re thinking right. Let’s keep going. So! As Jason is biking to the meeting place to hand it in, he is hit by a car! Yes! Well, actually, it’s a limo. And the passenger of this limo, a Hollywood producer named Marty Wolf (Giamatti), agrees, very, very unhappily, to give him a ride the rest of the way. As Jason and Marty chat for a bit in the backseat, his backpack spills and the story falls out without him knowing. After Jason leaves, Marty picks it up and gives it a quick read, growing visibly intrigued (you can tell by the slow arching of Giamatti’s eyebrow). And Jason shows up to meet his teacher without it, frantically telling a wild story about getting hit by a limo driving a Hollywood producer who accidentally took his paper. No one believes him, he fails his class, and he is sentenced to summer school. It’s only when he’s at the movies with his friend Kaylee (Bynes) does he see a teaser trailer for a movie with the same plot and title as his paper, causing him to realize that Wolf had stolen his story and has begun adapting it into a big feature, next summer’s hotly-anticipated blockbuster. Yet, still no one will believe Jason about what happened, so he convinces Kaylee to run away to Los Angeles with him for a long weekend while his parents are out of town, planning on corner Wolf at his studio and get him to admit that he plagiarized his next big feature film. Only, Big Fat Liar is poised to be Marty’s biggest hit in a long, long time, and he doesn’t plan on letting go of it easily. Big Fat Liar is probably the first time my generation even saw Paul Giamatti. Maybe some of us did see him in small roles beforehand; we might have seen him as the bellman in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), or watched as he played the orangutan Limbo in Planet of the Apes (2001), unrecognizable in pounds of makeup. There was always one or two kids in my elementary school classes who bragged about being allowed to watch Saving Private Ryan (1998) so maybe some of them caught him in that movie, too. But it’s not only appealing to kids—rather, the kids we were in 2002. In the twenty-plus years since, my own father has always been compelled to stop flipping through channels every time he sees Big Fat Liar playing. He watches it through to the end, every time, and his loud belly laughs echo through the house. Critics will say that movies like American Splendor (2002) and Sideways (2004) made him the star he is now. But Big Fat Liar proved, early on, that he could do anything. Giamatti seems to have thrown his whole heart into this one, playing the obnoxious, perfidious, sneaky, general all-around jerk Wolf with a level of manic energy heretofore unseen in man. He is… incredible. He is far more committed to his role than anyone in this genre of movie need be and, as a result, he makes the whole thing gel. He’s never so vile that he’s unwatchable; in fact, the deeper Giamatti burrows into his unpleasantness, the more compelling he becomes. The intensity of performance is not merely funny, but it is a coherent exaggeration of the sinister Hollywood producer archetype we’ve seen a thousand times before. Giamatti told GQ in an interview in December 2023 that he enjoyed the chance to do the “crazy physical stuff” that the role of Marty Wolf required. “I’ve always been physically comfortable doing stuff like that in front of people. I mean, there’s obviously an exhibitionist element to actors… he just was letting me do so much ridiculous stuff and I enjoy being big like that. It’s really fun, you know? You don’t get the opportunity so much to just go over the top like that. And [the director, Shawn Levy] knew I could.” Levy was a college friend of Giamatti’s and apparently hounded him to take the part. Honestly, has anyone been a better judge of ability than Shawn Levy in this moment? I say nay. Marty’s personality develops across two acts: his normal state of unprincipled megalomania, unhinged unpleasantness, and petty tyranny at his production company offices and on sets, and a state of frantic, tantruming, vengefulness as Jason turns the tables and begins to ruin his life, in the form of a series of vengeful pranks by Jason, Kaylee, and the small army they have gathered from the pool of his employees and colleagues. Throughout, though, he is a magnetic antagonist, a showstopping villain, combining vocal mayhem and madcap physicality. A perfect example is the film’s perhaps most memorable scene, when the obnoxious Marty wakes up one morning in his ostentatious Los Angeles mansion and dances his way to his pool, grooving along to his favorite song “Hungry Like the Wolf.” He doesn’t realize, though, that Jason and Kaylee have dumped out bottles of blue dye in his pool, poured orange hair dye in his shampoo, and dabbed wet superglue inside his phone earpiece. In the course of a single two-minute scene, we see the extremes of Marty’s existence: a narcissistic tyrant at the height of his power and an angry bully who realizes someone’s getting the better of him. But of course, this is only gets him ready to fight back harder. And boy, does he fight back. Marty and Jason find themselves locked in an epic battle that takes them across the Universal Studios lot. Their story already borrows from different genres (especially heists and westerns), but it also literally takes place on and across the different sets there, from famous movie landmarks like the Bates home from Psycho, to the flash flood set on the studio tour. In developing as a behind-the-scenes look at a major motion picture studio, Big Fat Liar becomes a heady mash-up of Hollywood tales; more than simply a be movie about “movies,” it’s movie about the stories we tell about the movies. Movies and stories and lies are all different versions of the same thing. It’s clear that the liar Marty doesn’t love movies, or, storytelling on the whole. He has a knack for fiction, but he’s in this game for the moolah. Maybe he wasn’t, always. But he is now. We meet Jason, on the other hand, before he parlays his life of lies into something truly disingenuous, like Marty has. And we watch Jason at this pivotal turning point in his emotional journey, realizing that he can transform his ability to tell stories from a strategy for copping-out into a productive creative form. Rather than stay a humble liar, he becomes a writer. Anyway, Big Fat Liar is a film burrowed deep in the annals of millennial cinema, but it deserves a Renaissance of its own—for Giamatti’s inspired performance, yes, but also for the whole damn thing. As Marty Wolf yells to a crowd of potential supporters and financiers during one BS-loaded speech, ““God Bless All of You, God Bless America, and God Bless Big Fat Liar.” Except the difference between me and Marty is that I mean it. And that’s the truth. View the full article -
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My First Thriller: I.S. Berry
For three months after its launch in May 2023, I.S. Berry’s spy novel was flying under the radar, as most debut novels do. Then a rave review from The New Yorker set off a firestorm of other favorable notices that resulted in numerous publications and National Public Radio naming it one of the best novels of year. In a world where thousands of great books go unnoticed annually, I.S. Berry (her pen name) was the lucky one who was discovered for her talent and story by a publishing and media world that too often looks inward for more of the same, by the same, for its next round of similar enlightenment. Berry’s novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow was also nominated for best debut novel by the Mystery Writers of America, the International Thriller Writers, and Deadly Pleasures quarterly magazine, yet it was still not a bestseller. But at Bouchercon, the massive mystery/crime fiction convention held in San Diego in 2023, Berry’s novel sold out quickly. Her publisher, Atria (a Simon & Schuster imprint), noticed. Publishing is so arbitrary at times that publishing experts are often caught off guard. But what you can expect once they realize they have a winner, they go all in. Expect a major marketing push for the paperback release of The Peacock and the Sparrow. A book that reeks of bestseller status, it just may find its way to the top soon. The Peacock and the Sparrow has been described as nuanced, realistic, and filled with twists and turns as it races to its conclusion. It’s based on the real-world dynamics of the Arab Spring. Berry knows of what she writes because she lived the life of a spy. And yet it wasn’t until her life as a case officer for the CIA had come to an end that she finally came up with the idea for the novel. “It’s not a typical thriller novel. It doesn’t fit in a category,” she says. “It’s literary, and as much a human, character-driven story as a traditional espionage story. I also wanted to portray the unvarnished, dark, gritty side of spying, which most spy novels don’t…My book doesn’t glorify the agency at all…I tried to make Bahrain a character. I think it’s full-bodied and immersive in the time and place. I tried to make every detail authentic. Every detail in there is real, from the cocktails at Trader Vic’s to the way spies conduct dead drops to the expat villas.” For a long time, she didn’t live the routine life of a spy. She didn’t schmooze potential contacts at embassy parties or get many chances to take them out for drinks at lunchtime. Instead, she became a counter-terrorism case officer during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a case officer, her mission was to recruit sources, but she was stationed in the green zone in Baghdad, protected from her potential sources by walls and surrounded by the U.S. military. And she admits she was traumatized by the daily shelling and mortar fire that landed near her inside and outside the massive compound on a near-daily basis. She often relied on walk-ins (to the zone) to become her latest assets but would sometimes venture into the red zone in an armored vehicle to pick up sources. Not exactly the romantic life for a young, single case officer. There was nothing glamorous about it and she captures that feeling in The Peacock and the Sparrow. Berry was assigned to track down Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who was responsible for numerous suicide bombings and beheadings of Americans and other hostages. He was killed by U.S. bombs dropped on a safe house in 2006, several months after Berry left Iraq. The exact circumstances of his death are still murky, Berry says. She doesn’t know the particulars and if she did, she couldn’t talk about it. It is this uncertainty, which is pervasive in the spy game, that makes The Peacock and the Sparrow so compelling. One source helped her track down an alleged terrorist target believed to be involved in a Baghdad attack. He was detained but never confessed. Today, she can’t say for sure if he’s guilty. She still wonders if they got the wrong guy. “It is something that has haunted me,” she says. “It’s still a weight on me.” It is yet another example of the ambiguity of the spy game. “The truth is elusive. You never know and you have to make peace with the unanswered questions.” Berry was beguiled by foreign affairs while studying abroad at the London School of Economics. “I thought I’d be a civil rights lawyer, but I fell in love with the great beyond and wanted to explore.” After graduation, she shoved everything she owned into a suitcase and moved to Prague where she lived in a small flat above the famed Roxy night club while making a sparse living at an online English-speaking newspaper. “I wanted to experience the world.” It was there that she made her first attempt at a novel, but she readily admits that at that time, she had no experience and nothing to say. She then she moved to Cambridge, England and worked for the U.S Department of Defense as a Balkans intelligence analyst. Having lived in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, she was already well-versed in transitional countries and “I loved intelligence. I loved being in the thick of foreign affairs.” While on one of her frequent trips to Bosnia, someone told her the CIA needed more women case officers (spies) and suggested she apply. She did. It took so long that she attended law school at the University of Virginia while waiting for the CIA to examine her application and run their background check. She focused on national security and international law. After graduation, she joined and later headed to the Middle East. Years later after leaving the CIA, Berry returned to the U.S., got married, and practiced national security law until her son was born in 2010. She moved to Bahrain in early 2012 where her husband worked as a civilian for the Department of Defense as the Arab Spring was bubbling to the fore. Most Americans focused their attention on the events in Egypt, but Bahrain was a hotbed of protest against its autocratic government. It was also the battleground for a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Berry was entranced by the politics. “It was so fascinating. We were living in it,” she says. Following their two-year stint, her family moved back to Virginia, but the ghosts of espionage were still imbedded in her soul. Her son was now in preschool, so she had some free time and decided to again try writing a novel. This time, she had extensive exposure to the world and had lots to say. One of her struggles has been dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after first coming home from Iraq. “Your brain learns to live with this fear, trauma, and uncertainty…I really don’t know of anyone (who’s experienced war) who doesn’t deal with PTSD…We’re just not programed as humans to deal with it.” She used her own time in war and everything else she experienced as a spy to mold her novel. Particularly the unanswered questions. She wanted to leave the reader feeling haunted, wondering what was unseen and what the story was behind the story to convey a visceral sense of espionage. “Initially, I didn’t have a firm idea of what I wanted to write,” she says. She started with what she calls, “a spy-flavored thriller, but not a spy novel. I looked back and the espionage scenes had an authenticity that the rest of the book didn’t.” She began rewriting. It took five years. Three years in, she said, “For a moment, I hated the story. I think every writer reaches that point. But I worked through it because fundamentally I believed in my book. You just have those moments of doubt.” Later, she notes, “I didn’t realize until the end how much of my own experience was in there.” Critics have spoken of the realism in her writing. “One review I saw described my book as ‘equal parts literature, noir, and thriller.’” Her novel focuses on Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, who is stationed in Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia for his final tour. He’s ready to call it quits when he starts to uncover Iranian support for the insurgency against the monarchy. Then he meets and falls for Almaisa, a beautiful and enigmatic artist. This enabled him to experience a part of Bahrain most expats never do. When a trusted informant becomes embroiled in a murder, Collins finds himself caught in the crosswinds of a revolution. Drawing on all his skills as a spymaster, he sets out to learn the truth behind the Arab Spring, win Almaisa’s love, and uncover where Bahrain’s secrets end, and America’s begin. Berry was now learning to become a writer. “I’d always wanted to write a novel. I didn’t think it was a practical profession.” It was a lonely task she couldn’t fully share with others, not even her husband. Because she is former CIA, every manuscript she writes about spies has to be preapproved by the agency before she can share it with anyone. For that reason, she hadn’t gotten to know any writers to ask for help about the publishing business. So, ever the novice, she read what she could and queried about 15 agents. The response was immediate. Several expressed interest. “I didn’t understand how audacious that was at the time. I think if I had known I would have been a lot more intimidated and not as bold. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” She chose David McCormick because he represented a wide range of authors, and her book, as he pointed out, wasn’t a “genre” book. “He really loved my manuscript and seemed to really believe in me…Along the way there are people who really believe in you and that’s what I felt with him.” Especially, she says, because “my book is kind of a slow burn, not a shoot ‘em up novel.” “When my agent was pitching to publishers, I suggested he submit to Peter Borland, who had edited Joseph Kanon, bestselling author of The Berlin Exchange. Peter ended up being the one. And my first blurb ended up coming from Kanon.” When her book launched on May 30, 2023, she faced what most debut novelists endure. Silence. “I was so new to this I wasn’t part of the writers’ community. I thought it would get reviewed more. I had no reviews at first. It felt a little bit like shouting in an empty room.” Publishers Weekly did give it a starred review, but others like Kirkus ignored it. “That was eye opening for me. And then I hustled to get events. I joined social media and got involved in the author community. I was blown away by how supportive other authors were.” Her colleagues at the CIA embraced her as well. “Since my book was published, I’ve met with a lot of former case officers and even spoken to the CIA’s creative writing group, ‘Invisible Ink.’” It was the first time she’d set foot in the CIA’s Langley headquarters in 15 years. “There are a fair number inside that world who want to write books,” she says. But her watershed moment came after The New Yorker stumbled upon her book and later named it a best book of the year. That attracted other reviewers, even NPR. “Having the cache of The New Yorker really helped,” she says. Since then, she has gotten a hoard of invitations from book clubs, including men’s book clubs. For a writer who had to wait so long to become part of the authors and readers community, it appears the neighborhood has finally opened its arms to her. “Spying was definitely not like this,” she says. ___________________________________ The Peacock and the Sparrow ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 3 years to write, 2 years edit, CIA approval a few months Decided to write a novel: First attempt in Prague, years later after her CIA and Bahrain tours. Experience: CIA Case officer (spy who recruits human sources for information) Agents Contacted: About 15 agents Agent Rejections: 10-11 First Novel Agent: David McCormick First Novel Editor: Peter Borland First Novel Publisher: Atria (Simon and Schuster) Inspiration: The texture of the world. What lies beneath the scenes. Secrets intrigue me. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Website: https://isberry.net Advice to Writers: Don’t be afraid to find a distinctive voice. Pick a story you love because writing is like a long-term relationship. There are moments you will hate your story. Read everything to find out what speaks to you and what doesn’t. Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, Mary Kubica, and Hank Phillippi Ryan. View the full article -
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How Four Investigative Reporting Experiences Led to Great Mystery “Material”
During my career as an investigative reporter – and as the wife of an expert in the field of computer-assisted investigative reporting – I have experienced situations that could be distressing if you didn’t realize this is all great material for writing mysteries! The first occurred early in my career when I was assigned to write a feature on a man who was a “shoo-in” as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. We will call him Mr. M. He was a familiar figure in the city and state – a young, handsome multi-millionaire respected not only for his business acumen but because he was ballyhooed as “the most eligible bachelor” in town. I was tickled to be covering such a neat guy. Our first interview went well though I did note that he wore lifts in his shoes. Guess he wanted to be taller? That night I was at a dinner party where I mentioned to a woman friend that I was working on an article about Mr. M. “Really,” she said with an odd expression, “I know him. I used to babysit for him. I suggest you check with this reporter in my hometown for background on Mr. M.” So I called the newspaper in that city, connected with an award-winning investigative reporter and when I told him whom I was profiling and why (i.e. “he’s also the most eligible bachelor in town….”) – the reporter paused, then said, “That’s interesting because he has a wife and three children down here.” Our newspaper broke that story. Mr. M lost the election. No U.S. Senate. One week later, he called me at my office shouting, “I’m suing you for defamation.” “Try,” I said, “and I’ll sue you for libel.” Of course, I had no idea if I could or not. A few weeks later, I was in a small private plane, sitting near the pilot, as I was being flown to a political conference I had to cover when the pilot said he had seen my stories on Mr. M. “Something you should know,” said the pilot, “is that Mr. M. keeps his private plane next to mine and I know he does not have it inspected as he should. That plane is going to crash one of these days….” Sure enough, a couple months later Mr. M and five other people died when his plane crashed during a flight to Las Vegas. Lesson learned: Never trust a person who wears lifts. And learn to spot those people who think they can get away with anything. Until they can’t. Great Material. * My next experience occurred ten years later. My second husband, B, also an investigative reporter, was testing the use of database technology – this was in the early eighties before the Internet was so easy to use – and he had decided to explore what was behind a series of small mentions of accidental deaths in our area. We lived near a large East Coast city, which was surrounded by small towns, each of which had their own police force. B had been keeping track of different death notices that had appeared as “agate” in the major city’s newspaper. “Agate” referred to a brief graph in tiny type stating the date, sex and cause of a victim’s death. B also knew that the different police departments did not, generally, communicate with one another. Again, this was before our major, amazing national databases in use today. On his own, B reached out to the police departments for more details and then he got started building his own database. I will never forget it as I found him in our den, in the dark, on a hot summer night, inputting the following details: Each of nine (!) victims was female, black and between eighteen and thirty years of age Each victim was known to the police as having worked as an “escort” or prostitute Each victim’s body had been found near an electrical transformer Each victim’s cause of death had been listed as “undetermined” but when an autopsy was finally done, each one had been strangled And so it was that hot summer night that B and I looked at each other in amazement: this was the work of a serial killer! Likely an employee of the local electric company. What was needed next was to find someone who might have known all the women. And with that information, the various police departments chose to work together. They soon discovered an engineer at the electric company who moonlighted as a “pastor” focused on saving women’s souls. It didn’t take long to determine he had known each of the murdered women. He got life in prison. B, meanwhile, went on to become an expert in the field of computer-assisted reporting. Lesson learned by me: Keep an eye on the details such as locations, odd coincidences and don’t make early assumptions based on race, education or sex. Look for the obscure, the unexpected – and take notes! That’s when you’ll discover Great Material. ** Even when you are not working as a reporter, challenging events can occur: happy, sad or perfectly awful. Again, you can choose how to deal with such moments. The following happened shortly after B and I had moved to a new suburb out east and I had just enrolled my son in the nearby middle school. It was early on a snowy January morning and I was driving him to his first day of school. A neighbor had told me of a shortcut to the school so I was driving a road that ran alongside the high school playing fields when we passed a small sedan that had crashed into a telephone pole. No one was around but that didn’t worry me – I grew up in Wisconsin where drunk drivers often abused telephone poles. I kept going. After dropping my son off, I returned the same way only to see police officers and men in trench coats gathered around the wrecked sedan. Once home, I called B at the newspaper and told him, “There might be an accident…” at such and such a location. An hour later, he called back quite upset saying, “that was a murder scene. I wish you had told me!” (Translation: he could have broken the story and gotten a raise.) Turns out there was a dead woman in the car. Had I stopped on my way to the school, I would have found her naked, wearing only panties in the below-zero weather. When the police, two men, first arrived, they reported “an accident.” But minutes later, when they were joined by a female officer, she took one look at the victim and said, “This is no accident. No woman, drunk or depressed, goes driving in weather like this wearing only panties! This is murder.” At first, the woman’s husband, an OB-GYN at the local hospital, tried to say she had been drinking, they had fought and she had driven off angry. Not true. And this is where the story gets kind of awful. They’d had a fight, all right, and he beat her to death with a statue of the Virgin Mary, dumped her body out their bedroom window onto the driveway — only to realize he better do something to hide his actions. When the autopsy report showed she had died of blunt trauma to the head, he was arrested and convicted of homicide. But that’s not the end of the story. Years later, I was in Wisconsin and giving a library talk about “things you cannot make up” when a woman in the audience raised her hand. “I was on that jury,” she said. “And you won’t believe what happened next. The husband got out on appeal, applied to a hospital in another city and was hired as the head of their OB-GYN unit. They never checked his credentials. They hired a murderer!” Lesson learned: Some stories you can’t make up. Again, Great Material. *** Finally, on a lighter note, B covered one investigation where he had to interview a forensic pathologist. The source turned out to be a hefty woman wearing scrubs who invited him into her autopsy room. They weren’t alone. Along with the deceased, she had two massive Great Danes she allowed to roam freely. Lesson utilized: That experience prompted me to conjure up the coroner in my series who is a retired bartender, appointed to his position by his brother-in-law, the Mayor of Loon Lake, and who shows up for official duties “overserved.” Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up. How to find your Great Material? When writing mysteries don’t hesitate to draw from real life: the unexpected, the amusing, or the horrifying. It is all Great Material. **** View the full article -
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Nicholas Meyer on the Great Escape of Art (and the Art of Detective Fiction)
Leo Tolstoy, author of my favorite novel, War and Peace, said that the purpose of art is to teach us to love life, an observation that has pleased me since I first read it. But on reflection, I think it fair to say there are other things that art can do in relation to life; it can change the way we see life; it can teach us to endure or perhaps enable us to escape life. For a time, anyway. In a world beset by unprecedented horrors, where the survival of the planet itself seems to hang by a fraying thread, art can sometimes grant us respite—time, as it were, to catch our breath. Art can take us out of ourselves, plunging us, however briefly, into alternative worlds, worlds of beauty and make believe, worlds that allow us a pause from day to day anxiety and panic, a “timeout” in which to… surrender to enchantment, to collect ourselves so as to return refreshed and perhaps inspired to resume the ongoing battle with reality. The art that can accomplish this may not necessarily or always be great art. It might be. It might be Mozart or Shakespeare, which for me is akin to getting a transfusion. But it could also be the less exalted variety, like, for example, the satisfaction of curling up with a good mystery story at bedtime. Detective stories, are, as many will allow, a source of great comfort, which is strange if you think about it. After all, detective stories promise death and bloody destruction, serial killers, and mayhem, severed body parts with corpses splayed at unnatural angles, the skulls fractured by blunt instruments wielded a person or persons unknown. How can this stuff be comforting? Because detective literature for all its protestations of thrills, gore and procedural authenticity, frequently delivers the exact opposite of what it promises. Unlike life in which dreadful things happen for no reason, where children are struck by lightning or pedestrians by drunk drivers, in detective stories, as the gumshoe sooner or later observes, “it all adds up.” In detective literature, unlike life, nothing happens without a reason. So yes, we love detective stories because they help us escape real life. It is a superficial escape, to be sure. It isn’t a total transfusion like Mozart, (who has unfortunately been elevated to a form of castor oil—“listen to your Mozart, it will make you smarter!”) Detective stories by contrast are what some people call guilty pleasures. And let’s admit frankly that some pleasures are all the keener because they’re guilty. We feel we should be spending our time on more “worthwhile” things, but we cannot resist the siren call of, “Come, Watson, the game’s afoot!” Artists lose all proprietary authority over our creations when they’re finished. We cannot be objective judges of our creations. Like Moses, we don’t get to cross the Jordan and look back to see the trail we’ve blazed. Like messages stuffed in bottles, our work is essentially thrown out into the wide world, hoping for the best. Each person who extracts the message within will make of the contents what they will. So, what follows must be counted idle speculation. I write Sherlock Holmes stories for the same reason I read them, to divert my attention from the terrifying issues that plague the rest of my waking hours—Ukraine, Gaza, drought, famine, wildfires, limits on voting rights, Fox News and anti-vaxxers. But for a few hours, when I read or write Sherlock Holmes stories, I am transported to what appears to be a simpler world, where a creature of superhuman intelligence, nobility, compassion and yes, frailty, can make sense of it all. Was the Victorian world in fact simpler than this one? We’ve no way of knowing, but like an audience willing itself to believe that the magic trick is really magic, we are conniving accomplices to our own beguilement. I’ve now written five Sherlock Holmes novels. The sixth, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, will be published August 27 and I am working on a seventh. I didn’t plan on writing more than one and I don’t write them unless I have an idea that seems right for Holmes. Ideas of any kind do not come easily or plentifully to me. As an example, twenty six years passed between the time I wrote The Canary Trainer and when I wrote The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols. The idea has to be good enough so that it teases my brain and won’t let go. When I should be doing other things, grownup things—like earning a living—instead I am lying awake and riffing on what has begun taking shape in my head. I self-censor easily. If I can poke holes in my idea, it becomes natural if not inevitable that l lose interest and drop it. My novels fall into the category now pejoratively labeled “pastiche,” which I confess I find irritating. All art is a history of cut and paste. Are James Bond movies with different Bonds also pastiches? Star Treks with different Spocks? As Michael Chabon has observed, all fiction is fan fiction. What are the Odyssey and Aeneid but fanboy spinoffs? There is something to be said for pouring new wine into old bottles. Don’t we sometimes get off listening to covers of The Beatles? Just to see what someone else does with their songs? Isn’t it cool to hear Sinead O’Conner’s riff on “Nothing Compares to You?” To listen to Tiffany’s version of “I Think We’re Alone Now”? The words of the Catholic mass are pretty standardized, but who would argue that Mozart’s “Requiem,” Bach’s “B Minor Mass,” Verdi’s “Requiem” or Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War” are “pastiches”? The music makes them different. Seeing what can be done with Holmes and Watson while adhering to the rough outlines set forth by Doyle, seems to me as legitimate a challenge as setting new music for the text of the “Dies irae.” No one confuses Mozart with Verdi. Most of my ideas reach me indirectly; they begin as someone else’s; in however incoherent form, I trip over them. Or someone primes my thought pump. “What about Holmes and…?” and I’m off and running. Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud; Holmes in London’s theatre world; Holmes encounters the Phantom of the Opera; Holmes and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Lately, Holmes in Egypt. This last notion was no more than those three words. It was all I needed. I find that taking Holmes out of his element (England, and specifically London), making him in effect, a fish out of (Thames) water, allows my creative juices to flow. I am not interested in limiting myself to Doyle’s vocabulary or never allowing Holmes an action that he hasn’t performed earlier someplace. Mere variations along those lines strike me as inevitably a species of taxidermy. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but in my opinion in order for Holmes to come to life he must change. But he must always change in character. It is a fine and arguably abstract line that I am drawing and while I’ve no doubt there are Doyle imitators who successfully adhere more literally—and literarily – to Doyle than I do, I am not certain the results are more lifelike. Of course, I’ve not read many other Holmes novels and stories, for two reasons: firstly because there are now so many that if I attempted to canvas the competition I’d never have time to read anything else. Secondly, I shy away from other Holmes books, not because I suspect they might be dreadful but because I am just insecure enough to fear they might be better—much better—than my own attempts. I’ve read some that are and the result is a kind of brain freeze wherein I become creatively inhibited. Or worse, I start to imitate other Doyle imitators. Writing Holmes, of necessity, involves an enormous amount of research. Whether it’s a novel or a screenplay, entering a different narrative milieu is like starting medical or law school. You write down everything because you’ve no way of judging at the start what will prove pyrite or gold. You go for long walks, notebook in hand. You think about possibilities as you fall asleep and as you wake. You try things in different combinations. Somehow the result must seem inevitable, one event leading to inexorably to the next. Besides our dynamic duo, who are the characters? What are Holmes and Watson doing in Egypt? In Russia? What is the mystery? (Hint: a body always helps). How much description can the reader (used to moving pictures in all venues) tolerate? How much modern and how much ancient history do you—and the reader—need to know in order to follow the story? How much information is too much? Research is like painting stage scenery. All you need is what you want the audience to see, not what’s hidden in the wings, fascinating though it may be. It’s like fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube. But it is more than that. For all the research, the hesitations, the false starts and frustrating stops, it cannot be denied that writing a detective story provides—for this author, at least—many of the same pleasures as reading one. It is, in short, a great escape of its own. And, to mix a metaphor, it can only be hoped that my great escape proves contagious, that what I stuff into my bottle will entertain and divert those who chance upon it. __________________________________ Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram From Hell by Nicholas Meyer is published by The Mysterious Press and will release on August 27th, 2024. It is available for pre-order here. 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Sasha Vasilyuk: To the Insecure ESL Writer I Once Was
I grew up in the former USSR surrounded by books on shelves built by my grandfather. The books came in multiple numbered tomes – grey, brick red, pale green – and bore the names of the authors in gold lettering that glistened under the light of the lamp. Chekhov. Pushkin. Akhmatova. One collection – Tolstoy – numbered in 14 emerald-colored volumes. There were foreign ones too: the Brontës, Hemingway, London. It would be a while until I learned that such collections were a status symbol for the Soviet middle class and that they were very hard to come by. Back then, long before I became a debut author in the U.S., they were simply a backdrop – weighty and venerated. Before I dared open one – in fact, before I even learned to read or write – I entertained myself by making up nonsensical rhymes. I loved that words could be used to build worlds. To make magic. But the words I heard adults around me use weren’t magical. They were strange, complicated, dry: synthesis, psychotechnical, methodology. My parents worked as psychologists and all their friends – and my potential role models – were psychologists too. Even Santa Claus, who came to our apartment one year, turned out to be my dad’s colleague who, after ho-ho-hoing, took off his white beard to drink vodka in the kitchen and talk shop with my dad. While I secretly wanted to grow up into someone who made magic with words, when adults leaned over to ask what I wanted to be, I dutifully said, a psychologist. Saying a writer – putting myself in the vicinity of the gods on our bookshelves – felt sacrilegious. After living in Ukraine, we moved to Moscow where, in third grade, a tall, assertive teacher with a booming voice walked into my Reading class. He announced that instead of Reading, where we’d been suffering through short, deadwood passages of Soviet-era textbooks, he had come to teach us Literature. Literature! I still remember how that sophisticated word – and the dignity with which he said it – cast a magic spell on my mind. I thought of the gold-lettered books back home. As the teacher teleported me from the boring textbooks toward the transcendent poetry of Pasternak, I knew I wanted to be part of this World of Literature. Within a couple of years, I was composing my own Russian poetry. On a long winter bus ride to school, I wrote a poem about Pushkin, which won an award in a school competition. When assigned to write a fairytale based on a real historical event, I wrote an animal-populated version of the 1991 putsch, a coup attempt that resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I stopped saying I’d become a psychologist and began to believe that I was on a path toward a literary future. I allowed myself to dream that I would become a novelist, with a gold-lettered tome of my own. Then, in the summer before seventh grade, my mother dropped a bombshell: we were immigrating to the U.S. At 13, I found myself walking into an ESL class in a public middle school in San Francisco. No one there would care for a girl writing in Russian. My main purpose in life became mastering English and fitting into the strange and fraught new world of American teenhood. I’d studied English back in Moscow, but the proper British version in my old classes included no Californian slang or cultural references. Plus, there was the accent. I’ll never forget how the whole class giggled when my “can’t” came out like “cunt”. I learned the pledge of allegiance and the concept, drilled into me daily, that this was the best country on earth, that I was lucky to be here, and that to be American meant abandoning the past and reinventing yourself in this land of opportunity. I was, in the words of Emma Lazarus, “the wretched refuse” of my ancient homeland “yearning to breathe free.” What I heard behind the American welcome was: my homeland was lesser than, my language was unnecessary, and my past irrelevant. All those gold-lettered books that traveled with us to San Francisco were a shrine to my past. They would never be a gateway to my future. In high school, I took Psychology where I confirmed that I had no talent or interest in following in my parents’ footsteps. By the time I got to college, I’d decided to major in Comparative Literature. I might not have the language chops or cultural knowledge to become an American novelist, I reasoned, but at least I could immerse myself in the writing of others. My classes focused on international literature and, unsurprisingly, were much smaller than the those in the English department. I read Doctor Zhivago, learned about Futurism, where we studied Marinetti and Mayakovsky, and did an independent study project on Akhmatova’s connection to Italian literature. I was finally making use of the books my mom dragged across the ocean, though I also felt college years were an indulgence. No one would pay me to do any of this in the real world. Even if I were to write a novel, the very concept of “The Great American Novel” excluded me, I felt. Though by then I’d become a U.S. citizen, who was I to say anything about my adapted homeland? It didn’t help that I kept wondering what would have happened to me had I never immigrated. In that alternate universe, unencumbered by foreignness, was I becoming a young novelist? At 19, I landed a summer internship at a Russian-language newspaper headquartered in the Empire State Building. As I rode the elevator – up, up, up – for a moment I felt there was value in my native language after all and maybe, even in America, I could carve out some niche and become a real working writer. My first assignment was to interview a Soviet émigré artist who made sculptural paintings using found objects. He was in his 40s and lived in a crowded studio apartment on the Upper East Side. Though his life didn’t seem glamorous, I admired that he was able to find himself as an artist in this new country and was jealous that his craft was free of language. As I was about to leave, he asked me what I wanted to be. When I told him, he said, “To be a writer, you first need to live a little.” Instead of seeing through his condescension and sexism, I accepted that I hadn’t lived enough real life stuff to say anything substantial. By my age, Hemingway had been injured in World War I. Chekhov had assumed full support of his bankrupted parents. Jack London had gone to Japan as a sailor, had ridden trains as a hobo, and was jailed for vagrancy in London. In comparison, my immigrant life was pretty conventional. I didn’t have the confidence to appreciate what I had already lived through: growing up in Russia during the brutal violence of the 1990s, coming to America, being separated from my father, losing my first love to a car accident, and having grandparents who’d survived the Ukrainian famine, World War II, and Stalin’s repressions. The artist confirmed what I had already internalized as an immigrant: the stories from my culture didn’t matter. For the next decade, I didn’t write fiction or poetry. Not a single creative word, in any language. I was convinced that I had to live a little, whatever that meant, and that I had nothing meaningful to offer to American readers except occasional articles about things happening in this country. It took ten years and a divorce that sent me to Moscow where I marched in the biggest wave of anti-Putin protests for me to see that maybe I had some things to say that could bridge my upbringing in Ukraine, Russia and America. The protests were followed by arrests and, soon, by an armed conflict between my two homelands. At the time, in 2014, the conflict was centered in my family’s hometown in Ukraine. The world didn’t yet know that soon it would grow into the biggest land war since WWII. But I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to stop being afraid that I hadn’t lived enough and that no one in the U.S. would care to read a story that happens in another place, another time, to other people. It took me almost three decades to go from ESL class to seeing value in my history and culture. I only wish I could tell my younger self not to wait, but to write while life happened. To practice the craft. To record the experience of living in an insecure, confused, immigrant body. And meanwhile, not to let those old, gold-lettered books gather too much dust. *** View the full article -
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The Strange, Sad Literature of Evil Mothers
Given how much I love reading and writing about dysfunctional families, it’s no wonder I would soon turn my attention to evil mothers! While my new book, Darling Girls, is about the relationship between three women who grew up in foster care together and call each other sisters, once you meet their foster mother Miss Fairchild, you’ll understand what I mean. Here are some of my favourite thrillers that feature evil mothers, all of which definitely provided inspiration for Darling Girls… Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent This incredibly twisty book is an absolute page-turner! Strange Sally Diamond is told from two perspectives. We have Sally Diamond, now orphaned in her forties and grappling with her less-than-average upbringing as she tries to function in ‘normal society’ in the small Irish town where she lives. Then we have another narrator, living in New Zealand, who’s also grappling with their strange childhood and telling the story of the past. Do their stories intertwine? What do evil mothers have to do with it? You’ll need to read to find out… None of This is True by Lisa Jewell Where I live in Australia, it seems like everyone is talking about None of This is True by Lisa Jewell… and for good reason. The story follows two mothers who meet in a restaurant bathroom and both realise it’s their 45th birthday. The protagonist, Alix Summers, is a popular podcaster, and Josie Fair sees an opportunity to tell her own story. Alix agrees to interview Josie, and quickly we realise we have no idea what’s true. I can’t really talk about the evil mothers storyline without spoilers, so you’ll have to trust me! Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford Originally published in 1978, Mommie Dearest was one of the first harrowing memoirs of child abuse that gained global attention. It also shed light on the behind-the-scenes life of Hollywood actor Joan Crawford who was an alcoholic and abuser of her adopted daughter, Christine. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy While we’re on the subject of true stories, how could I skip over I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy? Not exactly an evil mother in the true crime sense, but the title says a lot about the toxic and abusive relationship that child actor Jennette experienced at the hands of her mother for many years. White Oleander by Janet Fitch White Oleander technically isn’t a thriller, but the mother character, Ingrid, has always stayed with me. She’s a gorgeous, talented poet locked away for committing murder, and a master manipulator to her daughter who’s being shipped from foster home to foster home in her absence. It’s also beautifully written (Oprah reads the audiobook, if that tickles your fancy!). Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews One of the most evil mothers in crime fiction history, I would argue, is the mother in Flowers in the Attic, a book (series of books) that has haunted me since I first read it many years ago. I remember this being a book my friends passed around at school…it really had us in its grasp! Let’s just say the mother stores her children in the attic with unwanted furniture. Need I say more? *** Version 1.0.0 View the full article -
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The Ripple Effect of Crime
If you follow the news at all—on TV, newspapers, social media—you are aware of crimes perpetrated both at home and in faraway places. You might read them, feel a pang of grief for the victim or a flare of rage at the villain. But our fast-moving media often gives us only a glimpse of the crime itself and then the news cycle is on to the next crime. Most of the time, the aftereffects of crime aren’t acknowledged. It’s not because those reporting the news are bad people. There’s just so much crime and only so many minutes in the day. Part of it may also be our own viewing habits. In these days of instant connection with a single click, I think our attention spans have become shorter. We read a news story and then we’re on to the next. But every crime has aftereffects. Some are more widespread than others. I call these “ripples.” A pebble tossed into a pond makes a small ripple. A larger rock makes a bigger ripple. But there’s always a reaction. It can be psychological, physical, or financial. It can affect only the victim or it can touch their family and friends. The news rarely focuses on these aftereffects, but for me—both as a writer and as someone who’s been touched by these ripples—it can be life changing. Acknowledging these life-changing ripples gives depth to the characters of a story. And in real life, it can help survivors deal with their trauma. In a basic example, a father is murdered in a random shooting on his way home from work. His family and community mourn. There will be a funeral and speeches. There might be flowers or teddy bears left at the scene. But when the speeches are over, when the flowers have died and the teddy bears cleared away, the victim’s family is left to pick up the pieces. The victim was the primary breadwinner for the family. Now there is no income. If the family was at the poverty line prior to the murder, they might not even be able to afford a funeral. A family who’d been getting by paycheck to paycheck might find themselves homeless. Even a middle-class family might have to sell their home and move somewhere smaller and probably a lot less nice. In either case, the surviving spouse must find a way to pay the bills amidst her grief. The kids will need to depend on free lunches and other charity at school and the other kids can be cruel about such things. If there were any savings or college funds, they’ll be used for daily expenses. The children will no longer be able to go to college, their entire future compromised. An entire family can be bankrupted. Those financial ripples go on to cause other trauma—shame, fear, hunger. No one steps up to pay for this family. The cops aren’t responsible. The city isn’t responsible. The only one responsible is the person who committed the murder and, statistically, if they are caught, they’re unlikely to be sentenced in a way as to bring peace to the family. The family suffers for years for the actions of a single murderer. There are other kinds of ripples, of course. Here’s a more detailed example: A psychologist is nearly killed by a client while trying to keep the client from hurting/killing everyone in their place of work. The client is angry because his court-ordered therapy required him to be on time for the therapy sessions. He’s missed several and his probation has been revoked. He’s going to jail and he’s filled with rage. If he’s going down, he’s going to take everyone with him. He sets the practice’s building on fire in an attempt to smoke out the therapists and other clients there for treatment. He’s waiting in the lobby for the occupants to exit—armed and ready to cause real pain. Occupants and therapists are huddled behind doors barricaded with desks and chairs so that the client can’t get in to hurt them. Smoke is spreading. They are terrified. Only two people have not been able to retreat behind closed doors—the owner of the practice and one of his therapists. The owner confronts the rage-filled client, but the owner is a man of small stature and the angry client is over six feet tall and muscular—and armed with knives. This isn’t going to end well. Luckily the other therapist hasn’t been seen. He’s standing in the shadows, frantically trying to think of what he should do. He’s got martial arts experience and wrestled in high school but that was nearly twenty years before. Luckily his skills come back to him. He attacks the much-larger client, taking him down, pinning him to the floor—and somehow he holds the man down while the fire department arrives to put out the fire. The firefighters then hold the client down until the police arrive. Crisis averted. For the moment. The client is arrested. You’d think he’d go to jail for a long time, considering he’s committed arson and attempted murder. But he’s sentenced to only thirty days in jail. Thirty days. And, as he’s dragged away from the courtroom, he turns to the therapist who’d wrestled him to the floor and threatens the man and his family. Ripples ensue. The therapist is traumatized but doesn’t realize it yet. It hasn’t quite sunk in and won’t for years. He’s just getting through each day. His first action is to quit his job, because it’s not the first time his life has been threatened by a client. It’s the third. He’s got a wife and two young daughters and he’s afraid the next time he won’t be so lucky. He’s just a dissertation away from his doctorate, but he walks away from that too. He can’t bear to think about the field of therapy now. Every client is a potential threat. His career as a therapist is over. He was a good therapist. He helped a lot of people. But now, the world is missing one good therapist and anyone who might have come to him cannot. The remaining therapists will have to take on more clients. These therapists will now have to work harder, longer. Clients have lost an ally in their recovery. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The therapist’s wife is also affected. Besides the fear that never quite subsides—she’d come so close to losing the love of her life—she is now the sole breadwinner because the trauma runs far deeper than either husband or wife are aware. PTSD is an insidious condition, affecting everyone a little differently. For the therapist, it’s going to be several years before he’s ready to tackle a structured job in public. With people who might be threats. When he’s able to, he thrives once again, but there’s always the knowledge that an attack can come from anywhere at any time. He’s always vigilant. Continuous vigilance is physically and mentally exhausting. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The therapist and his wife are afraid of the rage-filled client’s threats, that after his thirty days in jail, the man will follow through and come after the therapist, his wife, and his two young daughters. They sell everything and move. Start all over again in an uncertain economy. More ripples. The family moves several more times, trying to find that new start. Their children’s lives are disrupted and their home not as stable as it once was. There are financial ripples. Money is very tight. One of their children is sick, but knows that Mom and Dad are stressed, so she doesn’t say anything. The child gets worse and worse until she finally admits how sick she is. The parents now feel guilt on top of everything else. The therapist becomes a teacher and tells his students not to become therapists. It’s too dangerous. (Which is true, in his experience.) The world may lose other good therapists before they can even begin their journey. On the other hand, those people will be a lot safer in other jobs. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The other clients in the building that day faced their own trauma over the years. They’d come to a place of healing, only to have their sense of safety ripped away. One hopes that they found help elsewhere or they probably would have continued to suffer, dragging their families along with them. The therapists who huddled behind those barricaded doors will always wonder if the new client in their office is the next one who’ll become violent and hurt someone—maybe the therapist. They are always vigilant, which, again, is exhausting. So many lives were affected that day—and no one was even physically harmed. So many lives were affected that day—and no one was even physically harmed. The therapist who took the client down walked away with only bruises that disappeared over the next few days. It was the psychological bruises that took years to heal. If the second example sounds personal, it’s because it is. It happened to my family. My husband was the brave therapist who saved lives that day. I was the wife who didn’t want to let him out of my sight. My daughters were the children whose lives were uprooted. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. Ripples happen. I hope the next time you read a story about crime that you think about the victims, about how their lives will go on. Because while the loss of life or the crime itself is horrific, the aftereffects—the ripples—can continue for a lifetime. *** View the full article -
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Mask of the Deer Woman: Excerpt and Cover Reveal!
The beetles could help her disappear, but not in the same way the others had. She would do it for a better life. This was why, even though someone had trashed her van, even though her cell phone was now one big useless glitch and even though her mother was probably sick with worry, Chenoa Cloud had hiked for days to reach this ravine in the dark. If the beetles were nocturnal, so was she. The November wind whirred into the chasm and up the sleeves of her jacket like a threat, carrying with it loamy soil laced with the scent of decay. Chenoa tried to clear her head, to think instead of the waist-high switchgrass that had been gentle company as she walked across Oklahoma’s eroded plains, but the memories of missing friends were too intrusive. The moment her mind went quiet or she felt hopeful or—and this was especially annoying—she was alone in the dark, they were there with her too. The ones who left and never came back, or who couldn’t come back. How many girls had she known who’d never been heard from again? Rez girls gone. Families that searched. Or didn’t. Fleeting news coverage. Then gone again. A shiver trailed across Chenoa’s scalp as she took careful steps through the lonely cut that ran the edge of the reservation. Forget the switchgrass. Think of the beetles. She trailed her hand along the ragged sandstone wall flanking the narrow trail and knew she must be close. The smell of death, that harbinger of the American Burying Beetle colony, grew stronger. Maybe she would come upon them, feeding on a carcass right in front of her. Or maybe they would be tucked into a cave, an expanse suddenly opening under her fingertips in the dark. The image of a black and red beetle on a screen at the front of a lecture hall flashed in her mind. Any graduate student who could find and document an endangered species or, better yet, a species long-feared extinct, would be awarded grant money and a Smithsonian job at the end of the rainbow. It was the moment that had changed the angle of her future. That’s when she’d realized she had a secret, hard and smooth as a seed, its electric shock singing through her body. In an instant, she knew why the American Burying Beetle looked so familiar, and she knew exactly how to win. She was going home. Excerpt continues after cover reveal. Every weekend since, Chenoa had driven her Volkswagen from campus to the rez—a risky endeavor for the unreliable van—to conduct a search that started to feel pointless. Until she found a single crumbling carapace in this, the last place on Saliquaw Nation land that she knew to look. The crimson markings on the dried-out shell were enough to drive her onward. No matter the weather, no matter the hell she’d catch from her mother, no matter what she was afraid to find. Chenoa stumbled to the floor of the ravine, the sound of gnarled branches creaking overhead, her visibility doused by the inky night. A pungent odor filled her nose, her mouth, like fetid, fermenting fruit and something fleshier, rotten, underneath. Here was the source of the smell at last: A raccoon, its ribs picked clean, its tail still thick with fur. Chenoa moved carefully, using her headlamp to illuminate the decay from every angle, and found her future: a pair of American Burying Beetles in a clash of antennae and pincers, the victor to gain a mate. To gain it all. A place in the world where it could survive, even on this land that made people fight for all they had. A thrill began to work its way up from her belly. It spread through her chest and into her throat, which she exposed to the hidden moon, grateful. She’d found them. They were her ticket out. The American Burying Beetle would be a triumph for the reservation, thanks to the recent passage of a Recovering America’s Wildlife Act that would dedicate annually nearly $100 million in federal funds directly to tribal nations for on-the-ground conservation projects. Or it would spell disaster, bring the reservation’s development plans to a screeching halt with punitive fines for habitat damage. Either way, nothing would stop her from proving its existence. It was her way out. Rez life isn’t for everyone, Chenoa whispered over the battling beetles. The night sounds closed in. Chenoa began to recite their names. The girls, gone. Kimberley. Tayen. Loxie. Aileen. She needed to tame her thoughts, put memories into a manageable order, ignore the warning that chirred inside her like an organ. Chenoa stood, feeling the tingle of blood rushing into her thighs. Her headlamp made her blind to anything outside its range of light. If she heard the sound, it only registered as a feeling. The snap of an instinct breaking open inside of her. There was someone else. Out here, in the ravine. Where only she should have been. Where she should have been alone. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.” A man, hands outstretched in front of him, fingers wide. “Sorry, didn’t mean to spook you. I just…” He was close now, talking fast, and Chenoa was standing, rooted. Her mind was trying to make sense of it, of someone out here, with her. In the dark. Then he lunged. __________________________________ From MASK OF THE DEER WOMAN. Used with the permission of the publisher, BERKLEY. Copyright © 2025 by LAURIE L. DOVE. View the full article
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