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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
Forums
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete in today's market. Just beware because we do have a sense of humor.
I've Just Landed So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts - NWOE Novel Writing Guide
Crucial Self-editing Techniques - No Hostages- 47
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George, "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, and "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many horrid and writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom in the novel writing universe. All topics are unlocked and open for comment.
Margaret Atwood Said What?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups- 24
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of informative, entertaining, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on Youtube. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Members of the Algonkian Critics Film Board (ACFB) include Kara Bosshardt, Richard Hacker, Joseph Hall, Elise Kipness, Michael Neff, and Audrey Woods.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?- 91
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read a few fascinating articles, learn something useful, and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side.
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. If you're in the early or middle stages of novel writing, you'll get a lot from this. We cannot thank her enough for this collection of literary dissection.
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2024
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New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
- New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
- New York Write to Pitch Conference Reviews
For New York Write to Pitch or Algonkian attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Assignments include conflict levels, antagonist and protagonist sketches, plot lines, setting, and story premise. Publishers use this forum to obtain information before and after the conference event, therefore, writers should edit as necessary. Included are NY conference reviews, narrative critique sub-forums, and most importantly, the pre-event Novel Development Sitemap.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Writer Conferences nurture intimate, carefully managed environments conducive to practicing the skills and learning the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive commercial or literary novel. Learn more below.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
Algonkian Conferences - Ugly Reviews
Algonkian's Eight Prior Steps to Query
Why do Passionate Writers Fail?- 242
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Algonkian Novel Development and Writing Program
This novel development and writing program conducted online here at AAC was brainstormed by the faculty of Algonkian Writer Conferences and later tested by NYC publishing professionals for practical and time-sensitive utilization by genre writers (SF/F, YA, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, etc.) as well as upmarket literary writers. More Information
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Forum Statistics
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Total Topics12.7k
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2024: A Year of Literary True Crime
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exponential growth in both creative writing programs and the true crime storytelling industry, so perhaps it should come as no surprise to find so much beautiful writing about terrible events. Just so, as true crime has matured, those who tell such stories have learned essential lessons in how to avoid exploitation and bring in appropriate context and empathy (the anthropologists in the list below are especially notable in their sensitivities). The works on this list are about complicated situations, torn individuals, delayed or denied justice, and a world in which those who bear the most responsibility for harm are not the ones who face the most consequences. They are about the criminalized, the victimized, and the systems that perpetuate the circumstances that enable and encourage violence. True crime is, at best, a depiction of the nexus between worlds, a disrupted moment in which incongruous threads collide with brutal symmetry. There is a before, and an after, and a long after. The after does not end. Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, by Jason de León (Viking, March 19) Jason de León is an anthropologist who uses the concept of “radical hanging out”, or embedding himself in communities for long periods of time, to tell the stories of those smugglers who eke out a bare bones living bringing people over dangerous, ever-changing routes towards relative safety. De León is kind, empathetic, and context-savvy when it comes to depicting those who lesser journalists might have rendered as one-dimensional exploitative boogeymen; the real story of exploitation is that of the United States’ impact on Latin American lives. The people in Soldiers and Kings may walk a gritty path of extra-legality, but they were not forced there in a vacuum. The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, by Angela Garcia (FSG, April 30) Angela Garcia is the second anthropologist on this list, also interested in extralegal acts by those who are forced into unconventional solutions. Here, she portrays the informal rehab system of Mexico City’s anexos, established as makeshift community responses to the need for affordable and accessible treatment centers (and to a lesser degree, assisted living and hideout spaces). In these cramped and crowded rooms, powerful work is done—not always helpful to the individuals in question, but always aimed at fulfilling a need shared by an enormous amount of underserved people. Angela Garcia has crafted a moody, thought-provoking, and fascinating work that will make you consider the ethics of stop-gap measures in a nuanced and hopeful way. Shadow Men: The Tangled Story of Murder, Media, and Privilege That Scandalized Jazz Age America, by James Polchin (Counterpoint, June 11) James Polchin uses the murder of a blackmailer by his wealthy target as a jumping off point to examine power, privilege, gender, and sex in Jazz Age America. Polchin is previously the author of the much-launded Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall, and Shadow Men cements his place in the new true crime canon. Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable, by Sarah Gerard (Zando, July 9) Sarah Gerard’s skills in both creative writing and private investigation are on full display in this disturbing account of her friend Carolyn Bush’s murder by a roommate, and the many iniquities that enabled the crime. She also examines a wider culture of male privilege and entitlement at her alma mater of Bard College, the same school attended by both Carolyn and her killer, drawing a convincing through-line between the university’s abysmal record on sexual assault and mental health treatment and the shocking crime at the heart of her book. Gerard also connects the case into a wider discussion of privilege and power in the New York literary scene, and shows the devastating impact of Carolyn’s loss on an entire community. The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant L.A., by Jesse Katz (Astra, July 16) In this stranger-than-fiction story, Jesse Katz unpacks the context of a botched hit and its long-lasting consequences. L.A. is home to numerous street vendors, caught in a gray market economy in which both authorities and criminals add to immigrant families’ financial burdens. A teenager. bent on joining a gang is told to take out a vendor who refuses to pay rent on his small patch of concrete; the target survives, but an infant is killed by a stray bullet. The shooter then is subjected to an assassination attempt, itself botched, and the subsequent long-drawn-out legal consequences reverberate across the Los Angeles underworld. Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida, by Mikita Brottman (Atria, July 23) Mikita Brottman’s latest psychoanalytical approach to true crime looks at purity culture and Christian morality, grappling with the story of a murder committed by two married lovers because it seemed to them less shameful than a divorce. There is never a shortage when it comes to crimes in Florida, but Brottman has captured one of the strangest, and saddest, to ever occur in the Sunshine State. View the full article -
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Michael Dirda on curating stories for a Folio Society anthology of “Weird Tales”
The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda has chosen 12 of the best weird tales ever written for a new collection from The Folio Society titled, appropriately enough, Weird Tales. Our editor Olivia Rutigliano spoke to Dirda. a longtime aficionado of the “weird,” about his selections. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. OR: You’ve done such wonderful research in the history of “weird tales”—the magazine of that name, and MAM/pulp publications and sci-fi and horror stories, in general. MD: Let me start by underscoring that The Folio Society collection Weird Tales only draws one story from the self-appointed “unique magazine” of that name. That would be Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” Instead, the book is, more broadly, both a sampler and survey of weird short fiction from the mid 19th-century to the beginning of the 21st. Let me point out, too, that I’ve been an editor and reviewer, written introductions to all sorts of books, and published a half dozen collections of essays, as well as a memoir, but Weird Tales was my first foray into compiling an anthology. For this opportunity, I am grateful to Tom Walker, editor of the Folio Society, who invited me to assemble a companion volume to the society’s excellent anthologies of ghost stories and horror stories. It was also my good luck to have his colleague, Mandy Kirby, for advice and guidance through the whole production process. In truth, Mandy did much of the nuts-and-bolts work, assisted by the accomplished Folio staff and artist Henry Campbell, to make this handsome book a reality. I can’t thank them enough. OR: Harry Campbell did the gorgeous illustrations in this edition– how was it to see his renderings compared to the visuals that have been in your mind’s eye when you’ve read the tales? MD: Whether it was a decision by Campbell himself or the Folio Society, the use of the colors black and green throughout gives his illustrations a deliciously unnatural air that is slightly head-spinning. The particular shade of the latter color always reminds me of Captain Hook’s line, in the musical version of “Peter Pan,” about baking a cake with poison until it turns a tempting green. Campbell’s art is, moreover, varied, ranging from tentacled horrors to the witchy beauty of Medea da Carpi in “Amour Dure.” Appropriately, the touches of purple on the book’s cover add to the jarring weirdness of Weird Tales. OR: I’d love to hear more about the selection process of stories for this edition, namely about the toil of whittling down this canon. Were there any stories that you really wanted to include but didn’t get to? MD: Given the huge number of stories dealing with the supernatural, spectral, and occult, I began by setting some limits for myself. With some regret, I decided to restrict the book to works written in English, which meant leaving out such favorites as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and Maupassant’s “The Horla.” From here, I adopted the following rules: 1) Because the Folio Society publishes books for the general reader, I decided to focus on the genre’s short-fiction classics. I wanted Weird Tales to serve as an introduction to some wonderful reading for people, young and old, who were relatively unfamiliar with the genre. 2) The Folio Society recently issued excellent anthologies devoted to ghost stories (introduced by Kathryn Hughes) and horror stories (introduced by Ramsey Campbell) and there seemed no point in duplicating anything from those volumes. Otherwise, Weird Tales would have included Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Arthur Machen’s tour-de-force “The White People.” Machen, however, is represented by his only slightly more conventional but comparably unsettling, “Novel of the Black Seal.” 3) Besides choosing classics, I wanted the book to reflect the genre’s variousness. Some stories are viscerally shocking, others simply emphasize the uncanny, a couple mix eros with horror, one or two are deeply enigmatic, and two–Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” and Mark Samuel’s “The White Hands”–even carry a post-modernist vibe, deliberately playing variations on familiar tropes. 4) While all the stories in Weird Tales are personal favorites, I did consult with knowledgeable friends for suggestions. Those friends included Stefan Dziemianowicz, who has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies of genre fiction; Robert Knowlton, whose familiarity with horror and dark fantasy is unrivalled; and members of an online discussion group called Fictionmags, a hive-mind possessing immense knowledge of popular fiction. In short, I performed due diligence to be sure I hadn’t overlooked an essential story. 5) At this point, I made several longlists. Here’s one of them: Sheridan Le Fanu, “Schalken the Painter” (1839) Rhoda Broughton, “The Man With the Nose” (1872) Margaret Oliphant, “The Library Window” (1879) Vernon Lee (aka Violet Paget), “Amour Dure” (1887) Madeline Yale Wynne, “The Little Room” (1895) H.G. Wells, “The Door in the Wall” (1906) Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows” (1907) M.R. James, “Casting the Runes” (1911) Oliver Onions, “The Beckoning Fair One” (1911) William Hope Hodgson, “The Derelict” (1912) E.F. Benson, “The Room in the Tower” (1912) Max Beerbohm, “Enoch Soames” (1916) Lord Dunsany, “The Three Sailors’ Gambit” (1916) Marjorie Bowen, “The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes” (1917) Walter de la Mare, “Seaton’s Aunt” (1921) H. F. Arnold, “The Night Wire” (1926) Cynthia Asquith, “The Corner Shop” (1926) H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) Ann Bridge, “The Buick Saloon” (1936) E.B. White, “The Door” (1939) Gerald Kersh, “Men without Bones” (1955) Jack Finney, “Of Missing Persons” (1956) J. G. Ballard, “The Voices of Time” (1960) Karl Edward Wagner, “Sticks” (1974) Robert Aickman, “The Hospice” (1975) Fred Chappell, “The Adder” (1989) Joyce Carol Oates, “The Ruins of Contracoeur” (1999) Mark Samuels, “The White Hands” (2006) 6) Space is the final frontier. Many of the greatest weird tales are quite long, but I needed to keep this anthology to a reasonable number of pages, so several major works–such as Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One,” Marjorie Bowen’s “Julia Roseingrave” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Ruins of Contraceur”–were set aside simply because of their length. Perhaps some day there will be a Weird Tales II. Other stories, such as Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” and Lord Dunsany’s “The Three Sailors’ Gambit” didn’t carry enough weirdness in their overall atmospheres, being essentially comic. In the end, I did include one living author–Mark Samuels–but sad to say he died unexpectedly while Weird Tales was in production. Let me take this space to urge readers to check out his eerie and wonderful fiction. A good sampler is The Age of Decayed Futurity: The Best of Mark Samuels (Hippocampus Press). For that matter, I hope readers intrigued by, say, Vernon Lee’s “Amour Dure” Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Hall Bedroom,” or Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice,” will want to seek out their other stories. OR: We are fortunate that characters like Cthulhu have finally found their way to mainstream culture, after spending decades being known by only a small population of readers. What’s another character or story or author from this group that you wish more people knew about or widely read. MD: Well, there aren’t too many characters like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu–fortunately for us. As his worshippers say, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”, i.e., “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” did loosely inspire Jacques Tourneur’s cult film “Night of the Demon” and Blackwood’s “The Willows” was Lovecraft’s own favorite supernatural tale. But let me stress again that my hope is that readers will enjoy all these stories while also discovering a few authors whose work they will want to explore further. If there’s one thing reading weird tales teaches us, the past is never really past. Like Cthulhu, it is only waiting for the right time to return. __________________________________ The Folio Society edition of Weird Tales, selected and introduced by Michael Dirda and illustrated by Harry Campbell, is exclusively available from foliosociety.com View the full article -
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Heather Graham on Ancient Texts and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The Reaper Follows arrives out in the world this week, and I’m certainly hoping that it’s a suspenseful novel readers will enjoy! It’s the last in my ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ series—which, naturally, includes four books. Each book stands on its own, of course, a case that must be investigated, that brings danger and mystery, a beginning, a middle, and an end!” But working on this has been intriguing for me! I have always been fascinated by ancient texts of any kind, words that can be—and are—interrupted differently by different people through time. And the Four Horsemen . . . We’ve recently lived through a period in which all signs of the ‘horsemen’ might be seen—we’ve encountered war (not sure what decade, century, or millennium we haven’t) pestilence, famine, and disease. I can certainly say that as I was raising my children, I didn’t think to warn them that we might be facing a pandemic in their future, so that one was . . . far from impossible, of course, but for me, at least unexpected. Again, though, we see different things in the words that are left to us by wise men and women of days gone by! But! Here is the point of words, their effect on us—and how they can be twisted and turned and used by others, sometimes for the most nefarious of purposes! The series started with Danger in Numbers, continued with Crimson Summer, then Shadow of Death, and now, The Reaper Follows. Again, each novel stands entirely on it’s on, but it’s been a lot of fun to develop the overall arc with the four books. Just as we may all interpret many things differently, we’re all capable of seeing and believing different things. That’s part of the beauty of what our American forefathers fought and died for—our rights to our own opinions. But what forms those opinions? Many truly terrible things have occurred in history because of the things we set and believe in our minds—often for good reasons. But good things can be twisted, too. I remember once when a very wise man told me that there was nothing wrong with the world’s major religions, what could be terribly wrong was what mankind sometimes chose to do with them. I remember my disbelief and horror when I learned about the massacre at Jonestown. By the time it occurred, of course, there were those beginning to doubt the words of their venerated leaders. And it was too late for them. But knowing how many little children, so innocent, died that day, I was appalled, and I couldn’t begin to understand how such a thing could have happened! The human mind is one of the greatest mysteries that will ever exist, right along with the human heart, which is, perhaps, along with the great part of us that allows us to feel kindness, compassion, and empathy, even for strangers, the soul. Besides Jonestown, of course, we’ve seen many other instances of people believing . . . often, again, in goodness, but then discovering that maybe, all that they’ve been told, isn’t true. Back to our freedoms of thoughts, opinions, and words! My mom came from Ireland at a time when things were rough—Catholics were killing Protestants and vise-versa. I was taught to go everywhere, study everything, find out what worked for me. I was also taught that religious wars were usually based on something else as well—such as property, rule, and of course, our age-old need, money. And, studying history, that does appear to be true. If you’re suffering horribly in abject poverty and someone promises you an after-life filled with plenty for you and those you love, you might well be willing to sacrifice your own life in the pursuit of vengeance against those who have caused the pain and misery. Things aren’t always that radical, of course. But that’s one of my favorite things about one of my protagonists in these novels—Hunter Forest. That wasn’t the name he was given at birth! Hunter’s mom, horrified by her rich father’s refusal to show generosity and kindness to others, fell into a cult. But, luckily for the family, Hunter discovered what was going on when some others who were doubting the words of the elders suddenly disappeared. And then a beloved friend turned up dead. They were helped by a hunter. In a forest. And thus, the name the young hero would take on for the rest of his life. I’ve also made use of places I know and love. Sounds strange, perhaps, but I love the Everglades. That said, I’d never want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere within our great “river of grass.” There are some terrifying things out there, too. But the birds are exquisite, the landscape is unique, and there are places where you can enjoy it all without worrying about alligators, the crocodiles who seem to be moving up along the coast, or the pythons and boas now taking over like wildfire—probably let loose originally by some well-meaning people who realized they couldn’t keep them but didn’t want to kill them. Florida is home these days to the Seminole and Miccosuki tribes of Native Americans. There’s a great museum at Big Cypress with a boardwalk that allows a wonderful look at so very much. The museum offers a great deal of history. Some of this is history that the ‘white’ or European settlers should not be proud of—‘settling’ and seizing what was wanted and killing those who were there already. But I’m a big believer in the words of the philosopher George Santayana—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (There are even different theories on the origin of the quote, but I’m going with Santayana.) So, I love history and always hope we learn from it! And I am fascinated by the strength, fortitude, and survival of our tribes. Those who remained, hiding and fighting from the Everglades, are the only “Undefeated.” They never signed peace treaties. It’s estimated that only three to six-hundred people remained alive, but those were “The Undefeated!” Now, of course, the Seminole Hardrock restaurants and casinos are doing great. They just had a pow-wow at the Broward location, bringing in tribes with cultural events and wonderful shops from indigenous tribes across the country! Neither the Miccosuki nor the Seminole were recognized by the government until the 1950s! And that’s, of course, why I also have a character who is a Native America working in these books! He loved his home, his ancestry—and forensic science and computers. I have loved working on these books, with “The Reaper Follows” now out, and, as I said earlier, a stand-alone as well as the final Four Horsemen book. I hope that if you read Reaper of any or all of the others, you’ll enjoy my take on fictional events that have a whisper of reality within them! Thank you! *** View the full article -
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Anthony Horowitz on Giving Himself a New Role in His Latest Mystery
Anthony Horowitz is missing. Not the real Anthony Horowitz, of course. He’s exactly where you’d expect him to be—hunkered down at his desk, toiling away at the next novel even as his newest is hitting bookshelves around the world. But more than sixty pages into Close to Death (April 16, 2024; Harper) and the author’s literary alter ego—the Watson to ex-Detective Danielle Hawthorne’s Holmes—has yet to make an appearance. It’s a strange case indeed. “I think all my life I’ve had a fear of formula,” Horowitz—whose prolific output includes the Alex Rider saga for young adults, Magpie Murders, and original works featuring James Bond and Sherlock Holmes—confesses. “I just don’t want to write the same book over and over again. So, in other words, within the narrow confines of a writer’s life, I try to be as varied as possible.” Consequently, the fifth book in the Hawthorne/Horowitz series takes some creative liberties—the risks of which are also the rewards. “Having done four novels in which I had dutifully followed Hawthorne, five paces behind him, making inane remarks and getting myself injured, I decided that it was time to do something a little different,” Horowitz says. The earlier books were all narrated in first-person by the Horowitz character and chronicled contemporary investigations that he and Hawthorne, a brilliant if maddeningly eccentric PI, worked on together. Close to Death, however, utilizes the third-person (omnipresent) POV predominantly and reexamines a cold case that predates the duo’s collaboration. “It allowed me to exercise my writing muscles,” Horowitz offers. It’s a humble assessment for somebody whose credits also include television (Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, Poirot), film (The Gathering, Stormbreaker), plays, and even occasional journalism. The novel’s premise goes something like this: Riverview Close—a peaceful, tight-knit community comprised of six homes occupied by longtime friends—is set on edge with the arrival of hotshot financier Giles Kenworthy and his family, whose disrespectful antics create an atmosphere of hostility and resentment. Then, Kenworthy is dispatched under cover of darkness by an unknown assailant with a crossbow. Nobody is sorry. Everybody is suspect. And there goes the neighborhood … “This is a Close that exists. It’s actually ten minutes away from where I am now,” Horowitz—speaking from his Richmond office in south-west London on the River Thames—notes. “So the characters had to be realistic.” Much like a Golden Age Agatha Christie novel, the book’s opening chapters introduce the ensemble cast (i.e., the suspects) one by one. Each is distinctly defined yet all share the same motive for Kenworthy’s demise. (It’s a bit like Murder on the Orient Express, minus the train.) “The most important challenge of the book was to get those characters right,” Horowitz says, declaring his intent to eschew classic tropes for more multidimensional renderings and modern sensibilities. “This is a 21st Century novel.” Meet the suspects: Master chess player Adam Strauss and his wife, Teri (who is a cousin to Strauss’s first wife); Doctor Tom Beresford and his wife, Gemma (who fashions jewelry in the likeness of poisonous animals); widowed barrister Andrew Pennington; friends May Winslow and Phyllis Moore (who own The Tea Cosy bookshop with café); “dentist to the stars” Roderick Browne and his wife, Felicity (who is mostly homebound due to a neurological disorder). “I suppose what I was looking for was something realistic but at the same time interesting and a little unusual,” Horowitz recalls. “So what I was trying to do was mix the two together, ordinary professionals with extraordinary aspects to make characters who would be fun to follow and to suspect, any one of whom might have committed the murder …” The readers’ suspicions reflect the characters’ own misgivings. Rather than quelling the discontent, Kenworthy’s death further exacerbates the fissures that have been growing within Riverview Close. Because as much as the residents would like to believe an outsider is responsible, the reality is that it was far more likely an inside job. “It’s the ground zero of the murder mystery novel,” Horowitz says, likening the collective implosion to a bomb having been detonated. “It’s the moment when … it becomes impossible for that community to continue to function.” Enter Danielle Hawthorne. Dismissed as a detective after a (thoroughly reprehensible) suspect landed at the bottom of a flight of stairs while in his company, he now works as a private investigator and is reluctantly called upon when the local authorities fail to make an arrest. Hawthorne’s methods may be questionable, but they get results. “He is the man with no name. The man with no history. The man with no connections,” Horowitz says, likening Hawthorne’s appearance to Clint Eastwood’s arrival in a Malpaso action movie. “He is the only person in the story who does not connect to the community and who is the great first disruptor.” In the traditional scenario, said disruptor further upsets the equilibrium only to restore order in the end. Or as Horowitz puts it: “The one whereby the detective is effectively the healer.” That doesn’t happen in Riverview Close, however—as Horowitz discovers when he arrives on the scene to retrace Hawthorne’s steps (at the behest of his agent, who expects another book despite the fact that they haven’t worked a case since the events depicted in 2022’s The Twist of a Knife). “In the case of Riverview Close, it’s impossible … the forces of destruction are just overwhelming,” notes Horowitz. “And that, I think, is what makes this book quite different from the other ones.” While the set-up would seem to relegate Horowitz to a passive participant, this is but another of the story’s admirably deceptive qualities. “In the course of the book I am actually quite active,” Horowitz says of his fictional self. “I am, in fact, doing more on my own than I normally do. Because I’m alone, I get to travel, to meet people, to ask my own questions …” This newfound autonomy empowers Horowitz to take the initiative, even when doing so is against the advisement of Hawthorne and others. An especially impactful moment comes when he meets with Hawthorne’s former partner, who helped to bring clarity to what transpired at Riverview Close, if not closure. “I very much enjoyed writing the character John Delaney because he is everything I want to be,” Horowitz says. “Essentially, he’s professional, he’s smart, he knows Hawthorne really well. He is part of the investigation rather than an outsider.” And while that makes Horowitz—who is prone to self-doubts about his perceived investigative shortcomings—a bit circumspect, their eventual encounter is an amiable one. Affectionate, even, in its way. “I couldn’t wait for that moment to happen in the book,” the author enthuses. “I can’t help liking [Delaney] because I think he is a likeable and slightly sad character, also a character who is inadvertently damaged by me.” This rumination leads Horowitz to a surprising declaration: “I think that Dudley is a much better sidekick than I ever was. Argh!” Readers might disagree. Horowitz, for all his foibles, is quite endearing—and his absence throughout large segments of the book makes his eventual presence, peripheral as it may appear, all the more pivotal. “I would guess I have a bigger role in the other books even though I am less involved,” Horowitz muses. “It’s a paradox, is it not?” This seeming contradiction is entirely fitting of the meta-aspect of the books, which celebrate the anomalous nature of the writer’s life with a wink and a nod. “It’s an opportunity for me to have a quiet laugh at what I do and the way I inhabit my life,” Horowitz acknowledges, noting that the publishing industry is a “peculiar one” populated by rarified individuals. “I mean, there aren’t many people who spend as many hours sitting in one place as I do … There is a world outside that window, which is sort of away from me.” And yet the sacrifice is one he’ll gladly make for the privilege of, and genuine desire to, tell stories that his readers devour for entertainment and escape. “I love writing with every fiber of my being and I love the world I inhabit,” he says. “I’m very, very fortunate and there’s not a day that I wake up and don’t recognize that fact,” Which is why the real Anthony Horowitz always shows up. Just don’t tell him that sounds suspiciously like a formula—albeit one for success. View the full article -
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How a Hollywood Fixer Played Both Sides of a War Between Frank Sinatra and the Tabloids
By the 1950s, Wheaties had gained massive popularity as the “Breakfast of Champions.” Packaged in a bright orange box with famous sports figures on the cover, the iconic breakfast cereal was marketed to consumers as a healthy way to nourish a fit and active lifestyle. According to a tip to Confidential from one of Frank Sinatra’s lovers, the megastar always ate a bowl of Wheaties before sex, then con-sumed three more between encore performances. That tidbit inspired the magazine’s May 1956 story headlined “Here’s Why Frank Sinatra Is the Tarzan of the Boudoir.” Otash joked that Sinatra’s face should grace every box. Still pissed-off at Confidential for the 1955 “Wrong Door Raid” story, and no doubt annoyed that his latest album, In the Wee Small Hours, failed to hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, the thin-skinned Sinatra threatened to sue. Sinatra wasn’t the only celebrity getting fed up with Confidential for tarnishing their polished personas. Stars were growing litigious and the lawsuits were piling up. Tobacco heiress and socialite Doris Duke sued for $3 million after a story reported she had an affair with a former Black handy-man and chauffeur. In the lawsuit filed by Jerry Giesler, she claimed that Confidential’s implication of “indecent acts” was “completely and entirely false and untrue,” exposed her to “disgrace, contempt and ridicule,” and that the sole purpose for her suit was “to defend her good name against the ugly, unfounded and scurrilous attack” and “to discourage this magazine and others of its ilk from making similar unfounded attacks on innocent people.” In 1957, the case was settled for a substantial sum. In the wake of these and other lawsuits, Harrison began giving way to his original policy of never settling a claim. Otash, who was receiving ample praise from clients for his meticulous investigations, reassured Harrison that the stories he investigated had enough backup to withstand legal chal-lenges. But nobody bats a thousand, not Babe Ruth, not Joe DiMaggio, and not Fred Otash. In July 1957, Confidential outed Liberace as a homosexual. Ever flamboyant with coiffed hair and custom-made suits, tabloid trouble came after he made unwanted moves on a young and straight male press agent while on tour in Akron, Ohio, and again in Dallas. Otash must have been overconfident about the story’s veracity, given that the self-proclaimed piano virtuoso had hit on him in a Hollywood dive bar while working as an under-cover police officer. But Liberace didn’t take it lying down and publicly proclaimed he was heterosexual. Otash scoffed at the career-saving move. What he didn’t bet on was that Liberace had concrete proof that the dates of the accusations didn’t jibe with his touring schedule. He sued the magazine for $20 million. The case was eventually settled for $40,000, which he donated to charity. Maybe Otash was spread too thin. In addition to Confidential, he had taken on a heavy workload to build his business while continuing an active social life. He was also spending as much time as possible with his now six-year-old daughter, Colleen, who looked forward to their weekly outings at Kiddieland. The popular amusement park was frequented by Hollywood elites and Sunday bachelor dads like Fred, who, dressed in tailored suit and tie, somehow managed to squeeze his strapping six-foot-two frame into the small carnival rides with his little girl. What else could explain his sloppy work on the Maureen O’Hara story? Red-haired and radiant, O’Hara was catapulted to Holly-wood stardom in the 1940s after a series of critically acclaimed roles in hit films such as director John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, The Black Swan starring Tyrone Power, and opposite an eight-year-old Natalie Wood in the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. When the magazine uncovered that the Irish-born actress had been more than canoodling with her Mexican lover while seated in the last row of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre during a matinee, she filed a $5 million libel suit. True, she was having a romantic liaison with a Mexico City hotel man who fit the exact description of the man the two Grauman’s ushers spotted with O’Hara. But the day they said it happened didn’t match the day stamped on her passport, proving that she was in London at the time and not in the famous Hollywood movie theater. Simply put, Otash had screwed up. He felt terribly that he left Harrison legally vulnerable and wanted to make it up to him. That chance came in 1957 when he got a call from his own attorney, Arthur Crowley, asking him to help Sinatra beat a perjury charge that had resulted from Confidential’s “Wrong Door Raid” story. *** Crowley explained to Otash that a California Senate committee investigating tabloid magazines had dug into the two-year-old story and subpoenaed the records of Hollywood Research Inc., as well as Marjorie Meade, DiMaggio, and Sinatra to testify. DiMaggio was back in New York and out of reach of a subpoena but gave a written deposition stating that the Confidential story was sensationalized. Sinatra, however, testified under oath that he stood by the car smoking cigarettes as he waited for DiMaggio and the others to talk with Marilyn inside the apartment, an assertion that both detective Phil Irwin and the landlady contradicted during their sworn testimonies. The committee members seemed to believe Irwin was telling the truth because he had been beaten up for selling the story to Confidential. “Right now it is our educated guess that he could be indicted for contempt at least, and for perjury at most . . . he could go to jail,” Crowley told Otash. To make matters worse, the LA district attorney had convened a grand jury to determine if DiMaggio, Sinatra, and the others involved should be indicted for conspiracy to commit criminal mischief. Crowley needed Otash to corroborate Sinatra’s claim that he hadn’t been in the apartment. Otash didn’t know if Sinatra had committed perjury or not but didn’t think he should go to jail over such a trivial matter. If he took the case, Otash would be working for and against Confidential and for and against Sinatra—a dicey proposition. When Crowley implied that Sinatra would not sue the magazine over the Wheaties story, Otash saw an opening to use the conflict of interest to his—and the magazine’s—advantage. He went to Harrison and explained the symbiotic angle that working for Sinatra would give his boss one less lawsuit to worry about, which was just fine with the besieged publisher. Otash went to work. He drew up a diagram of the apartment building so he could study its ins and outs. Then, with a court reporter present, he interrogated the landlady. The break-in happened at night, but she claimed she saw Sinatra “plain as day.” It was meant as a figure of speech, but Otash felt he could turn it to Sinatra’s advantage. After the interview was over, he did a midafternoon search of the area for any outside lighting. There was none. Nor were there any streetlights near the apartment building. When he returned that night and examined all the doorways, he couldn’t see a thing. He still wanted more evidence to bolster his case, so he gathered information from the weather bureau that established there was no moonlight on the night of the raid, making any visual identification impossible. Unless Sinatra was serenading her personally, there was no way the landlady could make a positive ID. To button things up, he visited his old pal and fellow detective Barney Ruditsky, who, due to poor health, had been excused from testifying. Ruditsky told Otash that Irwin lied to the committee about staking out the apartment all night when, in fact, he was driving around with his wife earlier in the evening, trying to patch up his marriage after she caught him repeatedly lying about his infidelities. Otash had enough to prove Irwin was a liar. He didn’t ask or want to know if Sinatra was in the apartment because he had enough to absolve him. He also knew that Ruditsky would fall on the sword for Sinatra out of loyalty to his well-paying client Joe DiMaggio. But he sensed Ruditsky was holding back information. “Something doesn’t add up, Barney,” Otash said. “You had Marilyn under surveillance and knew exactly where Sheila lived.” “So?” Ruditsky replied. “C’mon, you were too good at your job. How the hell could you not identify Sheila’s apartment?” Ruditsky chuckled. “Of course I knew. I broke into the wrong goddamn apartment to save DiMaggio from doing something crazy.” “You did the right thing, Barney,” Otash said. “A lot of good it did me,” Ruditsky said. “I lost my license. Don’t be a schmuck like me, Fred. The last thing you need in this job is a conscience.” Otash laughed knowingly. Although he had privately concluded that Sinatra was indeed in the apartment, Otash cast enough doubt on the landlady’s story and Irwin’s credibility that the committee exonerated Sinatra, who, thanks to Otash’s work, avoided a grand jury indictment. Prior to this, the two men had been friendly acquaintances who always exchanged pleasantries whenever they bumped into each other. Now Sinatra avoided Otash like the plague because he knew he knew the truth. Surprisingly, the committee didn’t indict Irwin despite having evidence that he lied. But they did cite Otash with contempt when he wouldn’t reveal his sources or turn over his Confidential files. Crowley eagerly sprang into action on Otash’s behalf. He accused the committee of violating the state’s professional code of conduct, which prohibits a private detective from divulging information except to law enforcement agencies, reminding them that they were not a law enforcement agency nor entitled to the information. He also scorched them for wanting to divulge that information so they could grandstand about it on national television. After a closed-door session, the committee backed down. ___________________________________ Excerpted from THE FIXER: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn. ©2024 Josh Young and Manfred Westphal, and reprinted by permission from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group. View the full article -
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On Writing a Book When The World is On Fire
The world is terrifying. It seems like such an obvious thing to say, right? Of course, the world is terrifying! Turn on the news! Look around! The world’s always been terrifying! Still, when I think about what that means in practice, not in theory, the terror becomes sharper, more realized around its edges. I’m bombarded with tragedies at the mere click of a button, a news app that pops into my notifications every fifteen minutes. Whenever I see a college campus trending, I feel something sink inside of me, heavy and tired. And whenever I see a news story with a Black person’s photo front and center, I hold my breath. I’ve wondered if there’s a name for the feeling I’m describing, where you have to steel yourself before reading about yet another victim, another avoidable death that you can’t quite wrap your head around. I also wonder if the name for it changes when it’s something you’ve been experiencing ever since you were a child, reading about Emmett Till in your third-grade history class. Traumatic déjà vu. A sense that we’ve been here before and that we’ll be here again. It’s a feeling that I couldn’t get away from in the summer of 2020. While I’d been experiencing this particular brand of traumatic déjà vu for a long time, it was the first time that other people seemed to be feeling it too, people who didn’t look like me. It was a moment of unexpected unity as people flooded the streets, crowds overflowing with diversity and united with a singular purpose: to demand justice in an unjust land. And, for a moment, it seemed like the world was on fire. I think about the summer of 2020 a lot, about the hopelessness, about the passion and determination. I think about black squares on social media sites and promises made to diversify companies, thoughts, and surroundings. I also think about how scared I was, about how badly I wanted there to be justice, and how much I wanted there to be consequences for all the pain caused throughout the years. I think about George Floyd. I think about Breonna Taylor. I think about Philando Castile. I think about Trayvon Martin. I think about Latasha Harlins. I think about a long list of names of dead people who shouldn’t be dead. And then, I think about the beauty of thrillers. I’ve been drawn to the thriller genre ever since I was a little kid. There was something that captivated me about imperfect people taking life into their own hands, women with bad intentions and sharp knives, and women who were wronged and felt like doing something about it. Sometimes, they were just women who wanted more, who wanted what they thought they’d always deserved. From Misery to The Hand That Rocks The Cradle to Fatal Attraction, I was consuming all kinds of thriller media that I was probably (definitely) too young to be engaging with. But there was something about these often-complicated stories that kept calling to me, that kept bringing me back. As I got older, I realized that I was so drawn to the genre because it provided me with something that often eluded me in real life: a satisfying resolution. Being marginalized in America is nothing short of a wild ride, complete with an understanding that nothing is made for you, and nothing is made to serve you. You can’t expect things like justice to be part of your everyday reality, and you certainly can’t expect to be saved from becoming a news story just because you do or say all the right things. This is an aspect of the world that buries itself down to your bones. It stays with you like a second skin, rearing its head in even the most innocuous interactions. The knowledge that things can turn on a dime, that someone can say the wrong word, give you the wrong look, and you realize that your world might be about to turn upside down… It’s a tilted experience, one that’s often hard to describe to those without any inherent insight into it. Feeling safe is never so simple, feeling understood is never so reachable. It’s a constant state of movement, whether you like it or not, a delicate dance that requires rapt attention and near-constant shifting (code-switching, anyone?). Because in real life, there’s no balance to things, no correction to its ups and downs. There are only micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions, idly wondering if anyone’s going to do anything about the guy with that “The South Will Rise Again” bumper sticker on the back of his car. There’s also knowing when to pick your battles, like realizing that if you wanted to take a black marker to the bumper sticker until it read something like “Just Take The L” you’d be the one sitting in front of HR and not the guy dedicated to The Lost Cause. But in a thriller? Everything is answered for, every moment of darkness is controlled, and every action has an equal or opposite reaction. It can be beautiful chaos, with twists no one sees coming, pieces that don’t quite make sense until you have a bird’s eye view. And yet, the resolutions tend to be satisfying, whether or not you were rooting for the good guy or the bad guy. Which is something else I love about the genre. The Bad Guy. So often in a thriller, The Bad Guy is someone who turns out to not be so bad, after all. Their actions might be unforgivable but you understand them, their need to be desired, their need to seek revenge. You might even find yourself crossing your fingers that they’re successful, that somehow, in the end, they come out on top. It’s a genre where unlikable protagonists thrive, where having the worst intentions doesn’t always make you the worst character in the book. It’s one of the reasons I chose to write thrillers. I needed a genre where I’d be free to explore complicated feelings, the kind of things you second-guess telling your therapist because you don’t want them to judge you too harshly. I also needed a genre that was downright welcoming to unlikable female characters, women you’d never want to be friends with in real life, but who you’d enjoy talking about for a few hours. I wanted my characters to be as messy as they were compelling, as problematic as they were heart-wrenching. And I wanted a world where every moment is answered for. I try not to be too heavy when talking about While We Were Burning. It’s often a task full of paradoxes, where I attempt to balance the impossible, keeping a smile on my face while giving a rundown on the book’s themes (social justice, racism, classism, the harm that people can do to each other without even really trying…). But I always wanted my work to be accessible, something that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to moralize or tell you how to live your life. For one, I don’t believe in perfect people, which translates into no perfect characters either. More importantly, I think there’s treasure to be found in the messiness of it all, the rough edges, the feelings that are too complicated, too much. To me, books are one of the world’s greatest empathy machines, and there’s so much value in connecting with people, so much joy that’s born when we realize we’re not alone in what we’re feeling. To quote James Baldwin, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” That being said, I can’t pretend as if the seeds of my book weren’t planted when they were, that I didn’t feel a particular dread in the summer of 2020 that kept me up at night. The world is terrifying, no matter how much I try to keep things light, try to keep things together instead of shutting down. And while I hope that readers can empathize with my characters, no matter how problematic, I also hope for something else, too. I hope that my book makes people feel seen, their grief, their hopelessness, their wishing for a better world. I hope that the sense of traumatic déjà vu is lifted, if only for a moment, and that readers are transported to an alternate reality where actions have consequences, where the shadows will all be dealt with accordingly. I want readers to see my cast of imperfect characters and root for them, good or bad. And maybe, just maybe, readers will feel a little spark that makes them want to change something for the better, whether that’s inside their hearts or out in the world at large. Maybe, together, we can light a few good fires. *** View the full article -
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Megan Campisi on the Wild Tales of Allan Pinkerton
Allan Pinkerton is a storied figure in the American imagination. Most know his agency for its violent anti-union mercenary work, but few realize that Pinkerton was an Abolitionist, as well, who ran a stop on the Underground Railroad and headed Abraham Lincoln’s secret service during the Civil War. He also wrote true crime books. In them, Pinkerton recounts his detective agency’s exploits, including several about the first woman detective in the United States, Kate Warne. Pinkerton was highly unconventional for hiring her. While more and more women were entering the work force in the 19th century, which jobs were considered “suitable” for women was a major point of contention. Detective work, with its proximity to cons and criminals, was definitely not. My new novel The Widow Spy follows Kate Warne during her time as a Pinkerton detective and Union spy. In telling her story, I drew on Pinkerton’s “true crime” books as well as other historical documents. Pinkerton’s writing is an incredible window through time, offering a look at not only past views and values regarding society, women and detective work, but also how crime writing has changed. Interested in the evolution of the detective genre? Here are five original Pinkerton stories to check out. 1 & 2: The Somnambulist and the Detective, The Murderer and the Fortune Teller. (1875) This two-story volume features operative Kate Warne at her most adventurous. In The Somnambulist and the Detective, she goes undercover to catch a murderer. During the case, a colleague disguises himself as a ghost to frighten the primary suspect into confessing. In the Murderer and the Fortune Teller, Pinkerton is hired by a sea captain who suspects his sister and her lover of dirty dealings. Kate poses as a fortune teller to entrap the pregnant sister into giving testimony against her murderous lover. In the book, Pinkerton describes his choice to hire Kate Warne: Previous to the early part of 1855, I had never regularly employed any female detectives . . . My first experience with them was due to Mrs. Kate Warne, an intelligent, brilliant, and accomplished lady. She offered her services to me in the early spring of that year, and, in spite of the novelty of her proposition, I determined to give her a trial. She soon showed such tact, readiness of resource, ability to read character, intuitive perception of motives, and rare discretion, that I created a female department in the agency, and made Mrs. Warne the superintendent thereof. (Warning! There are references to fortune tellers and Romany culture in this last story that are based on harmful stereotypes.) 3. The Spy of the Rebellion: Being a True History of the Spy System of the United States Army During the Late Rebellion. (1884) A primary source for The Widow Spy, this book recounts Pinkerton and his detectives’ spy craft during the Civil War, including Kate Warne’s pivotal work foiling a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It also recounts the work of another key woman detective, Hattie Lawton, who worked undercover in the South and narrowly escaped capture by Confederate soldiers. (Warning! While Pinkerton was an active part of the anti-slavery movement, he employs some words and characterizations of people of color that were common at the time, but inappropriate today—and harmful in any period.) 4. The Burglar’s Fate and the Detectives. (1883) This book follows several detectives working as a team to discover the culprit behind a bank burglary. It is a testament to prescribed gender roles of the period: faced with adversity, men “bear up manfully” and women swoon. That said, in a subtle subversion, a young woman (recently recovered from a swoon) offers smart and detailed observations that prove crucial to solving the case. 5. Thirty Years a Detective: A Thorough and Comprehensive Expose of Criminal Practices of all Grades and Classes. (1900) This compendium describes all sorts of criminals and criminal behavior from pickpockets and train robbers to confidence games and blackmail. It is intended as a classification guide for professional detectives and contains dozens of short vignettes from the agency’s archives. If you have ever been curious about the ins-and-outs of 19th century lock-picking, steamboat thievery or counterfeiting—this is a must read. *** View the full article -
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The Well-Made Story and the CIA
During my years in Iowa City I struggled to learn how to write what we called the well-made story. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered I also had been serving the goals of the CIA. Before that, my assumptions about government control of writers had been shaped by the brutality of executions and soul-deadening physical labor in frozen Siberian gulags. In Iowa my only labor was pounding a manual typewriter, grading undergraduate essays, and—for a time—changing diapers. But the CIA was much more subtle than Stalin. It fought the Cold War by supporting literary magazines like the British Encounter and the Partisan, Paris, and Kenyon Reviews, as well as the teaching of writing. Unfortunately, at the same time the Agency was complicit in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. That certainly was a blatant act. To influence what was being written even before submission for print, the Agency slipped funds to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’ founder Paul Engle, then the only game in town when it came to MFA programs, but eventually the model for the hundreds of others that followed, in great part because many were founded by Iowa graduates who spread across the country. In CIA-speak that might be “infiltrated.” The beans of the CIA plot were spilled in the 2015 book Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett, a one-time Workshop student. Thomas Aubry, in The New York Times, explains that the Iowa model endorsed the values of high modernism: “Good literature, students learned, contains ‘sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.’” This was an aesthetic most of us accepted without question. The CIA had been concerned that Cold War writing would follow the model of the political fiction and poetry that reacted to the Depression by supporting Marxist protests and, in many cases, belief in the Soviet workers’ paradise. What concerned us instead was that so much of the now-forgotten work published in magazines like The New Masses was so heavy handed. Even more, we were opposing the “loose baggy monsters” of Victorian fiction with its dominant authorial presence in favor of James Joyce’s belief that authors should just stand offstage paring their nails. We focused on craft, not politics, with Joyce as one model, the standards of Anton Chekhov behind him. Labor organizer Annie Levin, writing in Current Affairs, claims this creative writing programs’ focus “drained fiction of its political bite.” Such criticism raises a fundamental question about what creative writing is for. We have many outlets for political statements. Should fiction and poetry be among them? Were we wrong to unknowingly submit to the CIA? I suppose it’s necessary to define what writing about politics means. Should it just mean including characters’ views and conflicts, or should fiction and poetry take a political stance and support a particular position? I can’t help recalling what an author from a country under a repressive political dictator told me about the impassioned writers producing manuscripts in their oppositional fury: “All those people risking death for bad writing.” Of course, the influence of CIA-supported high modernism waned in the later twentieth century with the rise of the Beats and their attacks on prevailing cultural values, with a focus on sex and drugs, and their new approaches to writing. Initially, my cohorts at Iowa rejected their violations of craft; but eventually the Beats won. The Beats morphed into the Yippies and their blatant, mocking political protests. Opposition to the Vietnam war had much to do with that. Even those of us committed to well-made fiction and poetry joined protest marches, burned draft cards, and sent angry letters to editors. Now, decades after CIA meddling, we are free to write anything we wish and hope editors somewhere will approve. Those trying to control us are now elected politicians and school boards who fear exposure to certain subjects and ideas—Don’t say gay. Back to the well-made story that had been my youthful goal: That standard for story writing dominated in the mid twentieth century, resulting from the examples of James Joyce’s Dubliners collection and informed by the writing advice of Anton Chekhov, who expressed six points in an 1886 letter to his brother Aleksandr: 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature; 2. Total objectivity; 3. Truthful description of persons and objects; 4. Extreme brevity; 5. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. Compassion Added to Chekhov were the standards presented by Henry James in his novel prefaces and essays about writing, where he complained about verbose and opinionated prose. Instead, writers should closely observe human behavior, motives, and the world around them with the goal of delving into the "whole landscape of human feeling, emotion and passion." Today, while many stories are variations of the well-made, the story form is open to a wide range of approaches, including the very experimental. Significantly, a developed narrative arc is no longer an expectation. Successful stories instead can create a specific feeling, mood, or "unity of effect." I doubt that today’s CIA cares. -
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Where Some Nerds Have Gone Before - Watching All of Star Trek in Stardate Order
Totally on the nerd list!! -
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A Bloody-Minded Business: Julian Symons’ Evolution as a Crime Fiction Critic
Most of the generation of authors that produced the Golden Age of detective fiction–that brief era when the puzzle plot purportedly reigned supreme in mysteries–had departed not only from the field but from life itself when, over a half-century ago in the Spring of 1972, British crime writer and critic Julian Symons published Bloody Murder, his landmark study of mystery, detective and crime writing (there is a difference among them to be sure) and the first popular survey of the misdeeds and mayhem genre since Howard Haycraft published Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, three decades earlier in 1941. (Revised editions of Bloody Murder followed in 1985 and 1992.) What made Bloody Murder significant in a way that Haycraft’s book, notable as it was, had never been, is indicated by Symon’ subtitle, From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. As one of the contemporary reviewers of Bloody Murder put it: [Symons] accepts that fiction’s criminal records are primarily entertainments but contends that inside this limit there is a point at which escapist and serious writing converge. He defines this as the crime novel. Here, puzzles take second place to characterisation: the concern is not with murder but its consequences and it is not simply man who is indicted but society itself….Not everyone will accept the thesis—the [detective fiction] diehards will insist that the puzzle is all—but few will be able to resist the cause. In writing Bloody Murder, Julian Symons desired, like an earnest virologist, to isolate and quarantine from the crime novel the frivolous but infectiously entertaining detective story, which in his view had for too long hampered, if not prevented, the genre from being taken, and taking itself, seriously. Symons wanted both practitioners and public alike to appreciate that “[i]n the highest reaches of the crime novel, it is possible to create works of [literary] art”—if admittedly ones “of a slightly flawed kind,” on account of their intrinsic dependence on “sensationalism,” which went back to the crime novel’s bloodstained roots in the days of the Victorian sensation novel of Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood and others. In the dark hearts of even superior crime novelists like himself, Symons avowed, there still was something “that demands the puzzle element in a book, or at least the element of uncertainty and suspense, as a diabetic demands insulin.” He did not say, as the consciously highbrow mystery-hating critic Edmund Wilson doubtlessly would have, “as a drug addict needs a fix,” although it actually would have been a more accurate expression of the point which Symons was making: that there was something slightly seamy in all forms of fictional mystery mongering—intellectual slumming, as it were. Nevertheless, Symons wanted it understood that the crime novel was a loftier mystery form than detective fiction, concerning itself with more than mere puzzles. 1972 seemed a propitious year indeed for finally putting the “detective story” back in its proper place as lesser entertainment and apotheosizing the serious novel of crime. (Note that Symons does not dignify the tale of detection with the word “novel.). The generation which had produced so many prime specimens of the detective novel—I will use the word novel—was passing rapidly from the world’s mortal scene. The review of Bloody Murder quoted above, which appeared in the pages of The Guardian on April 6, 1972, came from the hand of Matthew Coady, successor in the “Criminal Records” crime fiction review column to Anthony Berkeley (under his pen name Francis Iles), who had died just a little over a year earlier, on March 9, 1971. Along with Agatha Christie, who would pass away on January 12, 1976, Berkeley had been all that remained on earth of the original founders of the Detection Club. The Club had been formed in London over four decades earlier, in 1930, as a social organization for eminent practitioners of the fine art of clued murder, with the goal, in part, of distinguishing themselves from the purveyors of cheap thrills, or the shocker-schlockers, if you will, such as Edgar Wallace, “Sapper” and Sax Rohmer, inheritors of the lowly Victorian penny dreadful tradition. Then pushing eighty years of age, Anthony Berkeley had steadfastly remained in the reviewing saddle throughout most of 1970. On October 15 he submitted his final column, which included a review of one of Agatha Christie’s last and least novels, a muddled political thriller, or something, entitled Passenger to Frankfurt, which, bad as it was, became an international bestseller anyway, the seemingly immortal Queen of Crime being critically bulletproof. About the lamentable Frankfurt Berkeley had little on point to say (What could one in kindness say?), aside from an unintentionally amusing and characteristically cranky bit of carping about a vintage crime thriller device: “Of all the idiotic conventions attached to the thriller the silliest is the idea that a car whizzing around a corner at high speed can be aimed at an intended victim who has, quite unseen, stepped off the pavement into the roadway at exactly the right moment. Mrs. Agatha Christie uses this twice in Passenger to Frankfurt.” One can almost hear that final triumphant Harrumph! from the curmudgeonly reviewer. Agatha Christie happily enjoyed a brief Indian summer the next year with her goodish, if by no means great, Miss Marple detective novel Nemesis, but she then published two more mysteries, Elephants Can Remember (1972) and Postern of Fate (1973), which were remarkable only as confirming indicators of the author’s rapidly diminishing powers. (Of Christie, Symons wrote with uncharacteristic indulgence in the first edition of Bloody Murder, when the Queen of Crime was still alive and active as a writer: “she is alone among Golden Age writers in remaining as readable as ever and her capacity sometimes still to bring off a staggering conjuring trick.”). In 1972, ailing Anglophile American mystery writer John Dickson Carr published his final mystery novel, The Hungry Goblin, which evidently is deemed so poor that is has never been reprinted in the last half-century. Anthony Berkeley himself had not published a mystery novel in over three decades, having contented himself with reviewing them under his Francis Iles pseudonym. While there were still a few old-timers around plying the clued murder trade with appreciable zest, like Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, Gladys Mitchell and Rex Stout their ranks were sadly diminished, like those of Great War veterans at an Armistice Day commemoration. Even Edmund Crispin, for a few brief years after the war the wunderkind of detective fiction but now an alcoholic slowly dying by degrees, struggled, zombie-like, for over a decade to complete a final, muddled mystery before his tragic, demise in 1978 at the age of fifty-six. Julian Symons was well aware of all the death and dreary decline going on around him. He began writing the first edition of Bloody Murder in 1970 at the relatively youthful age of fifty-eight, after having retired from a decade-long stint as the crime fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times. (His replacement had been his philosophical opposite Edmund Crispin.) In his critical magnum opus, which he completed the following year, Symons predicted this dire fate for the future of the “detective story”: “A declining market. Some detective stories will continue to be written, but as the old masters and mistresses fade away, fewer and fewer of them will be pleasing to lovers of the Golden Age.” Symons omitted from his 1972 study any mention of rising British murder mistresses P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Moyes, Catherine Aird and Anne Morice, all of whom wrote mysteries in the classic puzzler vein and were more than acceptable to “lovers of the Golden Age.” The Seventies would see continued success for all five of these authors–particularly James and Rendell, both of whom, much to their irritation, the press dubbed successors to Agatha Christie–and additional notable practitioners of detective fiction joined the murder muster during the decade, like masters Peter Lovesey and Reginald Hill, both of whom actually had published their first detective novels in 1970, and masters Colin Dexter, Robert Barnard and Simon Brett, who came along but a few years later. By 1992 Symons, now himself an octogenarian just a couple of years away from his own demise, was still doggedly insisting that the market for the detective story “has declined,” although face-savingly he added, albeit somewhat confusingly, that “few old-fashioned [emphasis added] detective stories are written.” By old-fashioned did he mean books with country houses, floorplans, men-about-town, flippant flappers, stately butlers, terrified maids, bodies in libraries and other such impedimenta? Writers like P. D. James and Ruth Rendell hardly had need of such devices to create classic detective fiction. Yet “A Postscript for the Nineties,” the valedictory chapter of the third edition of Bloody Murder, was filled with the author’s grim forebodings for crime writing’s future. In it, Symons lamented the sadistic violence of Elmore Leonard’s “strip-cartoon” neo-noir tales like L. A. Confidential (1990) and Thomas Harris’ gruesome serial killer novel The Silence of the Lambs (1989) (“the literary equivalent of a video-nasty”), as well as the startling, disturbing rise of…the criminal cozy. Seemingly contradicting his prior claim in the same volume that the detective story market had declined, Symons acknowledged, with a certain sense of rue, that the previous reports (mostly his) of the death of detective fiction had in fact been grossly exaggerated, especially in his native country, as evidenced by the success of what he called the cozy mystery, which he conflated with puzzle-oriented detective fiction: In Britain the cosy crime story still flourishes, as it does nowhere else in the world. We are a long way away from the fairy-tale crime world of Agatha Christie, but a large percentage of the mystery stories in Britain are deliberately flippant about crimes and their outcome….it would seem that the British crime story has always been marked by its lighthearted approach, from the easy jokiness of [E. C. Bentley’s] Philip Trent through the elaborate fancifulness of Michael Innes and Edward [sic!] Crispin to the show businesses mysteries of Simon Brett. A similar refusal to be serious about anything except the detective and the puzzle can be found on the distaff side in a line running from Patricia Wentworth through Margery Allingham and Christianna Brand to half a dozen current exponents of crime as light comedy. This is a product for which there is still a steady demand, as the recent foundation in the United States of a club for the preservation of the Cosy Crime Story shows [this a patronizing refence to the founding of Malice Domestic in 1989]. Symons attempted to distinguish James, Rendell, Lovesey and Hill, long leading lights in what might be termed the Silver Age of detective fiction, from their Golden Age forbears, praising their more “serious” crime novels, like James’ A Taste for Death (1986), where the author takes time to visit a housing project and the murderer is revealed two-thirds of the way through the novel. But the truth is these authors wrote plenteous traditional, puzzle-oriented detective fiction, just like their forbears from the Golden Age did (embroidered, to be sure, with sound characterization and social observation). Today of the aforementioned quartet only Peter Lovesey, now himself an octogenarian, is alive and active, yet younger writers have carried on with the writing of detective fiction in the classic vein, which has now achieved a popular and critical cachet that it has not enjoyed since the Golden Age itself. New reprints of Golden Age mysteries, many by authors long out-of-print and forgotten, appear every month. It becomes more obvious with each passing year that Julian Symons grievously underestimated the public’s passion for “mere puzzles.” It becomes more obvious with each passing year that Julian Symons grievously underestimated the public’s passion for “mere puzzles.” The blunt dismissiveness which Julian Symons in Bloody Murder directs toward many prominent writers of vintage detective fiction might startle those unfamiliar with his writing (and perhaps some of those who think they are familiar with it.) His animadversion against those detective writers, like Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and Henry Wade, whom he notoriously termed “Humdrum,” is well-known and I have written about this at length in my 2012 book Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery, so I will not go into that again here. Here I want to look at Symons’ disparagement of other Golden Age greats, beginning with one of the towering figures of the era, Dorothy L. Sayers, whom, in the first edition of Bloody Murder, Symons repeatedly disrespects, as I am sure Sayers herself would have seen it, by omitting the “L.” from her name. (The “L.” is restored in the third edition.) Admittedly Symons likes such Golden Age stalwarts as Agatha Christie—though he declares condescendingly that she was not a good writer from a literary standpoint and that her fictive world was a “fairyland”—John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Anthony Berkeley (primarily on account of his Francis Iles crime novels) and even S. S. Van Dine, creator of the extraordinarily obnoxious amateur sleuth Philo Vance. When it comes to Dorothy L. Sayers, however, he is coruscating in his assessment: There can be no doubt that by any reasonable standards applied to writing, as distinct from plotting, she is pompous and boring. Every book contains enormous amounts of padding, in the form of conversations which, although they may have a distinct connection with the plot, are spread over a dozen pages where the point could be covered in as many lines. This might be forgivable if what was said had some intrinsic interest, but these dialogues are carried on between stereotyped figures…who have nothing at all to say, but only a veiled clue to communicate….[Lord Peter Wimsey] is a caricature of an English aristocrat conceived with an immensely snobbish, loving seriousness….[His knowledge is] asserted rather than demonstrated, and when demonstration is attempted it is sometimes wrong….Add to this the casual anti-Semitism…and you have a portrait of what might be thought an unattractive character. It should be added that many women readers adore him….[Sayers’ later novels] show, with the exception of the lively Murder Must Advertise, an increasing pretentiousness, a dismal sentimentality, and a slackening of the close plotting that had been her chief virtue. Gaudy Night is essentially a “woman’s novel” full of the most tedious pseudo-serious chat between characters that goes on for page after page. Rather more gently—the Sayers stuff is so sharp-edged as to seem personal—Margery Allingham is faulted for not retiring Campion to the home for superannuated aristocratic sleuths (her books “would have been better still without the presence of the detective who belonged to an earlier time and a different tradition”), while Ngaio Marsh is taken to task for seeking “refuge from [the depiction of] real emotional problems in the official investigation and interrogation of suspects,” with Symons adding chidingly that “one is bound to regret that she did not take her fine talent more seriously.” Repeatedly he stresses his belief that the presence of a series sleuth was a ball-and-chain around the narratives of Allingham and Marsh, shackling their artistic development as crime writers. Christianna Brand and Elizabeth Ferrars, younger writers who were both born in 1907 and first published crime novels near the end of the Golden Age, Symons classifies cursorily in the third edition of Bloody Murder as being among the better writers of what he terms the women’s crime novel. Brand, in his view, “often wrote too hastily for her own good,” while Ferrars (who was still alive at the time) “has never completely fulfilled her talent.” Symons is forthrightly critical of Josephine Tey, long boosted by her many devout fans, including American critic and Symons contemporary Anthony Boucher, as an original and rare talent in crime fiction and what might be termed the Fifth Crime Queen (Christie, Sayers, Allinhgam, Marsh, and sometimes Tey). He dismisses examples of her crime writing as essentially belonging to the between-the-wars era and “really rather dull.” Coming off no better are Ellis Peters, author of the beloved Brother Cadfael mysteries (“I have tried three books without getting to the end of one”); Gladys Mitchell, creator of one of the genre’s most memorable women sleuths, Dame Beatrice Adela LeStrange Bradley (“an average Humdrum….tediously fanciful….impenetrable”); and once hugely popular American mystery writers Mary Roberts Rinehart (“crime stories which have the air of being written specifically for maiden aunts”) and Mignon Eberhart, the latter of whom barely rates from the critic a sniffy mention. In his view Eberhart, along with American mystery writer Elizabeth Daly and Britishers Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson, an early member of the Detection Club still alive when Bloody Murder was published), and Georgette Heyer, simply number among the “dozens” of “epigones” of Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh, Rinehart, et al, and hence did not merit serious critical consideration. For a nanosecond Patricia Wentworth, creator of the Miss Silver mysteries, pops up in the text as numbering, along with the aforementioned Margery Allingham and Christianna Brand, among the writers who refused “to be serious about anything except the detective and the puzzle”—a charge I find baffling in all three cases. How refreshing it was for me, as a lover of vintage detective fiction, to turn back from the Symons of the pious and preachy Bloody Murder decades, the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, to some of the critics’ earlier crime fiction columns from the 1940s and 1950s—what might be termed his lighthearted, pre-dogma days. There I spied find him lustily singing an altogether more praiseful tune about some of these very same detective writers he in varying degrees disparaged in Bloody Murder, as well as others who were entirely omitted from the pages of his critical tome. It seems that Julian Symons—like Raymond Chandler, another famous critic of Golden Age detective fiction (see Chandler’s notorious essay “The Simple Art of Murder” and an earlier Crimereads article by me)—was of a mind rather more divided on the matter of mystery writing than he willingly acknowledged. *** One of the biggest shocks from Julian Symons’ “Life, People—And Books” column in the Manchester Evening News is a 1947 piece concerning Dorothy L. Sayers and the ardent devotion which Symons professes to have for her criminal handiwork. “A few weeks ago, Miss Dorothy Sayers, when asked if she was working on a new detective story, replied that she was not,” Symons, then just thirty-five, reported. “She added that she did not even read new detective stories nowadays, because our present-day mysteries were so markedly inferior to those of a few years ago. In common with many other readers I regard Miss Sayers’ defection with dismay. I hope she is really deceiving us, and is quietly hatching out a new story with a brand-new detective.” Were Symons’ tears real human ones, or rather those of the false sort reputedly shed by the crocodile? Were Symons’ tears real human ones, or rather those of the false sort reputedly shed by the crocodile? Perhaps his expressed hope that Sayers write a new story with a brand-new detective really amounted to a wish that she would finally rid the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. Yet Symons claimed to regard her defection from detection with dismay. Symons even agreed with Sayers than detective fiction in 1947 was worse than that from a decade earlier, although he praised Christie, Carr and, more surprisingly, Ngaio Marsh, “who gives us every year a piece of social satire with a mystery neatly embedded in it.” No complaints from Symons here about the “long and tedious post-murder examinations of suspects” in Marsh’s mysteries, as there would be in Bloody Murder. Incredibly, in a 1949 column Symons laments the loss of the “superman detective,” observing: “The detective as a heroic or remarkable figure has almost vanished from the detective story—and a certain liveliness has gone with him.” Fortunately for lovers of Super Sleuths there was “Mrs. Agatha Christie,” who “may fairly be called the queen of detective story writers now that Miss Dorothy Sayers has abdicated the throne; and it may be fitting that, like Miss Sayers, she should have created one of the few memorable modern detectives—the little Belgian Hercule Poirot….It is very noticeable that the best of Miss Christie’s stories are those in which Poirot appears.” So, did Symons actually like Lord Peter Wimsey at this time, then? And if the presence of series detectives marred the work of Allingham and Marsh, why did it not do so with Christie and Sayers? It seems that back in the late Forties, Symons really liked those series detective puzzles and he was forthright in declaring his admiration for them, even at the expense of the old Victorian masters of mystery whom he would later celebrate in Bloody Murder. “There are few more ingenious detective writers than Ellery Queen and Carter Dickson [John Dickson Carr],” Symons admiringly observed in 1949, sounding like a twenty-first century miracle problem fanboy with a blog. “It is no exaggeration to say that in the way they set and explain their puzzles these writers can knock Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle (or any other old-fashioned detective writer) into a cocked hat.” By 1955, Symons, still conducting his crime column for the Manchester Evening News, divulged, in a review of Ngaio Marsh’s latest mystery Scales of Justice, that he asked for “something more from the modern detective story than a puzzle.” Yet it seems that, at that time anyway, Marsh amply fulfilled Symons’ need: The classical formula for the detective story is well known. Introduce your suspects in some rural scene. Let them include the local vicar, doctor and solicitor. Kill off the most unpleasant of them, and then proceed to long, long interrogations by the police and amateur detectives….Ngaio Marsh uses this old formula brilliantly….There are interrogations galore, conducted by that gentlemanly professional Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn. How is it that Miss Marsh managed to make all this so wonderfully entertaining? The prime reason is that like all good modern crime writers she is also a lively novelist. There is something individual about her characters. The interrogation of suspects, as she manages it, reveals a genuine clash of wits….Yet—and this is a rare thing—she can provide the puzzle, too. The solution…is highly ingenious. This is one of Miss Marsh’s two or three best books. It is assured of a place on the top shelf of crime fiction. By the time of Bloody Murder, however, this “top shelf” Marsh had been, it seems, carelessly discarded into the bargain bin. Yet in 1955 Inspector Alleyn and his endless inquisitions had not served as an obstacle to Symons’ reading enjoyment–indeed, far from it. What seems to have changed is something within Symons himself. A quarter of a century later, Symons selected, to represent Ngaio Marsh for the 1980 Collins Crime Club Jubilee Reprint series which he edited, not Scales of Justice but rather Spinsters in Jeopardy, an improbable thriller that no one else I know of has ever praised as remotely close to being one of Marsh’s best books. Citing “the problems facing the writer [like Marsh and, presumably, himself] who wants to create characters, yet knows the need to present and organize a puzzle,” Symons declared that happily “Marsh has sometimes escaped from these problems by writing another kind of book, the simple, pure, enjoyable thriller in which the puzzle is a secondary element. Spinsters in Jeopardy is such a story.” In the same column in which he reviewed Marsh’s Scales of Justice, Symons assessed the detective novel Watson’s Choice by Gladys Mitchell. You remember Gladys Mitchell: the author dismissed as “tediously fanciful” in Bloody Murder. Back in 1955 Symons gratefully deemed the author “an old reliable if ever there was one” and her latest book, based on an “ingenious idea,” “well worked out” with “several good touches” (though “rather lacking in liveliness”). Admittedly this is a mixed review, but it is far from the curt dismissal which Mitchell receives in Bloody Murder, where Symons acted as if he could barely recall the poor woman (another longtime colleague of his in the Detection Club). At least Gladys Mitchell merited a paragraph’s worth of notice in Bloody Murder (the third edition, anyway; in the first she is merely mentioned in passing). Other authors whom Symons once professed actually to enjoy receive only the slightest of passing, patronizing nods in his survey. Take Elizabeth Daly, for example. In Bloody Murder she is written off simply as one of the “Golden Age writers whose work was once highly popular.” However, in 1954 Symons reviewed her final detective novel, The Book of the Crime, in the Manchester Evening News, pronouncing it “a typical example of her craft, and very enjoyable it is too.” What was Daly’s craft, precisely? “[R]ather cozily horrific stories with a strong feminine appeal.” This cozy feminine appeal evidently had become lost on Symons by 1972. Then there is the strange case of Mary Fitt, who in the Forties and Fifties had at least three mystery books which Symons highly praised in the Manchester Evening News: the early Forties novels Death and Mary Dazill and Requiem for Robert, reprinted as Penguin paperbacks (and recently reprinted in the present day by Moonstone Press with introductions by me, I should disclose), and the short story collection The Man Who Shot Birds. Both novels Symons lavishly lauded as crime novels of character and atmosphere, although he does not use the term explicitly. The short story collection he raved as a model puzzler: “The detective short story is a most difficult form—much more difficult than the full-length novel, as anyone who has tried to write both [like Symons] will know—and Miss Fitt handles it very skillfully….the mysteries themselves are highly ingenious, with false clues laid and misleading suggestions made most cunningly in limited space.” By 1972, however, Symons seemingly had forgotten that the talented Miss Fitt had ever existed, obviously much preferring to write rapturously about the talented Mr. Ripley and his sociopathic ilk. So far I have detailed only women writers whom Symons left by the wayside or seriously downgraded. One male writer who suffered the same treatment, however, was versatile queer mainstream author Rupert Croft-Cooke, who under his pseudonym Leo Bruce was during the Fifties and Sixties one of the finest exponents of the classic series detective story, which Symons insisted in Bloody Murder was rapidly wasting. In 1948 Penguin reprinted Bruce’s classic debut Sergeant Beef detective novel Case for Three Detectives, which simultaneously was an ingenious locked room puzzler and an affectionate parody of Great Detectives Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown. Symons’ praise for this superb detective tale, which may have influenced his own poor attempt at satirizing Philo Vance in The Immaterial Murder Case, was high indeed: I read “Case for Three Detectives” more than ten years ago and thought highly of it then. I have refreshed my memory and can confirm that this is one of the most slyly amusing tales of detection that has yet been written. Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur Amer Picon and Monsignor Smith are three amateur detectives who bear a wicked resemblance to the famous creations of Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie and the late G. K. Chesterton. Their investigation of the mysterious death of Mary Thurston and the account of the ingenious theories which are destroyed by solid, stolid sergeant Beef is very good fun. Yet not a whisper of Bruce—a personal favorite of my own, I should divulge—is heard in Bloody Murder! Seemingly “one of the most slyly amusing tales of detection that has yet been written” had been utterly forgotten by Symons. *** Why all these later revisions and omissions on Symons’ part? Was the critic simply an insincere, cynical flatterer in those Manchester Evening News pieces, vigorously puffing books for which he actually cared little or nothing? Certainly, there are always imperatives for reviewers to give good notices to the books they review. Such notices make publishers happy, not to mention readers, who are forever on the hunt for new books to read and understandably do not like just to be told how dreadful everything is. And making both publishers and readers happy makes the reviewers’ employers happy too, which is no small consideration. All too often one has, after all, to sing for one’s supper. Additionally, most reviewers naturally dislike offending others. A review I once posted at my blog The Passing Tramp, which criticized Julian Symons’ own first essay in crime fiction, that weak little number The Immaterial Murder Case (1945), provoked a onetime internet friend of mine of over a decade’s standing, a former blogger of fine distinction and discriminating taste who is also something of a Symons fanboy (there are two of them I definitely know of), to accuse me, in rather off-color language, of wanting to “make Julian Symons my bitch,” which rather took me aback. (I can assure you I have no desire to make anyone “my bitch.”) In Symons’ case, he himself was inducted into the Detection Club in 1950 and became a member of the Crime Writers Association when it was founded in 1953, meaning that he informally socialized with many of the very writers he was reviewing. Yet throughout his life Symons seems to me to have been a man remarkably forthcoming, if not to say overbearing, with his opinions and not especially concerned about hurting the tender feelings of either his author colleagues or their fans. Get tougher skins, was his attitude, it is just honest criticism. Or as he explicitly put it: “The good should be praised, the eccentric tolerated, the bad excoriated….What could be more reasonable? Yet after such knowledge, what forgiveness? The approach did not make universally loved.” By the Sixties, Symons’ critical views had begun their tectonic shift. By the Sixties, Symons’ critical views had begun their tectonic shift. He was coming around to the “fact” which he pronounced in his introduction to Criminal Practices, a collection of his essays on crime writing published in 1994, the year of his death, that “in the fifties the crime story was still comparatively in its infancy. In terms of characterization, attention to forensic detail and police procedure, and truth to the lives and language of the many millions of people below the upper and middle classes, the best British crime stories were immensely inferior to those written now.” Back in the Sixties an incensed Margery Allingham took Symons’ mixed notices of her novels in the Sunday Times so personally that she implored the Times to keep her books out of his nitpicking hands. In 1964 she wrote defiantly of hoping with her next book, The Mind Readers (1965), her final book published during her lifetime, to “bust out of the AWFUL Gollancz/Symons/MWA [disparagingly referencing not merely Symons but the publisher Victor Gollancz and the Mystery Writers of America] stale blood and fumbling sex blanket bath and have FUN again”–which probably would only have confirmed Symons’ reservations about her writing had he been aware of this. Over two decades later, Symons, somewhat bemusedly observing what he termed the late Eighties “Allingham revival”—a series adapting her mysteries had been launched in the United Kingdom and her books reprinted in paperback—speculated thar this event was, in part, “a very minor accompaniment to the Thatcherite counter-revolution,” though he also credited the author’s exuberant romanticism, love for the “baroque and odd,” sharp eye for detail and “her surprising capacity to order and dovetail” her fanciful material into “plausible plots” (a very fair assessment of Allingham, in my view). While Allingham was complaining about the negativity of Symons reviews back in the Sixties, however, the hugely prolific and popular British crime writer John Creasey, founder of the Crime Writers Association, was pugnaciously putting Allingham’s distraught words into action by proposing nothing less than expelling Symons from the CWA. The critic recalled mordantly in a 1989 article on Creasey that the ban was stay in effect “until such time as I started to write constructive, helpful reviews.” Lamented Symons of his former friend: “That different levels of writing existed was something that John did not understand, and that his books should stay unreviewed, or be reviewed caustically, really upset him.” Before the board of the CWA, according to Symons, Creasey indignantly “read out a long account of my critical misdeeds—and received no support [for his motion].” As Symons tells it, he and Creasey had still not really reconciled at the latter man’s death in 1973, a year after the publication of Bloody Murder, which probably had not helped the cause of reconciliation with such observations of Creasey’s work by Symons as “the writing of the books is never equal to their often clever conceptions, and his people think and behave with a schoolboyish naivete.” (In the Criminal Practices introduction five years later, by the by, Symons states that Creasey’s CWA expulsion motion was “decisively defeated”—not quite the same thing as its having received “no support,” but I digress.) Across the pond, in the New York Times in 1977, not long after the death of esteemed American mystery writer Rex Stout, creator of Great Detective Nero Wolfe, the ever-iconoclastic Symons, perhaps slightly bloodied but still bowed, in a review of Stout’s recently published biography boldly waved a virtual red flag in front of the faces of the author’s many fans, writing: At the risk of outraging an accepted American myth, it must be said that [Stout biographer Joseph] McAleer absurdly inflates the [Nero Wolfe] stories’ merit….Stout was simply not in the same stylistic league with Hammett, Chandler or Ross Macdonald. His prose is energetic and efficient, nothing more. His plots lack the metronomic precision of Ellery Queen’s….The truth is Stout wrote too much too easily, and that like all crime writers dependent on repeated introduction of the same characters—including Doyle and Simenon—his work was subject to the law of diminishing returns….[The admittedly memorable Wolfe] operates in the context of books that are consistently entertaining, but for the most part just as consistently forgettable. Letters of protest poured in from Stout’s American mythmakers, who questioned whether Symons really must have been said any of this. Methodically Symons responded, at one point complaining with a rather surprising sensitivity, given his years of bluntly questioning the talents and tastes, respectively, of other mystery writers and countrywide mystery readerships, that one of the letter writers, the late Richard Reis, Chairman of the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, had been “gratuitously insulting” to him. (Of Symons’ motivations in writing the hit piece Reis had speculated acidly: “As a far less successful mystery writer than Stout, he splenetically attacks a biographer, when his real target is the biographer’s subject.”) How appalled Symons would have been, then, to have known that at this time the widely admired English suspense writer Mary Stewart (another name which does not appear in Bloody Murder) in a letter to Jospeh McAleer wrote with utter, withering contempt of the man: You also know that Rex Stout is an incomparably better writer than the pathetic and jealous Symons (or any of the grubby merchants he admires), and that this is the motivation of the review….I have met [Symons]; he is a boor, and a second-rate writer, and has no sense of style—I mean, he would not know good English if he saw it. The biggest compliment Julian Symons can pay to any book is to dislike it. Contrary to Richard Reis and Mary Stewart, I do not doubt that in both his early book reviews and his later ones Symons was expressing his genuinely held beliefs at the time, not concerning himself with how painful they were for some. What, then, produced the changes in his beliefs? I think that Symons’ views gradually hardened into inflexible dogma, producing in Bloody Murder a crusading book in which he was determined, finally, to put puzzle-oriented detective fiction in its lesser literary (or non-literary) place for once and all as the sort of freak he now deemed it: a changeling which had mischievously replaced the crime novel in its cradle back in the Twenties and Thirties and continued ever since to receive nostalgic genuflection from fond fans. Additionally, I think Symons genuinely had gotten bored with detective fiction, having had to read so many pedestrian examples of it in his capacity as the Sunday Times mystery reviewer for over a decade. (Dorothy L. Sayers had only been able to stick it out in that job for a couple of years). In the third edition of Bloody Murder Symons recalls that “I gave up [reviewing mystery fiction at the Sunday Times] chiefly because I knew I was becoming stale, so that my reaction on seeing a parcel of new books was not the appropriate slight quickening of the pulse marking the hope of a masterpiece. I opened it rather with the expectation that the contents would fulfill my belief that almost all crime writers publish too much.” Or, as he put it near the end of his life in 1994, in his introduction to Criminal Practices: I wrote the column for more than a decade, received the whole flood of crime stories that came into the paper…and so read thousands of books in the genre during that period. But ‘read’ needs inverted commas, for many of the books that piled up on my desk were ill-written, poorly-crafted rubbish…. Until I was threatened by burial under this mass of rubbish, I had not realized the full weight of it. The fact is that ninety percent of crime stories, mystery stories, thrillers, are written by people with no feeling for language, place or character. Once I understood that, there followed a desire [on my part] to make distinctions…to abandon the alkaline flatness of most writing about crime stories in favor of something sharper, sometimes even picric. Ironically Bloody Murder—that lauded, landmark study of mystery, detective and crime fiction—was written by a man nearing his seventh decade who had lost his youthful enthusiasm for detective fiction and become to a great degree jaded with the very genre to which he had devoted his book, after over a decade of having hoped every two weeks, rather unreasonably it seems to me, for glittering masterpieces to cross his desk, rather than solid examples of able craftsmanship. (How many masterpieces does mainstream fiction produce on a biweekly basis?) While he was able to summon up something of his bygone juvenile passion for Christie, Queen, Carr and even, in a true testament to the power of adolescent nostalgia, S. S. Van Dine and Philo Vance—what he really now desperately wanted was for murder fiction to bloody mean something, for tales of violent death to say something meaningful to him about human life. “Bloody Murder…makes discriminations between thoroughbreds and hacks,” the ailing Symons declared in a cri de cœur near the end of the ‘92 edition, published not long before his death. “It was part of my hope and intention that the book would, through such discriminations, raise the status of the best crime stories so that they would be considered seriously as imaginative fictions.” The books by “serious” crime writers like Patricia Highsmith, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler, he still found rewarding reading, as ever he had earlier in his life, but so many other makers of mystery seem largely to have lost whatever luster they had previously held for him. As he reiterated in the third edition of Bloody Murder for readers who perhaps should have paid more attention to him two decades earlier: “although this book is in general a history of the crime story, it also reflects personal preferences.” The book also reflected, as I hope I have shown, Julian Symons’ profound personal boredom in his middle and later years with the great dead mass of the mystery genre, which, as he must have seen it, was sinking helplessly into the mire of mediocrity by the law of its own weight (to borrow from the Book of Revelation). Perhaps Bloody Murder could more tellingly have been titled Bloody Bored. View the full article -
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10 New Books Coming Out This Week
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death (Harper) “An absolutely engrossing tale…written with the abundance of whimsy and dark humor that seems to permeate nearly everything that Horowitz creates. Kudos to anyone who can figure this one out!” –Booklist Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt (William Morrow) “Paretsky’s phenomenal gifts for significant and riveting stories, lacerating dialogue, rich psychology, and barbed humor reach tornadic force.” –Booklist Alyssa Cole, One of Us Knows (William Morrow) “Cole mixes a spooky, isolated setting with a hint of the gothic and a storyline that isn’t afraid to tackle tough social issues and creates a book that is both entertaining and insightful.” –Library Journal Nick Medina, Indian Burial Ground (Berkley) “Nick Medina blends myth and reality, supernatural danger and ordinary human menace into a story that will pull your heartstrings even as it shreds your nerves. Like the alligators lurking in its pages, Indian Burial Ground will swallow you whole.” –Ana Reyes David Baldacci, A Calamity of Souls (Grand Central) “A Calamity of Souls by David Baldacci is the immovable object of history slamming into the irresistible force of truth. An examination of a fractured place and time where the mores of the past were confronted by the implacable ferocious tenacity of justice. A tour de force.” –S.A. Cosby Karen Jennings, Crooked Seeds (Hogarth) “Bleak and provocative . . . leaves readers with much to ponder about South Africa’s painful history . . . There are no easy answers in Jennings’s knotty narrative.” –Publishers Weekly Megan Campisi, The Widow Spy (Atria) “Campisi follows up Sin Eater with a gripping and richly imagined mystery…With piercing prose and a nimble balance of emotion and suspense, Campisi expertly melds the best of historical mystery with top-shelf literary fiction. Amy Stewart and Sarah Waters fans, take note: this is a must-read.” –Publishers Weekly K.T. Nguyen, You Know What You Did (Dutton) “The descriptions of Annie’s OCD…and her struggles to control it are particularly visceral…[An] exploration of generational trauma and mental illness…There is healing to be had in the journey and the ending.” –Kirkus Reviews V. Castro, Immortal Pleasures (Del Rey) “History comes to undead life in this bloody tale of vampiric vengeance….An engrossing tale of monstrous life—human and otherwise.” –Kirkus Reviews Josh Young and Manfred Westphal, The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn (Grand Central) “A fast-paced, fascinating tell-all that’s a previously untold account of the seamy side of Hollywood, politics, and mob activity.” Library Journal View the full article
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