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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- 46
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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- 23
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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?- 238
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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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Forum Statistics
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The Strong, Complex Women of Historical Mystery and Romance
Two of my great literary loves are historical mystery and romance–especially when they star strong, complex, and messy female main characters. The kind that reviewers call unlikable, or spoiled, or complicated, and who sidestep completely the trap of “not like other girls.” My favorites are characters who are unabashed in their femininity and willing to get their hands dirty. They show tremendous growth over their arcs yet remain completely consistent with their characters. When I sat down to craft my own sleuth, I wanted to find a way to capture all of these elements and create my favorite kind of character. In A Deadly Endeavor, my main character, Edie Shippen, has been accused on the page as being spoiled and shallow. Another character describes her as a butterfly–beautiful, but flitting about life without any real focus. Over the course of the book, she throws herself into discovering who was behind the murder of her cousin and other young women in her acquaintance, and balances sleuthing with the desire to be properly accessorized. Because the people in her life constantly dismiss her as flighty, no one expects her to catch a killer…except the handsome young coroner, Gilbert, who’s sister is also among the missing. Edie’s not alone. So many of my favorite historical mysteries star the exact type of strong, complex, and messy female protagonists that I love…women who refuse to be put into the boxes that the world around has built for them. Here are a few of them – and I’d love to hear your suggestions for more! Nekesa Afia does an amazing job with the character of Louisa in her Harlem Renaissance Series, starting with the stand-out Dead Dead Girls. Lou is Black and queer in 1920s Harlem, and if that isn’t hard enough, she’s also famous for escaping a serial killer as a teen. Over the course of Dead Dead Girls and Harlem Sunset, we see Lou grapple with the cases thrust upon her (and her missteps along the way). Lou is prickly and impulsive and so very, very real – I loved her from the very first page, and I can’t see where she ends up in Lethal Lady, the next installment in the series. Saffron Everleigh, the titular sleuth in Kate Khavari’s series that begins with A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons, has to straddle her upper-class roots and the cruel world of 1920s academia, where, as a woman, she is decidedly unwelcome. Saffron manages to juggle these conflicting pressures with murder investigations and blossoming romance. She’s far from perfect, and Khavari does a deft job of avoiding the “not like all the other girls” trope that strong characters often fall into. She’s bold and driven, yes, but is far from perfect, and leans heavily on her friendship with Elizabeth, her childhood best friend. Another historical mystery series with a complex leading lady is Kate Belli’s Gilded Gotham series. Genevive has a lot in common with Saffron and my own Edie–they’re all young women born of immense privilege, straining at the boundaries society has imposed on them. Gen is passionate and driven–and, at the beginning of the series (Deception by Gaslight), filled with a naivety and impulsivity that puts her into danger and sets her up to be at odds with the mysterious Daniel (swoon). I absolutely love the growth of Genevive over the four books of the series, and I sincerely hope we get to see more. Katie Tietjen’s Maple Bishop is another complex character I can’t get enough of. In this debut Death in the Details (out in April), Maple is a recent widow of the Second World War on the verge of pennilessness in rural New England. Grieving and alone, she finds solace in constructing dollhouses, and finds her skills as a miniaturist and her keen knowledge of the law (she trained as a lawyer in prewar Boston) put to the test when she stumbles upon a murder that rocks her tiny town to its core. Maple faces a lot of pressure to stop, but refuses, and she shows a lot of grit while she tracks down a killer. I’d be remiss to write any list of complex heroines in historical mysteries without talking about the queen of them: Miss Charlotte Holmes in Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series. When we first meet Charlotte in A Study in Scarlet Women, she is purposefully “ruining” herself by setting herself up to be caught in a compromising situation with a (married) man: her way of freeing herself from the expectations of the London upper class. Over the course of the series, we see Charlotte make a life for herself as the sister of “Sherlock Holmes”, a bedridden detective, and solve a wide array of crimes with the help of her friend and landlady, Mrs. Watson, and her well-positioned childhood friend, Lord Ingram. Charlotte is brash and outspoken, with a keen sense of justice and an unwavering commitment to the people she loves. She’s also very stereotypically feminine: she’s beautiful and loves pretty dresses, while being the greatest mind of her time. It’s so fun to see a beloved character turned on its head. So often, “strong female character” is boiled down to women committing violence, or taking on a traditional masculine role, but there are so many ways to be strong, and I love that these characters show us the full range of human emotion, and demonstrate to us just how complex human beings are. I can’t wait to keep reading about them. *** View the full article -
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Algonkian Pre-event Narrative Enhancement Guide - Opening Hook
Late one evening in October, Robin paced around her wee Edinburgh flat, phone in hand, gathering courage to message a friend. She needed courage because the friend was not a close friend, nor one-hundred-percent pure friend, but also a man who, despite efforts not to, she'd developed a crush on. He'd been thwarting her efforts not only by being exceedingly handsome, warm, and affable, but also by sending her flirtatious messages and kissy-face emojis. The emojis had lost their charm after a couple weeks when they never evolved to a phone call or more substantial messages, and when the kissy-face messages had died off, she'd written him off. He was in Iceland, anyway, while she was in Scotland. That was summer a year ago. Then, that spring, she'd gotten in touch with him again on the pretense of needing travel advice for Italy, his native land, and he'd responded by sending her a half-naked photo of himself in addition to the travel advice. A few of her friends had received half-naked photos of men before. One had even received an unprovoked dick pick, which she'd promptly scolded the man for. A photo of a man's bare chest and face was a different thing, however, and Robin had found his photo particularly charming. At first it had shocked her; she'd only expected a bit of travel advice and more kissy-face emojis. Was this his attempt to up the ante? Do kissy-face emojis evolve to naked pictures and then a phone call? Or were phone calls out of the picture and this was his way of making clear he just wanted sex? An old fear crept up whispering if she wasn't up for sex she wasn't wanted, but she brushed the stifling fear aside, reminding herself the notion she was desirable to men only for sex came from her sex-obsessed culture but was fundamentally a lie. Most men, like most human beings, actually wanted intimacy and, like many women, used sex because they didn't know how to get it otherwise. The half-naked photo had only brought the lie to her mind again because it had made her think of sex and how she herself would like to have it with the man in the photo. It wasn't the naked body per say that made her want it, but the vulnerability of the nakedness and playfulness of the pose. He held his fists up like a body builder flexing his biceps and made a goofy face, puckering his lips together, bulging his eyes out, and raising his eyebrows. He'd sent it with the self-deprecating caption, "I got stuck in a random Italian city and miss my flight lovely Robin! I pretended I was a tourist and tomorrow I'll be back to Iceland.. and I'll collect my ideas and write or call u sweety!! This is me now a bit drunk sending love to you after weeks of hard working out." -
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Write to Pitch 2024 - June
Introduction to Pre-event Assignments The below seven assignments are vital to reaching an understanding of specific and critical core elements that go into the creation of a commercially viable genre novel or narrative non-fiction. Of course, there is more to it than this, as you will see, but here we have a good primer that assures we're literally all on the same page before the event begins. You may return here as many times as you need to edit your topic post (login and click "edit"). Pay special attention to antagonists, setting, conflict and core wound hooks. And btw, quiet novels do not sell. Keep that in mind and be aggressive with your work. Michael Neff Algonkian Conference Director ____________ After you've registered and logged in, create your reply to this topic (button top right). Please utilize only one reply for all of your responses so the forum topic will not become cluttered. Also, strongly suggest typing up your "reply" in a separate file then copying it over to your post before submitting. Not a good idea to lose what you've done! __________________________________________________________ THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT Before you begin to consider or rewrite your story premise, you must develop a simple "story statement." In other words, what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? What must be done? What must this person create? Save? Restore? Accomplish? Defeat?... Defy the dictator of the city and her bury brother’s body (ANTIGONE)? Struggle for control over the asylum (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST)? Do whatever it takes to recover lost love (THE GREAT GATSBY)? Save the farm and live to tell the story (COLD MOUNTAIN)? Find the wizard and a way home to Kansas (WIZARD OF OZ)? Note that all of these are books with strong antagonists who drive the plot line (see also "Core Wounds and Conflict Lines" below). FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement. ___________________________________________________ THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT (Photo : Javert from "Les Misérables") What are the odds of you having your manuscript published if the overall story and narrative fail to meet publisher demands for sufficient suspense, character concern, and conflict? Answer: none. You might therefore ask, what major factor makes for a quiet and dull manuscript brimming with insipid characters and a story that cascades from chapter to chapter with tens of thousands of words, all of them combining irresistibly to produce an audible thudding sound in the mind like a mallet hitting a side of cold beef? Answer: the unwillingness or inability of the writer to create a suitable antagonist who stirs and spices the plot hash. Let's make it clear what we're talking about. By "antagonist" we specifically refer to an actual fictional character, an embodiment of certain traits and motivations who plays a significant role in catalyzing and energizing plot line(s), or at bare minimum, in assisting to evolve the protagonist's character arc (and by default the story itself) by igniting complication(s) the protagonist, and possibly other characters, must face and solve (or fail to solve). CONTINUE READING ENTIRE ARTICLE AT NWOE THEN RETURN HERE. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. ___________________________________________________ CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE What is your breakout title? How important is a great title before you even become published? Very important! Quite often, agents and editors will get a feel for a work and even sense the marketing potential just from a title. A title has the ability to attract and condition the reader's attention. It can be magical or thud like a bag of wet chalk, so choose carefully. A poor title sends the clear message that what comes after will also be of poor quality. Go to Amazon.Com and research a good share of titles in your genre, come up with options, write them down and let them simmer for at least 24 hours. Consider character or place names, settings, or a "label" that describes a major character, like THE ENGLISH PATIENT or THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. Consider also images, objects, or metaphors in the novel that might help create a title, or perhaps a quotation from another source (poetry, the Bible, etc.) that thematically represents your story. Or how about a title that summarizes the whole story: THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, etc. Keep in mind that the difference between a mediocre title and a great title is the difference between THE DEAD GIRL'S SKELETON and THE LOVELY BONES, between TIME TO LOVE THAT CHOLERA and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA between STRANGERS FROM WITHIN (Golding's original title) and LORD OF THE FLIES, between BEING LIGHT AND UNBEARABLE and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed). ___________________________________________________ DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES Did you know that a high percentage of new novel writers don't fully understand their genre, much less comprehend comparables? When informing professionals about the nuances of your novel, whether by query letter or oral pitch, you must know your genre first, and provide smart comparables second. In other words, you need to transcend just a simple statement of genre (literary, mystery, thriller, romance, science fiction, etc.) by identifying and relating your novel more specifically to each publisher's or agent's area of expertise, and you accomplish this by wisely comparing your novel to contemporary published novels they will most likely recognize and appreciate--and it usually doesn't take more than two good comps to make your point. Agents and publishing house editors always want to know the comps. There is more than one reason for this. First, it helps them understand your readership, and thus how to position your work for the market. Secondly, it demonstrates up front that you are a professional who understands your contemporary market, not just the classics. Very important! And finally, it serves as a tool to enable them to pitch your novel to the decision-makers in the business. Most likely you will need to research your comps. If you're not sure how to begin, go to Amazon.Com, type in the title of a novel you believe very similar to yours, choose it, then scroll down the page to see Amazon's list of "Readers Also Bought This" and begin your search that way. Keep in mind that before you begin, you should know enough about your own novel to make the comparison in the first place! By the way, beware of using comparables by overly popular and classic authors. If you compare your work to classic authors like H.G. Wells and Gabriel Marquez in the same breath you will risk being declared insane. If you compare your work to huge contemporary authors like Nick Hornby or Jodi Picoult or Nora Ephron or Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling, and so forth, you will not be laughed at, but you will also not be taken seriously since thousands of others compare their work to the same writers. Best to use two rising stars in your genre. If you can't do this, use only one classic or popular author and combine with a rising star. Choose carefully! FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: - Read this NWOE article on comparables then return here. - Develop two smart comparables for your novel. This is a good opportunity to immerse yourself in your chosen genre. Who compares to you? And why? ____________________________________________________ CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT Conflict, tension, complication, drama--all basically related, and all going a long way to keeping the reader's eyes fixated on your story. These days, serving up a big manuscript of quiet is a sure path to damnation. You need tension on the page at all times, and the best way to accomplish this is to create conflict and complications in the plot and narrative. Consider "conflict" divided into three parts, all of which you MUST have present in the novel. First part, the primary dramatic conflict which drives through the work from beginning to end, from first major plot point to final reversal, and finally resolving with an important climax. Next, secondary conflicts or complications that take various social forms - anything from a vigorous love subplot to family issues to turmoil with fellow characters. Finally, those various inner conflicts and core wounds all important characters must endure and resolve as the story moves forward. But now, back to the PRIMARY DRAMATIC CONFLICT. If you've taken care to consider your story description and your hook line, you should be able to identify your main conflict(s). Let's look at some basic information regarding the history of conflict in storytelling. Conflict was first described in ancient Greek literature as the agon, or central contest in tragedy. According to Aristotle, in order to hold the interest, the hero must have a single conflict. The agon, or act of conflict, involves the protagonist (the "first fighter" or "hero") and the antagonist corresponding to the villain (whatever form that takes). The outcome of the contest cannot be known in advance, and, according to later drama critics such as Plutarch, the hero's struggle should be ennobling. Is that always true these days? Not always, but let's move on. Even in contemporary, non-dramatic literature, critics have observed that the agon is the central unit of the plot. The easier it is for the protagonist to triumph, the less value there is in the drama. In internal and external conflict alike, the antagonist must act upon the protagonist and must seem at first to overmatch him or her. The above defines classic drama that creates conflict with real stakes. You see it everywhere, to one degree or another, from classic contemporary westerns like THE SAVAGE BREED to a time-tested novel as literary as THE GREAT GATSBY. And of course, you need to have conflict or complications in nonfiction also, in some form, or you have a story that is too quiet. For examples let's return to the story descriptions and create some HOOK LINES. Let's don't forget to consider the "core wound" of the protagonist. Please read this article at NWOE then return here. The Hand of Fatima by Ildefonso Falcones A young Moor torn between Islam and Christianity, scorned and tormented by both, struggles to bridge the two faiths by seeking common ground in the very nature of God. Summer's Sisters by Judy Blume After sharing a magical summer with a friend, a young woman must confront her friend's betrayal of her with the man she loved. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud As an apprentice mage seeks revenge on an elder magician who humiliated him, he unleashes a powerful Djinn who joins the mage to confront a danger that threatens their entire world. Note that it is fairly easy to ascertain the stakes in each case above: a young woman's love and friendship, the entire world, and harmony between opposed religions. If you cannot make the stakes clear, the odds are you don't have any. Also, is the core wound obvious or implied? FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above. Though you may not have one now, keep in mind this is a great developmental tool. In other words, you best begin focusing on this if you're serious about commercial publication. ______________________________________________________ OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS As noted above, consider "conflict" divided into three parts, all of which you should ideally have present. First, the primary conflict which drives through the core of the work from beginning to end and which zeniths with an important climax (falling action and denouement to follow). Next, secondary conflicts or complications which can take various social forms (anything from a vigorous love subplot to family issues to turmoil with fellow characters). Finally, those inner conflicts the major characters must endure and resolve. You must note the inner personal conflicts elsewhere in this profile, but make certain to note any important interpersonal conflicts within this particular category." SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it? ______________________________________________________ THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING When considering your novel, whether taking place in a contemporary urban world or on a distant magical planet in Andromeda, you must first sketch the best overall setting and sub-settings for your story. Consider: the more unique and intriguing (or quirky) your setting, the more easily you're able to create energetic scenes, narrative, and overall story. A great setting maximizes opportunities for interesting characters, circumstances, and complications, and therefore makes your writing life so much easier. Imagination is truly your best friend when it comes to writing competitive fiction, and nothing provides a stronger foundation than a great setting. One of the best selling contemporary novels, THE HUNGER GAMES, is driven by the circumstances of the setting, and the characters are a product of that unique environment, the plot also. But even if you're not writing SF/F, the choice of setting is just as important, perhaps even more so. If you must place your upmarket story in a sleepy little town in Maine winter, then choose a setting within that town that maximizes opportunities for verve and conflict, for example, a bed and breakfast stocked to the ceiling with odd characters who combine to create comical, suspenseful, dangerous or difficult complications or subplot reversals that the bewildered and sympathetic protagonist must endure and resolve while he or she is perhaps engaged in a bigger plot line: restarting an old love affair, reuniting with a family member, starting a new business, etc. And don't forget that non-gratuitous sex goes a long way, especially for American readers. CONTINUE TO READ THIS ARTICLE THEN RETURN. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it. ________________________ Below are several links to part of an article or whole articles that we feel are the most valuable for memoir writers. We have reviewed these and agree 110%. MEMOIR WRITING - CHOOSE A SPECIFIC EVENT (good general primer) How to Write a Memoir That People Care About | NY Book Editors NYBOOKEDITORS.COM Are you thinking of writing a memoir but you're stuck? We've got the remedy. Check out our beginner's guide on writing an epic and engaging memoir. MEMOIR MUST INCLUDE TRANSCENDENCE Writing Memoir? Include Transcendence - Memoir coach and author Marion Roach MARIONROACH.COM MEMOIR REQUIRES TRANSCENDENCE. Something has to happen. Or shift. Someone has to change a little. Or grow. It’s the bare hack minimum of memoir. WRITE IT LIKE A NOVEL How to Write a Powerful Memoir in 5 Simple Steps JERRYJENKINS.COM When it comes to writing a memoir, there are 5 things you need to focus on. If you do, your powerful story will have the best chance of impacting others. MEMOIR ANECDOTES - HOW TO MAKE THEM SHINE How to Write an Anecdote That Makes Your Nonfiction Come Alive JERRYJENKINS.COM Knowing how to write an anecdote lets you utilize the power of story with your nonfiction and engage your reader from the first page. ________________________ -
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Hello, Miss Fenwick: Getting Reacquainted with a Crime Fiction Great
When Elzabeth Fenwick’s psychological crime thriller The Make-Believe Man was published in 1963, one of the novel’s many laudatory reviewers, a young North Carolina newspaper columnist named James Alexander Dunn, in the Chapel Hill News perceptively placed his finger on the signal quality of the author’s crime fiction. “Elizabeth Fenwick has successfully combined a believable situation with people who matter—not that they are important people,” he observed. “On the contrary, there is not an entity in the lot. But they are familiar people whom you would not like to be in the situation Miss Fenwick places them in.” In reviewing the same novel that year, Robert R. Kirsch, longtime literary editor of the Los Angeles Times, echoed with Dunn’s sentiment, trenchantly declaring: “The great gift of Miss Fenwick is to take the ordinary situation and translate it into nightmare.” Elizabeth Fenwick’s own colleagues concurred in these judgments. The next year The Make-Believe Man placed second for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best novel to Eric Ambler’s The Light of Day (perhaps better known under its film adaptation title, Topkapi), along with Dorothy B. Hughes’ The Expendable Man and Ellery Queen’s The Player on the Other Side—an estimable lot of crime fiction. Arguably this was the high point in the career as a crime writer of a woman who in her lifetime never received, despite the praise afforded her, sufficient due, both critical and monetary, as such; and who herself well knew from personal experience about the desperate struggles of people sunk in the depths of situations they do not want to be in, yet which they have somehow to navigate in order to reach the shelter of a safe harbor. That shelter was something which Elizabeth Fenwick herself never quite achieved until later in life, despite her many remarkable accomplishments. Yet she persevered, leaving readers all the richer for her work. The crime writer known as Elizabeth Fenwick went through several authorial appellations in life, but she started off as plain Elizabeth Jane Phillips. Born on April 6, 1916 in the city St. Louis, Missouri, Elizabeth was the second daughter of Jerome Jay Phillips and Elizabeth Jane Nicholson, who called each other Jay and Beth. Elizabeth grew up as an only child, her slightly elder sister Eleanor having passed away in 1920 during the dying days of the deadly flu pandemic; and as a solitary child she lived a precarious, peripatetic existence with colorfully quirky parents. Beth Nicholson was a pretty, spirited young woman of pious, patriarchal Canadian Scots-Irish descent who rebelling against a repressive father left her home in Canada at the age of seventeen in 1903 to settle with relatives in Boston. Over a decade later she met Jay Phillips while dining alone at a rathskeller at a St. Louis hotel during a tour with the Ziegfeld Follies. Small and bowlegged, Beth to her chagrin had been hired by Florenz Ziegfeld, the Great Man himself, after he got a good look at her gams, strictly to play boys. No mere boy himself, Jay—six feet tall, blond and blue-eyed, good-humored, well-mannered and single, of prominent family and in control of his own considerable fortune—seemed an enviable catch indeed for the Follies performer and Beth soon hauled him into her matrimonial net, wedding him at Greenwich, Connecticut on February 3, 1914 and bearing him a daughter, Eleanor, later that year. However, the couple’s promising fortunes were undone by the improvidence of Jay, an amiable drinker and gambler who remained, even after his marriage, under the thumb of his formidable widowed mother, Nellie Usher Curlee Phillips, and refused to leave St. Louis for Boston. Nellie Phillips, known among the family she dominated as “Mommy,” came from a prominent Mississippi family that had transplanted itself to St. Louis in the twentieth century and done very well there indeed. The Curlee House in Corinth, Mississippi, which served as headquarters to both Union and Confederate generals during the Civil War and today is a National Historic Landmark, had been the childhood home to several of Nellie’s cousins, one of whom, Shelby Hammond Curlee, founded the nationally prominent Curlee Clothing Company in St. Louis and at his death in 1944 left an estate valued at over a million dollars, or about sixteen million dollars today. Reflective of the effort at the time to recover and apotheosize a rigorously scrubbed, pristine version of the country’s complicated past through architectural restoration (the most famous example of which is found at Colonial Williamsburg, proudly dubbed the world’s largest living history museum), both Shelby Hammond Curlee, Sr. and his brother Francis Marion Curlee, Sr., an attorney and Great War veteran known in the press as “Colonel Curlee,” were heavily involved with historical restoration, the former buying back and restoring the old Curlee home in Corinth and the latter purchasing and restoring the homestead of Nathan Boone, where Boone’s father, famed pioneer Daniel Boone, had died. “This place will never become a ‘hootch’ joint or a roadhouse,” Curlee passionately vowed in 1926, two years after the exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924 was passed. “Italians were trying to get the property when I bought it,” he added darkly, “and if they had succeeded, it is probable that they would have made a roadhouse of it….” Both the Curlee House and the Daniel Boone Home, as it is known, are publicly owned house museums today, with nary a bottle of hootch in sight, one surmises.[1] Jay Phillips, who himself was known to enjoy a tipple or two, lacked the drive of either his mother’s dynamic cousins Shel and Frank Curlee or his own late father Joseph Phillips, a former trader of Atoka, Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) who became a prominent bank director in St. Louis, and he frittered away his once comfortable estate in a series of failed agencies. (Successively he fitfully sold automobiles, cut glass and Corona typewriters.) “[Jay’s] entire personality was so mysterious and admirable to her that [Beth] was unable, even years later, to make sense of his disaster,” Elizabeth Fenwick in her unpublished memoir Beth: My Mother’s Story, 1886-1965 recalled of her lovable, wayward parents, whom she likened unto birds of paradise. “She went over and over his virtues, and still found them sound. There was the glorious sense of humor, the kindness and generosity, the handsomeness and lovely manners, and a fine intelligence—‘very deep.’ She could only conclude that it was his mother who ruined him. The two women never got along well.” Leading an uncertain existence as an adolescent, Elizabeth over the years moved around the eastern half of the country—sometimes with both Beth and Jay, sometimes just with Beth—to Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, San Antonio and Dallas. The Boston move came only after her parents had divorced in the early Twenties and her mother had returned with her to the city she had adopted as her home. There Elizabeth saw much of her beloved Uncle Fen, aka John Fenwick Nicholson, a commercial traveler from whom she would derive her prominent authorial surname. After Beth married another, older man, she and Elizabeth lived briefly with him in Detroit. The marriage soon failed, however, and Beth, not liking life as a single working mother, in 1927 remarried Jay, who had been living with Mommy while desultorily laboring at “some sort of job with Uncle Shel” and falling thousands of dollars behind in child support. With the onset of the Depression and the realization, as Elizabeth bluntly put it, that “[n]either of them was much good at making a living,” Beth agreed to reside in an apartment in St. Louis with Jay and Elizabeth, supported by a stipend from Mommy, whom Beth and her daughter, offended by her disdainful and imperious behavior, refused ever to see again. Jay sank into semi-invalidism after Mommy, when Beth was away visiting relatives, had him receive an experimental injection for a growth on his neck, and Beth herself, likely motivated by the disasters that had befallen her husband and her elder daughter, became a zealous advocate of Christian Science, leading Elizabeth for a time to question her mother’s sanity. For several years the family moved around Texas on account of Jay’s health, before finally settling down for good back in St. Louis, supported by Mommy’s grudging benevolence. Despite her aptitude in English, Elizabeth, who had blossomed into an extremely comely blonde with a pretty pert nose and delectable Cupid’s bow mouth, never attended college after graduating from high school in San Antonio, instead learning shorthand to take up secretarial work and earn money of her own when the family moved back to St. Louis. However, in 1936, when she was twenty years old, Elizabeth joined a remarkable writers’ circle centered on a trio of male Washington University literature students: future U. S. Poet Laureate William Jay Smith; poet Clark Mills McBurney; and future landmark playwright Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams. There were also several young women besides Elizabeth, including Louise Antoinette Krause, who was writing a thesis on John Donne and composing her own metaphysical poetry. William Jay Smith later recalled that the little group, which grandly dubbed itself the “St. Louis Poets Workshop” on the letterhead of their own stationery, “met usually at Tom’s house at Arundel Place, a few blocks from the university, first in the living room where Mrs. Williams received us, and afterward on the sunporch, where we sat for hours criticizing one another’s poems.” He added wryly that Mrs. Williams, familiarly known as “Miss Edwina,” presided over the Williams’ two-story modern brick craftsman house “as if it were an antebellum mansion.” In his memoirs Tennessee Williams recalled that the “little poetry club…contained only three male members,” characteristically adding snobbishly and chauvinistically (and not entirely accurately, at least concerning Elizabeth’s economic standing) that “[t]he rest were girls, pretty, with families who owned elegant homes in the county….[and who at meetings] provided lovely refreshments and décor.” At the time Williams could vaguely recall of this pulchritudinous, refreshments-bearing feminine contingent only a girl named Betty Chapin and “the wealthiest, Louise, who took us all out in the family limousine to a ballet performance one night.” On the other hand, the rather-less-full-of-himself Bill Smith—“the handsomest of us three boys,” allowed Williams—to his credit remembered “Elizabeth Fenwick Phillips,” who “as Elizabeth Fenwick wrote several fine mystery novels.” For Elizabeth’s part her association with such adepts of Literature as Tom, Clark and Bill in what she lightly termed “our Poetry and Chowder Society” inspired her first published literary effusions, which appeared in the magazine Poetry in 1936, under the modest name Betty Phillips. “[W]hat wonders the others lived with, and passed on to me!” she later exclaimed in recollected awe, revealing how the Poetry and Chowder Society altered the course of her life. “Proust, Kafka, Rilke; Brahms, Debussy, Vivaldi; French books, movies and records; endless free or cut-rate tickets to the symphony, the ballet, the opera, the plays that came to town—and best of all, talk. We never stopped. Our talking became to me like air to breath.” (I am reminded of lyrics in the B-52s’ 1989 song “Deadbeat Club,” about another garrulous group of arty types in another college town: “I was good, I could talk/A mile a minute/On this caffeine buzz I was on/We were really humming.” People are the same all over the world.) Evincing the same cosmopolitan wanderlust which had taken hold of her mother nearly four decades earlier around the turn of the century, Elizabeth, as the advent of the Second World War loomed closer, resolved, like her friends, to move to New York: “The lively minds were all there, waiting for us. My gang assured me that I was probably better equipped to make a living there than any of them. I meant to go.” Yet in spite of this brave resolve, in 1940 Elizabeth still resided, at the age of twenty-four, with her parents at their place at Donaldson Court Apartments, located at 613 Westgate Avenue, University City (an inner ring suburb of Saint Louis), where, like Dolly Parton in the 1980 hit film, she worked as a stenographer from “nine to five,” Mondays through Fridays, making $1080 that year (or about $21,500 today). This was the family’s only actual earned income (distinguished from Mommy’s stipend), and it covered the rent at the attractive art deco apartment complex, which according to the National Register is generally regarded as the most attractive one that was built in the eastern part of University City during the Twenties. The next year Elizabeth finally made her big move to the Big Apple. After a bout of emotional recriminations from Beth (she “disowned me, assured me I should never see or hear from her again,” her daughter recalled, although this rage fortunately soon passed), Elizabeth found her parents a cheaper apartment in St. Louis and settled far away into her own place on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village (an extremely posh address today). Within a few months, however, the single working girl abruptly moved in with one of her old poetry circle compatriots, Clark Mills McBurney. After he left Saint Louis in 1937, Clark spent a heady year at the Sorbonne and then resignedly obtained a position teaching French at Cornell University, which was located to the west of New York City at the town of Ithaca in the Finger Lakes region. In her memoir of her mother, Elizabeth states unambiguously that she and Clark wed, although I have been unable to discover any marriage record for the couple. For his part Clark in his 1943 U. S. Army enlistment record gave his marital status as “single.” However, there is a later record of a marriage between Elizabeth and Clark having been annulled, so evidently Clark, for reasons of his own, simply lied about his matrimonial status, or the two wed after he enlisted. Three years older than Elizabeth, Clark Mills McBurney was an imposing figure at six feet tall and 180 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes, over which he wore the spherical glasses of the intellectual. Tennessee Williams, who idolized his friend at the time, referred to the poet in his memoirs as not only “brilliantly talented” but “handsome” too. In 1940, the year before Elizabeth burst into his life in a bold new way, Clark, who published his critically praised and cutting edge but decidedly unremunerative poetry simply as “Clark Mills,” had confided to Tennessee Williams that he planned to commit suicide. “[Clark Mills] came over and told me quite seriously that he decided to kill himself within the next year,” Williams recorded. “He is tied to an academic job at Cornell which smothers his creative life and he sees no possible escape, as his poetry, very fine but completely noncommercial could never support him.” Williams talked his friend out of self-destruction, but it was an ill omen for the potential stability of Clark and Elizabeth’s coupling. The pair remained together in Ithaca until Clark was inducted into the army at Syracuse in June 1943. Over the rest of that year Elizabeth lived with him at camps in South Carolina, Wisconsin and Maryland, additionally spending six months with her mother in Cleveland, where Beth had gone to live with a sister after Mommy had placed Jay in a nursing home and turned her daughter-in-law, in the latter woman’s querulous words, “out into the world with ‘a few hundred dollars’ and ‘a train ticket.’” Jay passed away not long afterward in 1942. Clark was sent overseas to Europe in 1944, leaving Elizabeth alone but hardly idle. In December of 1943, Elizabeth as “E. P. Fenwick” published her first detective novel, The Inconvenient Corpse, which she probably wrote in Ithaca during the first half of the year. (The novel is set in the Catskills region of New York.) Thus was launched her career as a novelist, albeit of mysteries. Two more detective novels, Murder in Haste and Two Names for Death, rapidly followed in 1944 and 1945, prompting the impressed crime writer and reviewer Anthony Boucher rapturously to dub her the first “student” of pioneering suspense novelist Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and “a possible major contender” in the mystery field. However, Elizabeth soon changed tracks as writer, Boucher’s praise notwithstanding. In the meantime, there was a grave personal matter with which Elizabeth had to deal: she had been callously deserted by her husband. Her marriage to Clark had been a great relief to her mother and aunt, Elizabeth later recalled: “Now I no longer would be ‘unprotected.’ They never lost the feeling—in fact, it increased as they grew older—that single women were in some great danger, and to be regarded with pity, anxiety and a bit of scorn. No woman could possibly choose to stand open to the wind, so, if she could help it.” With Clark absconded, however, Elizabeth had again become one of those unprotected, pitiable and pathetic women. During the war years of 1944-45, Clark served as a master sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Corps, where men with foreign language skills were in particularly high demand. Afterward he stayed on in the newly created Central Intelligence Agency, a product of the National Security Act of 1947, at posts in Berlin, Bonn and Frankfurt, not returning to the United States and the teaching profession until 1951. After months of not hearing from him, his letters to her having unaccountably ceased, Elizabeth was granted an annulment in November 1946. Apparently she never saw Clark again, although two decades later, her daughter from her second marriage reports, she referred witheringly to his having married again. This was “a terrible time” for Elizabeth, her daughter has written. “Much later she wrote in a journal about the loss of hope for the home and family she thought she had found.” During this difficult time Elizabeth determinedly had started work on a mainstream (i.e., non-criminous) novel entitled The Long Wing, which she proudly published with Rinehart under the name Elizabeth Fenwick in February 1947. Concerning a young woman and her mother-dominated father and his family, the novel, which is set in St. Louis, obviously is heavily biographical, having clearly been inspired by the author’s need to work though her ambivalent feelings toward Jay and the Phillips/Curlee clans, which after all those years, she finally realized, had accepted neither Beth nor herself. She sadly reflected that, after receiving a brief telegram at Ithaca from one of her father’s brothers notifying her of Jay’s death, “I never could bring myself to write. For the first time, I began to understand the depth and breadth of the gulf that had separated us for years from my father’s people; it was too sad to try to bridge it now.” Still, she transmuted the situation into art with The Long Wing, an impressive novel which likely none of the St. Louis Curlees and Phillips ever read. Nor, it would certainly appear, did Tennessee Williams, even though the put-upon “Edwina” of the novel seems to reflect aspects of both Tennessee’s mother Edwina and his sister Rose. The Long Wing received extremely good reviews, critics generally lauding it as a most promising first novel by an up-and-coming young author. In the Saturday Review Nathan L. Rothman, in a notice tellingly titled “Mama’s Boy,” pithily summarized the plot of the author’s “brilliant little novel” as follows: “A man returns to his mother’s house for a two-week visit and doesn’t get away again.” Elizabeth, however, was not going to make this same mistake. She returned to New York City, altered her birth year to 1920 rather than 1916 and found employment as a secretary to a professor at Columbia University, devoting her evenings to writing in a bid to make it as a “serious” novelist. In June 1947, Elizabeth encouragingly was featured in a Life Magazine article, “Young U. S. Writers: A Refreshing Group of Newcomers on the Literary Scene is Ready to Tackle Almost Anything,” along with five other hopeful neophytes, including Gore Vidal and Truman Capote. To be sure, the star attraction of the piece was the elfin “Tru,” who appeared on the first page of the article in a three-quarter photograph of him “on a couch in a checkered waistcoat, a cigarette in his hand,” soulfully gazing out “with big eyes and a wistful look on his face”; but at least Elizabeth’s photo was as big as Gore Vidal’s, who was quite vocally disgusted with receiving second billing, along with all the others, to the likes of Truman Capote. The next year Elizabeth was invited to spend the summer as a guest at the famed Yaddo artists’ colony at Saratoga Springs, New York, along with such future famous names as Flannery O’Connor, Chester Himes and Patricia Highsmith. Flannery O’Connor, then just twenty-three years old, became a lifelong friend of Elizabeth, who in 1949 found Flannery a place near her own to live while in New York. After Flannery retired to reside with her mother on a farm in Georgia upon her terminal lupus diagnosis in 1951, she and Elizabeth corresponded up until her death in 1964, although her last in-person meeting with Elizabeth was in 1958. The late writer Fredrick Morton, who was also at Yaddo during the summer of ’48, recalled Elizabeth as “a kind of sexy creature, very attractive physically,” and with this estimate Flannery—who in old-fashioned southern lady fashion always referred formally to Elizabeth as “Miss Fenwick”—clearly concurred, although not in quite those words. “She…is a big soft blonde girl and real nice to be around except that she bats her eyelashes,” Flannery wrote a friend about Elizabeth in 1960, “we get on famously.” This is far more than one can say about Flannery and Patricia Highsmith, who obviously loathed one another at Yaddo as only temperamental polar opposites can. (Elizabeth, on the other hand, should have appealed tremendously to Highsmith; it may be, however, that their time at Yaddo just missed overlapping, Highsmith having been there for only two months in the early summer.) At Yaddo Elizabeth worked on her second novel, Afterwards, which she published in 1950. Twentieth-Century Fox purchased the film rights to the new novel, assigning the projected flick, which was to star Joseph Cotten, to producer Julian Blaustein, who in 1951 would produce both the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still and the psychological thriller Don’t Bother to Knock, based on the Charlotte Armstrong novel Mischief; but sadly the project fell through and the novel was never filmed. (This would not be the last time that film adaptation would narrowly elude Elizabeth.) Despite piquing the interest of a Hollywood film studio, Afterwards, about a divorced couple with a child who get back together in Boston after several years apart (the author again was clearly drawing heavily on her own life), was not as well-received by critics and Elizabeth would not publish another novel for six years. Yaddo and Life notwithstanding, the writing career of “Elizabeth Fenwick” was wobbling. While her books, especially The Long Wing, had won her flattering plaudits from reviewers, to be sure, very little actual money had gone along with that praise. “I wrote a novel a few years ago,” Fenwick with evident bitterness recalled in a San Francisco Examiner article on women mystery writers in 1971, after she had long shifted over to publishing crime fiction. (The novel to which she referred was surely The Long Wing.) “I got my picture in all the magazines, a few bucks and a lot of letters from nuts.” She was desperately lonely as well, as she had been so often as an adolescent. “I returned to being the child and girl who belonged nowhere, was obsessed with other peoples’ homes, and wanted only to have someplace where I belonged,” she later reflected of this time in her life. “I thought I had found it in Ithaca, with Clark, and when I lost it after Clark went back to Germany, I went back to being ‘homeless and no family’ me in New York.” In 1950, the year Afterwards appeared, Elizabeth wed her second husband, David Jacques Way, a twice-divorced partner in the small New York publishing and printing firm Clark & Way who was a couple of years younger than she, and in October she gave birth to her only child, Deborah. Yet domestic bliss again cruelly eluded her, as did that sense of belonging as a wife. To be sure, she had a dearly loved daughter to care for, but her spouse proved an altogether thornier presence in her life. At 6’4” Elizabeth’s second husband was even taller than her first one, although in 1940 his recorded weight was just under 150 pounds. Gangling, brash and brightly red-haired, with glasses and a mustache and one blue and one brown eye, David Way was a distinctly memorable individual. Initially Elizabeth deemed him a “charming and funny and brilliant” man who seemingly knew “everyone and everything.” Unfortunately her estimation of David proved as errant as the one her mother had made of Jay, though in an even worse way, as it were. To obtain a better environment for the baby (Deborah’s carriage was covered over in a film of soot every morning), the couple at Elizabeth’s insistence departed from the Village, settling in the coastal town of Stonington in western Connecticut, which would serve as the fictionalized setting for her 1971 crime novel Impeccable People. David commuted to work in the city, staying at an apartment during weekdays and returning to spend weekends in Stonington. Elizabeth raised Deborah and ran the little book and game shop that was semi-attached to their house at 110 Water Street. After two years, however, the family returned to New York City, for Elizabeth felt isolated and unhappy in Stonington. David having proven a rageful and violent husband, she lived apart from him with Deborah in the same apartment building, with David visiting them at dinnertime. He began seeing a psychiatrist, but according to Elizabeth these visits failed to help him, since even his psychiatrist was mortally frightened of him. She and Elizabeth would attend cocktail parties and never get invited back again because of his aggressive, angry behavior. David and Elizabeth’s own daughter described her father as “terrifying” in his “rages.” After several years Elizabeth consented to live with David again and the pair moved with Deborah to Mamaroneck, a city in wealthy suburban Westchester County, where, Deborah recalls, Elzabeth and David occupied separate tbedrooms in a “very pleasant Cape Cod style house” located at 911 Stuart Avenue, just a three minutes’ drive, as it turns out, from the house where famed detective novelist John Dickson Carr lived with his wife in the early Sixties. There David joined the Episcopal Church, made a great hit with both the rector and the deacon, and sang, along with Deborah, in the choir. Meanwhile Elizabeth after four years had managed to complete her third mainstream novel, Days of Plenty (1956), but with the book decidedly failing to ignite the literary world, she resolved in Mamaroneck to try her hand at crime fiction. Crime writing might at least prove lucrative and finally make Elizabeth financially independent of her frighteningly moody and mercurial husband. With two small rooms at the top of the house at her disposal, her bedroom and a tiny writing-room/study, Elizabeth, working during the winters when her daughter was at school, between 1957 and 1963 published a half-dozen crime novels—Poor Harriet (1957), A Long Way Down (1959), A Friend of Mary Rose (1961), A Night Run (1961), The Silent Cousin (1962) and The Make-Believe Man (1963)—that established her as one of the preeminent authors of domestic suspense from those years. During the summers Elizabeth would drive with Deborah to Cleveland to visit her mother Beth and her aunt, trips which were something of an idyll for the author and her daughter, as Deborah has recalled: We went on these trips as soon as school was out, and each time we drove away from Mamaroneck in great high spirits, very early in the cool of the June mornings. She seemed to leave all of her troubles and worries behind as we headed off to Cleveland. We would stop at a “homey” motel in the mid-afternoon when the heat became unbearable, and no matter how cheap and homey the motel was, it had to have a pool, for us both to jump in and cool off. We were always welcomed to the house in Cleveland with great joy, and we would spend our week there in great comfort, my mother sitting peacefully with my grandmother and (great) aunt, with their endless conversations, myself playing contentedly around the house, or with the neighborhood children. Unfortunately Elizabeth’s crime novels, well-received as the majority of them were, failed to earn their author enough money to free her for good and all from David. Despite being published in the United Kingdom as well as in the United States, each book, Deborah recalls, typically only netted her mother royalties of about a couple of thousand dollars, or around $20,000 today. This was about as much as Elizabeth annually had made, in other words, from the nine-to-five stenographic work which she had performed in her early twenties—a dispiriting reminder to us today of the pecuniary limitations of even a lot of critically-acclaimed mystery writing. While all of Elizabeth’s crime novels were loyally published in the U. K. by Gollancz, her publication record was spottier in the United States, where, despite the high praise afforded her first three crime novels, A Night Run never found a publisher and The Silent Cousin was not picked up for four years. Nor was Elizabeth fortunate, on the whole, with paperback publication. Whenever Elizabeth did receive a check from her publishers, David, his own publishing business having been “constantly on the rocks” for years according to Deborah, responded by halting his own checks to the family until Elizabeth’s money ran out, meaning she was damned if she wrote and damned if she did not write. This continually stressful situation to which her husband subjected her inevitably began to exact its physical toll on Elizabeth, who started to suffer physically (aside from David’s outburst of violence toward her), developing migraines, facial rashes and numbness in her extremities. Her friend Flannery O’Conner, nearing death herself, was convinced that Elizabeth like she was suffering from lupus, but it turned out “merely” to be Raynaud’s Syndrome. 1964 saw the demise both of Flannery and Elizabeth’s mother Beth, who, afflicted with dementia, had been placed in a nursing home. Deborah, then barely in her teens, remembers “how frightening that tiny, sharp, disheveled, toothless person” had become, asking “the same questions over and over and over.” Back in Mamaroneck after her mother’s funeral, Elizabeth again was faced with that same question which faced so many of the female protagonists of domestic suspense fiction from the period: How to extricate herself from the terrible, soul-destroying marriage which she had made with a man who was entirely unworthy of her. According to Deborah: She racked her brains to think of a way to support herself so she could leave him—the writing just did not bring in enough for financial independence. She thought of going back to secretarial work, but she was so much older, had no recent experience and it would mean my coming home to an empty apartment after school. She thought of divorce and alimony, but could she support us on that? My father did not want a divorce, and seemed to be clinging tightly to this life he had made. She wondered how long she could stick it out. With cruel and classic irony it was David himself who settled the matter for good in 1966 when he, like Clark had before him, abandoned Elizabeth, leaving her for a graphic designer in his firm, who, at twenty-three, was proverbially young enough to be his daughter. Upon sixteen-year-old Deborah’s graduation from high school in June, Elizabeth sold the house in Mamaroneck and with her daughter set out for the west coast, as if to put as much distance between herself and her old life (and her faithless husband) as she could. However, there was more purpose to this western venture: Deborah was going to college in Portland, Oregon while Elizabeth, ironically, was going to stay with David’s family in California. “They had always loved her dearly and preferred her company to his,” Deborah bluntly recalls, “and invited her to come to them when the marriage broke up.” Over the next six years Elizabeth in California completed five more crime novels, her final published works: The Passenger (1967), Disturbance on Berry Hill (1968), Goodbye, Aunt Elva (1968), Impeccable People (1971) and The Last of Lysandra (1973), the last two of which were published only in the U. K. Over the summer of 1966, before Deborah went away to college, Elizabeth, while renting a small apartment in Pasadena, started writing The Passenger, a “road” novel which reflects some of her traveling experience with her daughter. She completed the novel later that year, but during the bleakly lonely winter, she later admitted to Deborah, she had, like Clark back in 1940, seriously contemplated suicide. Fortunately the next year Deborah transferred to the University of California at Berkeley and Elizabeth was able to purchase a small house with a rose garden in Walnut Creek, closer to her daughter and to David’s kindly son from one of his prior marriages, with whom she and Deborah had long been close. There Elizabeth was able to live off her royalties, along with the alimony she had exacted from David as a condition of consenting to a divorce. Presumably she was divorced by November 1971, when an article on women mystery writers in the San Francisco Examiner referred to her as “a tweedy, English-looking Walnut Creek wife and mother who writes books of what she calls ‘domestic menace.’” Perhaps in spite of herself Elizabeth, like her mother, still saw something pitiable in the state of a single woman, second wave feminism notwithstanding. Disappointingly, an attempt by producer-director Robert Aldrich to film Elizabeth’s “domestic menace” novel Goodbye, Aunt Elva as What Ever Happened to Dear Elva? or What Ever Happened to Dear Daisy?—the third in a trilogy of his so-called “psycho-biddy” films, following What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?—fell through in 1971, film success thus eluding Elizabeth again, as it had two decades earlier. Then ideas for stories finally just stopped coming to her a couple of years later, after the publication in the U. K. of The Last of Lysandra. She ceased writing for publication, instead quietly keeping her diaries, caring for her roses and her dog and cats and receiving visits from her family. Her writing reputation began to wane, even as her personal contentment waxed. About a decade later Elizabeth moved to Colorado, where Deborah had taken a residency in radiology. She again found a little house with a lovely garden to tend, but in 1987, when she was seventy-one years old, she was diagnosed, sadly recalling the experience of her mother Beth, with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. From these afflictions she suffered for nine more years, until she passed away in her sleep at the age of eighty on November 20, 1996. * As public tastes in crime fiction changed, many works by women writers of mid-century domestic suspense fell into unmerited neglect after their deaths, but Elizabeth Fenwick’s books plummeted, quite unaccountably, into even greater neglect than most. With the exception of Goodbye, Aunt Elva, which the publisher Academy Chicago reissued in 1987, it appears that until this year not a single Fenwick crime novel had been reprinted in paperback for half a century. Yet several of the author’s crime novels were embraced in their day as true classics of suspense. Perhaps the most lauded of these novels were Poor Harriet (1957), surely one of the most raved debuts in the history of crime fiction, A Long Way Down (1959), A Friend of Mary Rose (1961) and Edgar-nominated The Make-Believe Man (1963), which were published successively in the United States by the Harper & Brothers’ prestigious “Harper Novel of Suspense” imprint, edited by the hugely influential crime fiction editor Joan Kahn. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties (and beyond), Kahn through this imprint published an impressive array of talented crime writers, including Patricia Highsmith, Michael Gilbert, Julian Symons, Andrew Garve, Dick Francis, Maurice Proctor, Lionel Davidson, Gavin Black, J. J. Marric, John Ball, Elizabeth Linington, Nicholas Freeling, Peter Dickinson, Nicholas Blake, Shelley Smith, Sara Woods, and John Dickson Carr. What is remarkable about this list, aside from the notably few exclusive practitioners of classic detection like Carr and Sara Woods and the heavy preponderance of British writers, is how phallocentric it is. There are a wildly disproportionate number of men, especially when one considers that the editor of the imprint was a woman. Not only are traditional detective novelists of the British Crime Queen school absent, but so, largely, are women authors of “domestic menace,” like Celia Fremlin, Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Ursula Curtiss and Jean Potts. It appears that Kahn left it largely to Elizabeth Fenwick (along with British suspense writer Shelley Smith) to hold this flag high. And hold it high she did, despite her adversities, although between 1966 and 1968 she was affiliated in the United States not with Harper but with Atheneum, publishers of P. M. Hubbard, Eric Ambler and Len Deighton, the first of whom Fenwick especially resembles in her insidious explorations of psychological aberrations. Unpredictability in domestic life—the way the cozily familiar can, in the blink of a disoriented eye, turn into the crazily off-kilter—is something Elizabeth Fenwick, drawing on her sometimes painfully lived experiences of forty and fifty years, powerfully depicted in the eleven crime novels which she published between 1957 and 1973. Her body of mid-century crime fiction is an important and compelling one, making Stark House’s recent reprinting of several of her novels after the author’s long era of neglect a welcome event indeed. Welcome back, Miss Fenwick! The suspense is finally over—and it has only just begun. Note: Stark House has reprinted an Elzabeth Fenwick “twofer” of The Make-Believe Man and A Friend of Mary Rose. Early next year a twofer of Poor Harriet and The Silent Cousin will follow. [1] In a strange twist which could have come out of a mystery novel, both Shelby Hammond Curlee’s nephew Francis Marion Curlee, Jr. and his son and principal legatee, Shelby Hammond Curlee, Jr., died untimely accidental deaths shortly after his own unexpected demise in January 1944. Francis expired in an automobile accident in February, while Shelby in September was found dead in the swimming pool of a St. Louis racquet club. In the latter case the county coroner speculated from a bump found on the top of Curlee’s head and other marks about his head and face that the dead man “may have struck the bottom of the pool in diving” and then “lost consciousness and drowned.” Colonel Curlee was the lone survivor of this mayhem, passing away in 1958. View the full article -
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Brendan Flaherty on Estrangement, Home, and the Rippling Effects of Trauma in ‘The Dredge’
Cale and Ambrose Casey haven’t spoken in thirty years. The brothers at the center of Brendan Flaherty’s The Dredge became estranged after traumatic events upended their adolescence. Over the next decades, each has crafted a life in which to protect himself and survive. In Hawaii, Cale sells waterfront properties and can’t seem to commit to a relationship. In rural Connecticut, Ambrose still lives in the house in which the brothers grew up, now with his pregnant wife and young daughter. When their old neighbor’s pond must be dredged to allow for a developer’s expansion plans, the brothers are forced to reconnect to ensure old secrets remain buried. Meanwhile Lily Roy, who grew up alongside the Casey brothers in a far less harmonious home, is the contractor overseeing the dredge. It soon turns out she too has secrets to protect. In The Dredge, Flaherty has crafted an intense debut novel, tightly plotted in dual present and past timelines, with a trim and three-dimensional cast of characters. At its heart, the novel asks, can we move past trauma without dredging up the secrets that shaped us? I enjoyed an engaging conversation with the author over Zoom and we discussed the psychology of his characters, self-care in writing darkness, and the complexity of finding home. Jenny Bartoy: Let’s start with a straightforward question: where did you get the idea for this book? Brendan Flaherty: I probably shouldn’t admit this, but the seed of it came in a dream. This was probably almost 15 years ago. I woke up with this picture in my head of a stick of white birch in a dark swamp, and I had this awful feeling that I’d accidentally committed a terrible crime. I wrote a bunch of pages based on that image and it just stayed with me. I could sort of feel the story in it, but it took me years of false starts to do what I wanted to do with it. That image is now just a small detail in the book, but the DNA for all of it was in there. So that’s a long way of saying: a dream of a stick. JB: This novel’s foundation seems to be trauma and what ripples from it. It can take a toll on a writer to become immersed in the darkness or difficulty of our topic. How did you manage to separate yourself from the story? BF: The book touches on dark topics, but putting more pain and sadness into this world wasn’t my intention at all. Quite the opposite. I was interested in how people can sublimate those negative experiences into something more meaningful and positive. And though the book has a bit of an open ending that I think is more true to life than anything tidy—to me, it’s hopeful. There’s tragedy, but there’s also a sense that spring is coming, and with it, healing, forgiveness, reconnection, and new life, or at least the possibility of it. So, it helped having that idea and glimmer of light in mind all along. As a writer, I suppose you’re very alone in that kind of rigorous mental work. There were a couple of times where I did have to stop. Especially during the peak of the pandemic, when everything seemed really bleak and chaotic. I was trying to take another run at the manuscript and working long, weirdly stressful hours remotely. We had a newborn and another small child at the time, and I was kind of slogging through that dark material, those difficult sections. At some point, I needed to take a break for a while and go watch 30 Rock and play with my kids and change the record in my brain. JB: I was drawn to your novel because it begins with an estrangement between brothers. Here you have one brother who stayed, one who left, and they haven’t spoken in thirty years. For each of them, their choice represents both denial and a desire to rebuild over their traumatic past. I’d love to know more about your perspective on family estrangement, and what this rupture between the brothers meant for you narratively. BF: Great question. The brothers’ relationship, cleaved in two, is at the heart of the whole thing. These traumatic things happen to them that they could have shared, or helped one another along in some way, but instead blame pushed them apart and each was alone in it. And each had a different response to managing this rupture in their lives. One ran away, and that left the other brother in a position to have to stay to protect this secret. So they’re both in bad spots. One feels he can never return home and the other feels he can never leave. Their differences seem irreconcilable, and the result is a silence between them. I’ve seen this silence, and in the case of the brothers, it keeps them stuck in the past. The brother who leaves ends up figuring out the real estate industry, and he seeks solace in surfaces, in the physical world, his material possessions. That’s how he tries to fill this void in him. JB: Right. Meanwhile the other brother goes all in and builds a local business and a family, but there’s a palpable dread to him. Each of the characters keeps secrets that define them and their conflicts but that can’t be spoken, for essentially the duration of the book. How tricky was it to plot this story? BF: Yeah, it was tricky and took me a long time. Even once I thought I’d figured out how I could make it work with the rotating point of view between the main characters, I still had to keep the rhythm of it and the differing timelines. So there was a lot of getting the timing and the calendar right. In terms of how I did that, a lot of it was in my head, but I’ve got stacks of notebooks, too. And then for more complex stuff like the present timeline and the one in the past, I used a Word doc to keep it easily editable. A lot of the material accreted over the years, and then I ended up writing the majority of what became the book as it is now in three weeks between jobs. JB: Your novel covers a lot of depth in a short amount of pages (260 pages). Do you have any tips for writers wishing to keep their work as economical yet intense as yours? BF: It’s been said plenty before, but just edit ruthlessly. I read my writing aloud over and over, and cut everything, every syllable, that I don’t feel needs to be there. How do you say the most with the least? That’s the whole challenge of language, right? So I spent a lot of time editing and going over it and over it and over it. And that’s because I want it to be as polished as I can get it, but also this is my first book and I wanted to be mindful of people’s time. Hopefully, I can communicate a story to you and you could read it quickly and get right to the heart of it. JB: It was definitely a fast read, but I was impressed with how much you conveyed psychologically in a tight space. One of your characters, Ray, is rather monstrous, but you create empathy in the reader by showing his traumatic, abusive upbringing and the love that his sister Lily has for him. How challenging was it, morally or otherwise, to write this character? BF: He was challenging, definitely. But he was also a really interesting character to me, because the way he is isn’t his fault, and yet, he’s becoming a very dangerous person with the potential to hurt a lot of people. A person who has only ever known violence — that’s essentially his experience of the world. To me, the difference in the two families [central to the book] is largely based on how the two fathers respond to their own childhood trauma. Eli Casey becomes a good man, an empathetic person who tries to help others whose pain he recognizes. Ray’s dad, Abe, does not rise above this negative cycle, and instead he perpetuates it, on his own family, no less. This pointless cruelty shapes Ray. But he’s not all bad. The same way that no one’s all good. JB: These characters for generations have gone in loops over the same landscape—the pond, the roads, the wood, the bridges over the stream. How did setting help enhance the narrative? BF: It was very important to me. That setting is based on the woods I knew growing up. There’s not necessarily a pond like the one in the story that exists or anything like that, but my experience with that real landscape was the inspiration for the setting. I’m from northern Connecticut and the house I grew up in was built in the 1820s. There’s a sense of history you can feel there in certain places. Stone walls in the woods, long-abandoned foundations, that sort of thing. To me, it has a certain mood. Knowing the setting like that was helpful because it gave me a shorthand. As I was focusing on characters or relationships or more important stuff to the story, I didn’t have to, in my mind, invent every rock. It was just there. I could see it. I had a sort of set or stage in which to put the characters. JB: There’s a definite sense of intimacy with the landscape throughout the novel. Your three main characters work respectively in construction, in real estate, and for a suburban developer. Each of those jobs relates to houses and home, to rebuilding but also burying. Of course the dredge of the pond upends all those efforts. Can you tell me about the symbolism inherent in these choices? BF: Maybe the metaphors of my Catholic upbringing and childhood Bible class are showing there, but yes, each character is longing for a home. Each is searching for a place where they can find peace. The concept of “home” seems to elude them all. As much as Lily dresses up the house she grew up in, it’s still a site of trauma. And as much as Cale can go sell luxury real estate, he still can never buy back the happy home of his childhood. And as much as Ambrose tries to be a homebuilder, like his father, something is still missing. JB: Technology is largely absent in this novel, which is a bit of a trend I’ve noticed in recent literary mysteries. Tell me about this narrative choice. BF: So many televised court cases, it seems, have a prosecutor reading text threads. I think, for one, my characters know this and are protecting themselves. They’re wise enough to not create a paper trail with texts. And the silence between the brothers predates the pervasive technology of today. I think their ages factor in a little bit too. If they were 16 or 18, I’m sure digital technology would be a bigger influence. But they’re all more of an analog type of person, of which I know many. And maybe on a personal level, I’m not super interested in the social media space, which seems like concentration-killing brain poison, even as I look at it myself now and find myself entertained. Still, it feels fleeting and not built to last. JB: Harvey is the older sleuth unable to speak due to a stroke, not taken seriously even by his wife. Why did you choose to silence your “detective” character? BF: The simplest answer is that I feel like that’s been done. There’s plenty of detective stories—writers who can do it better than I can, people with a closer relationship with police procedures, who have that sort of knowledge. So, I thought that was sort of well-trod ground that didn’t really speak to me personally. I felt there had to be some kind of police, some sort of acknowledgment of the legal threat, but I liked the idea of his presence being almost a ghostly one. I don’t feel like I chose to silence that character—that was just kind of how he always was to me. Half in this world, and half in another. Half here, and half gone already. JB: Congratulations on this debut novel. What are you writing now? BF: I’m working on the next book. I’m kind of going back and forth between two ideas. I like lighter comedy-ish stuff, like Charles Portis and Kurt Vonnegut. So there’s one book that’s light, and another that’s more in line with this one. I’m writing them both in drips and drops each morning and waiting to see which horse takes the lead. View the full article -
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Real Life Crimes That Are Stranger Than Fiction
The truth is often stranger—wilder, more volatile, and somehow even more unbelievable—than fiction. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to true crime. As an author of mysteries for adults and young adults, I’m always scouring real-life, historical events for the seeds of my own stories. Here are a few true crimes that were stranger than fiction—and the books they inspired. One of the first true crime books I ever read was Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Set at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the book’s narrative snakes between the Fair’s renowned architect Daniel Burnham and the “devil” that roamed in plain sight during the Exposition: Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, arguably the United States’ first serial killer. Holmes was a psychopath and swindler, who, among various other crimes, committed insurance fraud and built a “murder castle” near the site of the World’s Fair. Complete with hidden passages and a nefarious kiln in the basement, he is as chilling as any fictional murderer—and perhaps more so, since he really existed. In a similar vein, the nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon—and its subsequent movie release—details the systematic and calculated murders of members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s. The story is a complex web of evil, the crimes jaw-dropping, as the Osage become some of the richest people in America after the discovery of oil on their land. Their families are then systematically infiltrated, hunted, and killed off for their headrights—even by people who claimed to love them. David Grann’s book is a prime example of a mystery that almost defies belief, if it weren’t actually true. Novels, too, often shed light on true crime events by weaving them into otherwise fictional plots. This has been the case with a number of Louise Penny novels, from the 1989 École Polytechnique shooting in Canada (fictionalized in Penny’s A World of Curiosities) to the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story of Gerald Bull. Bull was a Canadian engineer who was considered to be the preeminent artillery scientist of his time. He developed a Supergun called Project Babylon for Saddam Hussein—a space-cannon with a barrel that measured five hundred feet long—and was assassinated with several shots to the head on his own front door stoop. This stranger-than-fiction story was woven into another of Penny’s classic Gamache novels, The Nature of the Beast. I count Penny’s novels to be hugely inspiring. I love mysteries, and even more so when they involve unsolved crimes from real life. Perhaps that’s why I spent so much time at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum when I was a college student living in Boston. I was fascinated not only by the museum’s lush indoor garden courtyard but by the brazen (and still unsolved) museum heist that occurred there in 1990. Thirteen priceless works of art were stolen in the middle of the night, including pieces by Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet. Their empty frames still hang in the museum today, a haunting testament to where the thieves used box cutters to cut the paintings straight from the walls. This crime has inspired a number of works, including the Netflix documentary This is A Heist, an Inside the FBI podcast, and a nonfiction tome called Stolen—the only book about the theft commissioned by the museum itself. Its opening line? “They came for the Rembrandts.” But if a wide range of works have been inspired by the Isabella Stewart Gardner art theft, perhaps even more have been written about another atmospheric residence-turned-museum on the opposite coast: Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. A visit to the island proves rife with stories about the criminals who once lived there—and the few that escaped. From Al Capone and Birdman to the three inmates who pulled off one of the most well-known prison escapes in history, countless books and movies have explored the infamous island, including Escape from Alcatraz: The True Crime Classic by J. Campbell Bruce. Others include the historical fiction series for young adults Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko and the nonfiction account Eyewitness on Alcatraz by Jolene Babyak, both of which look at the experience of Alcatraz from the unique perspective of the children who lived on the island while their parents served as prison guards. As an author, I was intrigued by some of these true events, and they planted themselves like seeds in my mind. Learning about the unsolved art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, the mysterious Alcatraz escapees, and the children who grew up on the most infamous prison island in America, all became elements that inspired my historical mystery Enchanted Hill. Set in 1930 at a fictionalized Hearst Castle, Enchanted Hill was incepted by my own trips to visit these places and the way their unsolved crimes stayed with me, using my mind like a trellis. True life is so often actually stranger and more mysterious than fiction—which is why it can inspire some of the best non-fiction reads (and novels) to keep us turning pages long into the night. *** View the full article -
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4 Books In Which Children Are Accused – And Their Parents Wrestle with the Truth
I’ve long wanted to write a story where I take something that is considered a universal positive—the love of a parent for their child—and super-charge it and challenge it to the point where that love becomes dangerous. In my experience, we will do things to protect the ones we would love that we would never do, that we could never justify doing, on our own behalf, and that makes for a powerful starting point for a story. In my new book, What Happened to Nina?, a lovely young couple go away for the weekend, and only one of them comes home. For me the story was never so much about what happened to the missing Nina, or even so much about whether or not her accused boyfriend, Simon, is responsible for her disappearance … for me the story was always about the parents. I put myself firmly in the shoes ocf Nina’s parents, and asked myself if there was anything I wouldn’t do, any length I wouldn’t go to, to get my daughter back? And just as firmly and completely, I tried to see things from the point of view of Simon’s parents. If my son, whom I believed to the core of my being to be innocent, was accused, what would I do? What lengths would I go to to save him? For What Happened to Nina?, I wanted to put two families in crisis in opposition to each other at the centre of a story, and stand back to see what happened. I had a feeling it might be explosive. Of course, I’m not the first author to tackle this theme, or similar themes, or to write a thriller from the point of view of the parent of the accused. There’s something about the idea of having a child accused of a terrible crime that is, I think, universally horrifying and terribly compelling. Something about the slow peeling back of layers of truth, the fear that maybe we don’t know our child as well as we think we do, the fear of what we might discover next. I’d like to recommend the following four books that explore this theme, all very different, all equally captivating for their own reasons. Run Away, Harlan Coben In Harlan Coben’s Run Away, Simon Greene is a father who has lost his beloved daughter, Paige, to a drug addiction and an abusive boyfriend. Simon and his wife have tried to help Paige through multiple failed rehab attempts, and after one bad experience too many, Simon’s wife decides that enough is enough. She makes Simon promise to stop trying, to let Paige go. Simon makes the promise, but secretly he can’t do it. When Paige disappears again, he keeps searching for her and when her reappearance drags him down a dark and violent path, he can’t seem to stop himself from putting one foot in front of the other, no matter where it takes him. We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver It’s easy to look back on a book like Kevin, a book that has become part of the canon, and assume it was an immediate success. In fact, Lionel Shriver’s then agent was so dismayed by the novel’s unrelenting darkness, and by the unsympathetic point of view of the protagonist, Eva (a woman who had never bonded with her son, who didn’t even like him) that she thought it was unpublishable. The book was ultimately picked up by a small publishing house, and it grew to the behemoth it become through snow-balling word of mouth. I have some sympathy with the agent who couldn’t see the book for what it was—something brave and powerful and challenging and important—because hindsight is twenty-twenty, and to read We Need to Talk About Kevin for the first time is to discover something ugly and unsettling. Kevin is an unapologetic mass murderer. Eva is the mother who never loved him, but who, now that it is all done, can’t seem to leave him alone. The question that recurs again and again throughout the book is whether Kevin is the product of nature, or nurture. Was he born the way he is, and is that why Eva couldn’t love him, or did he turn out the way he is because she couldn’t bond with him? This book does not offer any easy answers, but it does leave us with a lot to think about. One of Our Own, Lucinda Berry And now for something a little bit different. This one is an audio original, a novella that comes in at a tight four hours and is all the sweeter for it. Felicia is an attorney and a single mom who also volunteers for a domestic violence helpline. She takes a call from a high school student, a young girl who has been sexually assaulted at a party and who is now planning to take her own revenge. Felicia is at first motivated only to help the girl, but she becomes concerned (reasonably) about the revenge plans, in particular as her son attends the same high school. As the story progresses, we learn, alongside Felicia, that her son was at the party where the assault took place. The question for Felicia, and for all of us, is where or not he was involved, and if he was, what Felicia is going to do about it. Defending Jacob, William Landay Defending Jacob was first published in 2012, but the TV adaption starring Chris Evans, which was widely praised and released in 2020, brought fresh eyes to the novel. The protagonist in this case is Andrew Barber, a well-regarded District Attorney, who takes on the case of a murdered teenage boy. He loses the case almost as quickly as he took it, when it transpires that Andrew’s son Jacob’s fingerprint has been found on the body of the dead boy. Jacob explains the fingerprint by saying that he found the body but ran away and told no-one, because he was afraid that he’d be blamed for the boy’s death. Other than that statement, Jacob is largely uncommunicative, leaving his parents to try to piece together the truth of his life, and to marry those truths with the boy they thought they knew. This book is a whodunnit, but it’s also an examination of trauma, of the lies we tell ourselves, and of what happens to a family when those lies are exposed. *** View the full article -
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Algonkian Retreats and Workshops - Assignments 2024
FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Story Statement It’s the summer of 1991. Popular and vibrant 20-year-old university student Rukmini Roy just had her heart broken. What she doesn't know yet, is that her best friend and all her other friends in her social circle are keeping a secret from her. The young man who broke her heart, Kash, has already started dating her best friend, Soloni. This coming-of-age story begins with how Rukmini overcomes betrayal by her friends. This tangled situation is only the beginning of her journey through young love, connection, and complicated friendships and eventually moving forward. Rukmini ultimately finds a sense of agency, then she finds the love of her life. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: Antagonist or Antagonistic force Soloni is the first antagonist in Rukmini’s story. Soloni is her childhood best friend. She is not an obvious antagonist as she is introduced as a shy, insecure, awkward, and studious 11-year-old. Soloni idolizes Rukmini. For her part, Rukmini loves having a loyal protege in the form of a best friend, especially since she doesn’t get much attention at home from her immigrant parents and isn’t popular at school. As they grow up, Soloni begins to show flashes of an inner darkness brewing inside, due to a jealous spirit. Secretly, Soloni hates how perfect everyone thinks Rukmini is and even Solini’s mother is constantly speaking of her praises. Soloni quietly studies everything Rukmini does, says, and wears. Friends at university start to comment on how similar they are to each other. Then one day Soloni starts dating Rukmini’s ex-boyfriend right after he breaks her heart. Soloni then preys on the sympathies of their mutual friends, swearing them to secrecy about her new relationship. There will be other antagonists but this is the one that starts the story off during a painful and confusing chapter in Rukmini’s growth. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: Create a breakout title The Chronicles of Rukmini Rukmini Roy The Loves that Led Me to You FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Two smart comparables I found answering this question challenging to not zero in on authors that are not venerated as these were the very inspirations I had in mind when I began writing this story. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: The main character is Olive but this collection of short stories takes the stories of other characters in her town and different key points in Olive’s life and has a self-contained story in each chapter. This is a closer look at the human condition. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler: Tells the story of three generations in the Whitshank family. This has a similar feel to Olive Kitteridge in that each chapter is a different point in time in the Whitshank legacy and the study of how each personality in the family came to be the way they are. Others: Interpreter of Maladies by Jumpha Lahiri: This is a collection of short stories about the Bengali immigrant experience in the United States that describes the emotional journeys of characters seeking love and overcoming barriers in settling in a newly adopted homeland. Anne of Gables Green by Lucy Maud Montgomery: Adventures of our favourite red-head by the iconic Canadian author. FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: Hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound A young woman must contend with the betrayal of her childhood best friend who is now dating the man who broke her heart and she must also contend with all the friends who kept the secret of this betrayal. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: Conflict Inner Conflict: Rukmini is struggling with just getting dumped by a guy she finally decided to give a chance to whom she normally wouldn’t date. She is nursing her broken heart and relying on her friend Soloni as a shoulder to cry on for support. Soloni has hinted that she is staying in touch with Rukmini’s ex-boyfriend because Rukmini has remained friends with Kash. There is no reason to stop Soloni from not having a friendship with her ex if they are remaining in each other’s lives. After the breakup, her ex, Kash reaches out to Soloni for a “friendship” and Rukmini feels it is for support and that he must be having a hard time with the break up as well but something feels off after a certain conversation with Soloni. She is troubled by this and doesn’t know where to place this sinking feeling. Soloni has always been a good loyal devoted friend. Rukmini asks Soloni, “Does he ever talk about me?” Soloni responds with “I’m sorry he never brought you up.” Rukmini is surprised and feels worried and is a bit turmoiled by her perception that they are getting closer. Is it friendship or could it be more? She knows Kash enough to know he seems interested in Soloni and Soloni doesn’t seem to be putting up any boundaries. They keep making plans to see each other under the guise of friendship. Soloni informs Rukmini that she enjoys her friendship with Kash because she is usually uncomfortable around men, especially given how they grew up in a conservative household. She tells Rukmini that she feels comfortable around Kash. It’s the early 90s and both young women were raised in an immigrant family so neither of them grew up dating in their teens. Rukmini desperately wishes to appear cool with the whole thing. She decides she must handle this breakup with maturity since Kash has made it clear he does not have feelings for her anymore. She silently struggles with this conflict in how she appears to the rest of the world while she is devastated by this breakup and not knowing if Kash is moving on with her best friend. Rukmini would like to appear emotionally mature and not let her insecurities get the best of her. For years, Soloni has jokingly and sometimes not so jokingly teased Rukmini about always wanting to be the center of attention telling her she has a big ego and needs to be humbled at times. She feels that Kash thought the same of her during their relationship. She does not want to be that person anymore. Rukmini wants to be seen as humble and down to earth by the people around her but doesn’t know how to be that person when she is hurting. She wants to be a better person and being a better person means being humble, without ego, more like Soloni. For most of her life, it was Soloni who was trying to be like Rukmini but now she finds herself wanting to be more like Soloni, quiet, and unassuming, the type of girl that Kash wants to be with because she imagines them eventually falling in love and getting married and living happily ever after. She confides in another friend that she is worried they are getting closer. That friend finally breaks the news to Rukmini that they are indeed in a relationship now and everyone has known about this for a while but no one wanted to break the news to Rukmini. The two of them even came out to social gatherings with their friends when Rukmini wasn’t around. She quickly rationalizes that this is for the best but she is angry at her friends for hiding this big secret and feels doubly betrayed. Secondary Conflict: While Rukmini is popular at her university and within her social circle, she didn’t grow up like this. Growing up she was never a stand-out at school and her parents didn’t pay much attention to her. Her mother was always more concerned with status and appearances and what their social standing was in the city’s thriving and growing Bengali community. Her mother was constantly comparing Rukmini to other girls in the community. Many of them were getting excellent grades but Rukmini was a solid C + student and this caused Rukmini much shame. She just assumed all her friends were smarter than her. Not only that, she had to deal with being one of the few brown kids at her school. At cultural gatherings when the Bengali community came together, her friends, discussed such things as who was on their way to receiving scholarships, who was lighter skinned, and who amongst them planned on a career in engineering or medicine. Rukmini struggled with the feeling that she disappointed her parents in all these categories. She was not light-skinned and she didn’t have a head for math or science, and the prospect of a future in engineering gave her a feeling of paralyzing boredom. She wanted romance and a life full of travel and adventure. Her father was an engineer and didn’t seem at all interested in anything Rukmini did but was mostly focused on her little brother who didn’t have a care in the world being the long-wanted son born to an Indian family. Her little brother was born when she was 10, Rukmini couldn’t help but feel that her parents finally welcomed the child they had been waiting for all their lives. He was doted upon by her parents and nobody mentioned anything about the shade of his skin. She felt constantly overlooked at home and school. She never really felt like she received any of her father’s attention or her mother's love so lived her life into her 20s constantly seeking what she saw as the ultimate validation in the form of the male gaze. She just wanted someone to notice her and tell her she was pretty. The only person who thought she was special was her friend Soloni who admired everything about Rukmini. As Rukmini experimented with makeup and styles, she likened herself as a mentor to a very eager Soloni, teaching her how to dress and display more confidence. While Rukmini struggled with her confidence at home, she felt self-assured around her Bengali community misfit of friends. While she never had a boyfriend in high school because no one showed any interest in her, by the time she started university in her hometown of Calgary it was a new beginning. It was the dawn of the 1990s and a whole new world had opened up for her. She started dressing better and had more friends in university, including her childhood family friends from the community that she had grown up with. Then finally she had a boyfriend. Kash was not the type of guy she normally dated because he was a bit of a loser, truth be told. It all began when he desperately wanted to cross the line of friendship and be her boyfriend, so she let him. Unfortunately for Rukmini, upon winning the prize of making her his girlfriend, he broke up with her after a few months saying he didn’t feel the way he thought he initially did. She was right all along; they were better off as friends. So what could Rukmini do but accept this after introducing him to all her closest friends? He seemed to take an interest in Soloni right away and that made Rukmini uneasy. Rukmini always had everything over Soloni. If she didn’t feel pretty enough, confident enough, she always secretly knew she was “better than” Soloni at least. She wasn’t insecure like Soloni. She was the pretty one, even though Soloni was the smart one. Now here is a guy who chose Soloni, over her and this is a hard pill to swallow. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: Setting The setting is in the early 1990s in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. There is a small-town feel to this mid-sized Canadian city. Some scenes take place in mostly suburban homes, community halls where South Asian cultural festivals are held, and then, when the characters are older, in nightclubs in the city’s downtown core. The city is not known for its diversity so many of the young people from different immigrant groups come together in social settings at the university, favorite local haunts, and their homes. The many young immigrant twenty-somethings who hadn’t gone away for university still lived at home and answered to their parents as most of the characters in this story are children of immigrants, twenty years after the mass immigration from South Asia in the 1970s took place in Canada. Given this era of Generation X, these children of immigrants had a more conservative upbringing than the current-day second and third-generation offspring of immigrants in North America. These characters often must deal with their parents' traumatic decisions rooted in survival mode and scarcity issues. For these characters, it often shows up as over-protective parenting all while having few financial resources and wanting to preserve one’s culture while settling in a new country. One of the first scenes is set on a blistering cold winter’s night after the two friends, Soloni and Rukmini have come back from a night out of dancing. The winter cold is piercing but Rukmini is reassured by the comfort and warmth of her friendship with one of her oldest and dearest friends as they attempt to warm their limbs in the refuge of Soloni’s car. The heat from the car’s radiator provides some respite to her icy hands and feet in the blistering prairie winter. She has been left out in the cold (by way of getting dumped by Kash) but here is her friend making her feel better by taking her on a night out to let off some steam and bond like they did when they were younger. Rukmini, after getting tipsy at their favorite majestic nightclub, in a moment of vulnerability, confessed how much she was still hurting from her breakup with Kash and how much she still missed him. Soloni appears to be comforting her but she is also masking her deceit as a relationship (unbeknownst to Rukmini) has already begun between her and Kash. They return to Soloni’s parent’s home and settle in on the pull-out couch in her homey suburban basement for an impromptu slumber party, much like they did years before as teenagers. Soloni now in the safety of her home dwelling is less guarded. She lets a few things slip. Here is where Rukmini picks up on a few clues that Soloni may be hiding something from her regarding the nature of her relationship with Kash. There are flashbacks to warmer Calgary summer days when life was full of promise and when Rukmini’s romance with Kash was just blossoming. The sky is crisp, endless, and blue, as Alberta is known as “Big Sky Country” so the possibilities were endless and hopeful as to where this new romance was to lead Rukmini. It began at the Calgary Stampede, an annual country exhibition and fair that has been enthusiastically celebrated in the city for generations. Kash wins a huge stuffed animal on the fairgrounds for Rukmini and she is charmed by him. This begins their romance. Cultural events at community centers, halls, and old churches play a big part in the setting of this story. When there is a cultural festival, immigrant groups rent out these halls decorate them with their cultural ornaments, and gather together for food and prayer. While many cultural groups now in 2024 have dedicated temples and cultural clubhouses, at the time in the 90s many of these buildings and gathering locations were still being built after years of fundraising. Here families and participants dress up in their best cultural garb, bring potluck, feast, pray, and rejoice, and hold shows showcasing local talent in the community to entertain all who are invited. It’s something that’s looked forward to by all the Bengalis around the city from different neighborhoods eager to come together a few times a year for Navrathri Holi or Durga Puja. -
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The Best Reviewed Books of the Month: March 2024
A look at the month’s best new releases in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers, via Bookmarks. * Ben H. Winters, Big Time (Mulholland Books) “A weird and wonderful cautionary tale … It features the month’s most engaging investigator, a schlumpy bureaucrat roused to action.” –Sarah Lyall (New York Times Book Review) Colin Barrett, Wild Houses (Grove Press) “Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face … The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings — not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite moments of violence that tear through the plot, the most arresting scenes are those of anticipated brutality … Barrett cleverly constructs his novel … Given the pervasive gloom, the fact that these chapters spark with life — even touches of humor — may seem impossible, but it’s a measure of Barrett’s electric style. Tense moments suddenly burst with flashes of absurdity or comic exasperation. Clearly, those years of writing short stories have given Barrett an appreciation for how fit every sentence must be; there isn’t a slacker in this trim book. Even the asides and flashbacks hurtle the whole project forward toward a climax that feels equally tensile and poignant, like some strange cloak woven from wire and wool.” –Ron Charles (Washington Post) Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black (Harper Perennial) “Stunning and intense … At once a rivetingly dramatic procedural and an intimate portrait of a relationship forged in trauma.” –Bridget Thoreson (Booklist) Andrey Kurkov (transl. Boris Dralyuk), The Silver Bone (Harpervia) “It is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre … Kurkov, as filtered through the supple translation of Boris Dralyuk, infuses The Silver Bone with wry humor.” –Sarah Weinman (New York Times Book Review) Tana French, The Hunter (Viking) “Suspense is in the details — small details — scattered throughout … The extraordinary sequel to … A singularly tense and moody thriller, but it’s also an exceptional novel because of its structure.” –Maureen Corrigan (Washington Post) View the full article -
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When Horror Hits Home: An Appreciation of Domestic Horror
There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” I came across this Grimm tale while conducting research for my novel, Monsters We Have Made, a story which also begins with a terrible crime committed by children: in this case, two young girls who fall under the sway of a mysterious creature they discover on the Internet. Like the fairy tale, my story, too, explores questions of boundaries: play violence versus real violence, fiction versus reality. And like the Grimm Brothers, I’m interested in the power of stories; especially the ones that live beside us, within the spaces and the relationships where we feel most at home. When I think about “domestic horror,” I think about tales like these—in which what we fear comes not from the woods or from the sky, but from people and places familiar to us. Although the domestic horror genre isn’t particularly new, and it isn’t even new to Crime Reads (see this primer from 2019), most definitions focus on physical horrors: knives, ghosts, corpses, exorcisms. But while writing this novel, I’ve realized that some of the most powerful and haunting works are those that explore something slightly different, something I’d call a horror of the domestic: by which I mean the psychological and emotional toll or terror of being a parent, a caretaker, a wage-earner, a spouse. What’s most horrific in the Grimm Brothers’ tale above, and in the stories I’ve gathered below, is that the terrifying situation cannot be easily understood or explained. And perhaps this is, in fact, where true domestic horror lies: in our inability to explain to ourselves, to each other, why and how the people and spaces with which we are most intimate can suddenly, unpredictably, irrevocably strip our peace and certainty away from us. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child, 1988 Friends recommended The Fifth Child to me in the early days of this writing project, when I told them what I was working on. Harriet, the mother in Lessing’s novel, gives birth to what she refers to as a “goblin” or “troll” or “changeling”—her fifth child, Ben, who sucks her nipples black and blue and deliberately injures his older brother and kills a friend’s dog. What do you do with a monstrous child? How does society handle a mother who hates her child? How does a parent choose between caring for one child and caring for the others? Motherhood is “a series of impossible choices,” as one reviewer of this novel observed, and Lessing conveys this reality in direct and lucid prose. She dismissed critics’ attempts to determine what the novel was really about, calling their efforts a search for a simple solution when the horror of the book is that there is no simple solution; there is only the trap of the world, and of your own decisions, and of the life that you’ve created for yourself. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 1915 What could be more horrific than waking up transformed into a giant insect, or—in certain translations—a “monstrous” vermin? Approximately twenty-five percent of the population is frightened by insects and spiders, and Gregor’s family is understandably horrified at the sight of his new beetle-like form. Gregor, on the other hand, is more horrified by how his transformation impacts his ability to earn an income. “‘What a quiet life our family has been leading,’ said Gregor to himself… [feeling] great pride in the fact that he had been able to provide such a life for his parents and sister in such a fine flat. But what if all the quiet, the comfort, the contentment were now to end in horror?” Nearly all of Kafka’s novella takes place within the confines of the domestic space, and the story reminds us that food, shelter, comfort, and stability are never guaranteed. What happens when we’ve outlived our usefulness? Will we still be valued by a capitalist system—by our friends, family, and dependents—if we’re unable to work? Is it possible that uselessness and loneliness are even more horrifying than giant vermin? Perhaps! Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch” in Her Body and Other Parties, 2017 Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” incorporates many of the tales and urban legends collected in Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. I remember how wonderfully terrifying I found these books as a child, and it’s a pleasure to spend time with a narrator who also remembers the girl in the graveyard, the bride in the corpse’s wedding dress, the killer with the hook for a hand. It’s wonderfully terrifying, too, to see how Machado revisits and adapts “The Girl with the Green Ribbon” (from Schwartz’s In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories) so that the horror in her version is much deeper and more complex than the physical horror of seeing a girl’s head roll off her body. In “The Husband Stitch”—the title referring to a surgical procedure terrifying in and of itself—what’s truly horrific is living as a woman in a world built by and for men; what’s horrific is the expectation that the narrator give and give and give of herself until she has nothing left. When her husband insists on untying the green ribbon that she has asked him never to touch, she pleads: “I’ve given you everything you have ever asked for… Am I not allowed this one thing?” The answer is no. “As my lopped head tips backward off my neck and rolls off the bed,” she tells us in her final line, “I feel as lonely as I have ever been.” Leila Slimani, The Perfect Nanny, 2018 (Original French: Chanson Douce, 2016) “The baby is dead,” opens the English translation of Slimani’s award-winning psychological thriller. “It only took a few seconds… The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived. She’d fought like a wild animal.” Slimani’s novel (like mine) was inspired by a true crime: in this case, a New York nanny who murdered two children under her care. At first glance, the darkness of this book is obvious: there is little that horrifies more than infanticide. Yet the novel centers not on the act itself, but on the political and cultural anxieties in which it is embedded: a working parent’s fear of leaving her child in a stranger’s care; the desperation of a domestic worker trapped in a life of isolation, insecurity, and economic distress; the terrifying realization that no matter how many references we check, how much security we pay for, or how intensely we love, calamity can strike. The mother in Monsters We Have Made spends more than a decade after her daughter’s crime trying and failing to figure out exactly where she went wrong. When did the play violence turn serious? What kind of darkness lurks in the nooks and crannies of our homes? How do we ensure that our worst fears do not befall us? To the most important question of all—Is there anything we can do to keep ourselves safe?—domestic horror says, resoundingly and irrevocably: No. *** View the full article -
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When Good People Do Bad Things: Exploring Everyday Evil in Crime Fiction
In my new novel SLEEPING GIANTS, the director of a children’s home uses a draconian new treatment method. Despite being without any scientific backing, this treatment has been heralded as the latest cure for troubled children. It’s cruel, invasive, and dangerous, and has already been implicated in the deaths of several children. Like so many who commit harm, the director is convinced she is doing the right thing. She thinks she is helping, not hindering. She believes she is on the right side. Even as her harm becomes obvious, she refuses to admit she is wrong. Instead, she doubles down, and commits even more violence to protect herself. It’s an issue that haunts me, as I know it does many others. Why is so much harm committed by those who think they are right? Slavery. The holocaust. Mass incarceration. The internment of Japanese Americans. Wars. Torture. Abu Ghraib. Lobotomies. Genocides. The list is endless, and I’m sure you could add many more. There’s an argument to be made that the worst harms of mankind come not at the hands of those who are social outliers at the time, but perfectly normal citizens, convinced they are doing the right thing. I see it all the time in my justice work. For decades I’ve worked as a licensed defense investigator. I’ve worked hundreds of cases, from juvenile to death row exonerations. Far too often I’ve looked at a child facing prison time, or a man wasting his life behind bars, and I’ve wondered, who is the bad guy here? Daily I wrestle with the brutality of a nation that blithely destroys lives, all in the name of justice. This everyday evil, I think, is underexplored territory for crime writers. Most crime fiction focuses on the outliers—the outright, obvious sociopaths, usually unexplainably brilliant—or else criminal underworlds, like gangs or drug cartels. This is all interesting stuff. But I think it has the effect of othering violence. It assumes there is a world full of normal people who are blameless, who couldn’t fathom the idea of committing harm even if you suggested it. This creates a false dichotomy, an us vs them that is troubling and honestly, kind of disingenuous. It’s true, most people don’t go around committing egregious crimes. Not directly, at least. But spend a few hours on a next-door neighbor site and you can see the seething anger that boils into outright discrimination, the rage that leads people to the voter’s ballot to pass even more punitive laws, and elect officials who will do their dirty work for them. These regular, everyday citizens might not be the ones administering the lethal dose, or locking people up, or torturing children, but they are the mass behind the monsters. Collectively, they can become the monster. This is not confined to politics or borders. Some of the most vicious people I’ve ever met have been the self-proclaimed enlightened. It’s the motive under the act that intrigues me, not the placard above it. In Sleeping Giants, I wanted to dig into those motives. In the novel, sleeping giants are massive stone age carvings found in Arizona. But the real sleeping giants are the secret, hidden pains, and anger inside us that can come out in misdirected rage. In my experience, when these sleeping giants are awakened with a cause—especially one driven by white supremacy, misogyny, or other biases— a permission slip to commit harm is signed, sealed, and delivered. For the director, the treatment method appeals to her own unexamined hurts and anger. It’s a chance to hurt others as she was once hurt. I think this is behind a lot of societal harm, only we poo-poo it. For some weird reason, we separate our acts from our feelings, as if we operate from some higher, clinical self when making decisions. Nothing could be further from the truth. As my friend and playwright Claire Willett once said, “honestly the best marketing scheme in history is men successfully getting away with calling women the more emotional gender for like, EONS, because they’ve successfully rebranded anger as Not an Emotion.” I would add that cloaking rage as reason is the defense of most offenders. Just as there was never any science behind torture, or conversion therapy, or the other atrocities I mentioned, there is no good reason behind most the harm we commit. We may go looking for excuses after the fact—inventing science, inventing reasons—but these are not the true motivations. Those are just the rules we invent to give legitimacy to our cause. When we believe others are harmful, then it becomes easier to put them in cages, and arm ourselves against their release. We write books where we exorcise all our fears and hates into an effigy called the bad guy, and we burn him at the stake. But what will we do when we turn around and see everyone watching is the bad guy? This is the dilemma we must face in fiction and in life. Initially, I worried this story would lack in tension. There is the director, and a little boy in the center named Dennis, who becomes the target of her rage. Twenty years after Dennis goes missing, his sister learns of his existence and goes looking for him. In the process she uncovers decades of crimes. Without the artifice of a conventional bad guy, could I keep the reader turning the pages? Once we abandon the idea that crime is committed by the other, we open ourselves up to more realistic characters… What I found is there is more than enough tension in real life scenarios. In fact, I think they are scarier, because what happens in Sleeping Giants is real. The bad guy is a smiling, nice-looking lady that people trust. She could be your neighbor. She could be any of us. She doesn’t even think she is bad. Once we abandon the idea that crime is committed by the other, we open ourselves up to more realistic characters, and this includes the heroes, too. In Sleeping Giants, the hero is not some hard-boiled detective, but the sister. This young woman, Amanda, has some learning differences. To my knowledge, she’s the first hero with these particular differences, but they are not the center of her story. The center is her longing for truth, and knowledge. That’s enough to get her in a lot of trouble, as many women know. In her efforts to find the truth, Amanda is abetted by a cop, but once again, he’s an ordinary person. Larry Palmer is recently widowed, and grieving. He’s bored and lonely in his small coastal town, where the center was located. Larry has committed harm in the name of good, too. Everyone in this story is in a path of reckoning. There’s been a lot of discourse lately about “unlikable” women characters and unreliable narrators. I think the hunger under these conversations is for books that deal with the fact that good people can do bad things. Sometimes very, very bad things. Or they might stand around and applaud when others do the bad things, and when justice finally comes to call, claim they weren’t there at all. In other words, we want real people on the page. None of this is to shame anyone. We’re all capable of harm, whether against others, ourselves, or other critters sharing our planet. In fact, there are animals in Sleeping Giants, and I wanted to thread their realities into the novel. There is a rabbit that Dennis likes to watch at the center, and a polar bear that Amanda cares for at the zoo. Both have their stories, too. In my own work, I’ve found the more divorced people are from their internal selves, the more separate they are from the outside world. It’s an interesting pattern, and one reason I believe that connecting with nature is so important. It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive. Just being outside, and feeling part of the world, can help people believe their feelings matter, too. As long as people devalue their own sleeping giants, they will overinflate their rage, and become convinced that is who they are. Which is sad, considering how soft and tender we really are, inside. At the end of Sleeping Giants, the director finally has her reckoning, and it is not the punishment some might hope. I’ve noticed that even behind bars, most guilty people don’t admit their wrongs, just as they don’t admit them outside of prison, either. It’s on the rest of us to fix their mistakes. And try to prevent more. Because just as we are capable of everyday evil in the name of good, we are also capable of profound healing, joy, and goodness. That is the final, hopeful message of the book. By facing down our inner hurts and angers, we can heal ourselves and make better decisions. The sleeping giant, once awakened, turns out to be not so bad after all. *** View the full article -
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Y’all Means All: On the Growing Diversity of Southern Gothic and Rural Noir
When I was young, I spent Friday afternoons at my maternal grandmother’s house with the pages of supermarket tabloids spread out in front of me on the living room floor. You know the ones: The National Enquirer, The Weekly World News, The Weekly Globe, and others of that ilk. Some had stories just unbelievable enough to feel true to a child of the Christ-haunted South, where we felt the supernatural lived with us cheek-by-jowl, close enough to smell the sharp tang of sweat mixed with Aqua Velva on a preacher’s neck as he spoke in tongues on a Sunday morning. With those pages splayed out before me, I was subject to a slew of adult-oriented advertising. Virginia Slims cigarettes were often featured on the back cover of the tabloids along with the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby!” I remember that slogan often when I think about Southern fiction, and Southern noir and gothics in particular. For years, this kind of fiction was the bailiwick of mostly straight white writers. While there were always outliers like Truman Capote, the genre bent naturally toward heavyweights like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Larry Brown. But in recent years, that’s changed for the better. While white men still dominate the genre, the modern Southern literary landscape is much more of a mirror to what the actual South looks like, with LGBTQ+ and BIPOC writers finally getting space to tell stories of marginalized characters to a rapt audience. I remember sitting with S.A. Cosby at the Conference for the Book in Oxford, Mississippi in April 2023. We were at the hotel bar drinking brown liquor and telling tales of our similar dirt-poor upbringings — his in Virginia, mine in Alabama — and talking about the tradition of Southern crime writers. A tornado warning had forced organizers to cancel a planned Noir at the Bar reading event, and we were making the most of it. We talked about what makes his work so special. What it came down to, he said, is that “the South belongs to Black people, too.” Of course that’s always been the case. But in the here and now the voices of marginalized writers have arrived with the gale force of a hurricane blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing winds and waves that are transfiguring the shoreline of Southern fiction right before our eyes. Cosby’s trifecta of masterworks—Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, and All the Sinners Bleed—are as powerful as anything published in the crime genre since the turn of the century. Here are some more crime and gothic writers reshaping the mythical South as we know it on the page and making it far more universally appealing to readers. Jesmyn Ward Might as well start off by talking about the elephant in the room. Jesmyn Ward is a National Book Award winner and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and every time she turns her keen eye toward her family’s native Mississippi—and particularly the Gulf Coast—it’s worth reading. While Salvage the Bones is the book that won the National Book Award, readers should check out Sing, Unburied, Sing first. It’s a modern masterpiece of Southern Gothic fiction, and one of its narrators—the ghost of Richie, who cannot accept or understand his death—haunts me still. Ward is a force of nature by herself, flattening readers with the power of her prose. If you’ve never read her, you are in for a treat. Kelly J. Ford Kelly Ford is not a household name. Not yet. But her three novels—Cottonmouths, Real Bad Things, and The Hunt—have all been lauded for their realistic, sensitive, and timely portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters in the Deep South. A writer with deep roots in her native Arkansas, Ford pens characters full of longing, heartache, and isolation and shows us that these themes are as universal to people of every gender and sexual orientation as you’d suspect. Cottonmouths, especially, is an incredibly passionate look at how accurate Faulkner’s words about the South were when he wrote “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Peter Farris Arguably one of the best writers of modern Southern fiction can’t seem to stay published in the United States. Farris, whose 2022 novel The Devil Himself should have marked him as a major player in crime fiction, is far more popular in Europe, where the strangeness that lies at the heart of so many Southern stories seems to be more accepted and even encouraged. If the grotesque is still a part of the Southern Gothic’s makeup, Farris’s mannequin-loving Leonard Moye will shake readers with his warped sense of love and loyalty, as well as his deep well of humanity. Wanda M. Morris Wanda Morris fooled me with her fantastic first novel, All Her Little Secrets. After its success, I thought she’d likely be writing twisty mainstream thrillers with some Southern ornamentation on the side. I’m so happy to have been wrong. Instead her second book, Anywhere You Run, immerses the reader into Jackson, Mississippi in 1964, when a Black woman murders the white man who raped her. With the murders of three civil rights activists weighing heavily to influence Violet’s mindset—and the novel’s plot—Morris leans into the Southern aspect of the crimes and chops at the virulent racism rooted in the time and place. Morris’s next book, What You Leave Behind, looks to be just as hauntingly Southern. Eli Cranor Eli Cranor’s 2022 debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, won the Edgar for best first novel as well as a finalist for the Anthony Award (and should have won it, too). One of the most striking things about Cranor’s debut was the voice of Billy Lowe, a talented running back for his Arkansas high school football team. Some readers took issue with Lowe’s point of view, considering it a ‘Black’ voice. However, as someone who played sports with poor kids across several different races, Lowe’s voice was an authentic depiction of a young man who was poor and desperate and isolated. It was a perfect inversion of expectations, especially when set against the characterization of his head coach. I can tell you that writers like these have changed the way that I approach writing about the area I’ve called home for most of my life. If, as a popular T-shirt down here says, “Y’all means ALL,” then the stories of the modern South will continue to resonate with readers from all walks of life for years to come. *** View the full article
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