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Leo Tolstoy, author of my favorite novel, War and Peace, said that the purpose of art is to teach us to love life, an observation that has pleased me since I first read it. But on reflection, I think it fair to say there are other things that art can do in relation to life; it can change the way we see life; it can teach us to endure or perhaps enable us to escape life. For a time, anyway. In a world beset by unprecedented horrors, where the survival of the planet itself seems to hang by a fraying thread, art can sometimes grant us respite—time, as it were, to catch our breath. Art can take us out of ourselves, plunging us, however briefly, into alternative worlds, worlds of beauty and make believe, worlds that allow us a pause from day to day anxiety and panic, a “timeout” in which to… surrender to enchantment, to collect ourselves so as to return refreshed and perhaps inspired to resume the ongoing battle with reality. The art that can accomplish this may not necessarily or always be great art. It might be. It might be Mozart or Shakespeare, which for me is akin to getting a transfusion. But it could also be the less exalted variety, like, for example, the satisfaction of curling up with a good mystery story at bedtime. Detective stories, are, as many will allow, a source of great comfort, which is strange if you think about it. After all, detective stories promise death and bloody destruction, serial killers, and mayhem, severed body parts with corpses splayed at unnatural angles, the skulls fractured by blunt instruments wielded a person or persons unknown. How can this stuff be comforting? Because detective literature for all its protestations of thrills, gore and procedural authenticity, frequently delivers the exact opposite of what it promises. Unlike life in which dreadful things happen for no reason, where children are struck by lightning or pedestrians by drunk drivers, in detective stories, as the gumshoe sooner or later observes, “it all adds up.” In detective literature, unlike life, nothing happens without a reason. So yes, we love detective stories because they help us escape real life. It is a superficial escape, to be sure. It isn’t a total transfusion like Mozart, (who has unfortunately been elevated to a form of castor oil—“listen to your Mozart, it will make you smarter!”) Detective stories by contrast are what some people call guilty pleasures. And let’s admit frankly that some pleasures are all the keener because they’re guilty. We feel we should be spending our time on more “worthwhile” things, but we cannot resist the siren call of, “Come, Watson, the game’s afoot!” Artists lose all proprietary authority over our creations when they’re finished. We cannot be objective judges of our creations. Like Moses, we don’t get to cross the Jordan and look back to see the trail we’ve blazed. Like messages stuffed in bottles, our work is essentially thrown out into the wide world, hoping for the best. Each person who extracts the message within will make of the contents what they will. So, what follows must be counted idle speculation. I write Sherlock Holmes stories for the same reason I read them, to divert my attention from the terrifying issues that plague the rest of my waking hours—Ukraine, Gaza, drought, famine, wildfires, limits on voting rights, Fox News and anti-vaxxers. But for a few hours, when I read or write Sherlock Holmes stories, I am transported to what appears to be a simpler world, where a creature of superhuman intelligence, nobility, compassion and yes, frailty, can make sense of it all. Was the Victorian world in fact simpler than this one? We’ve no way of knowing, but like an audience willing itself to believe that the magic trick is really magic, we are conniving accomplices to our own beguilement. I’ve now written five Sherlock Holmes novels. The sixth, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, will be published August 27 and I am working on a seventh. I didn’t plan on writing more than one and I don’t write them unless I have an idea that seems right for Holmes. Ideas of any kind do not come easily or plentifully to me. As an example, twenty six years passed between the time I wrote The Canary Trainer and when I wrote The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols. The idea has to be good enough so that it teases my brain and won’t let go. When I should be doing other things, grownup things—like earning a living—instead I am lying awake and riffing on what has begun taking shape in my head. I self-censor easily. If I can poke holes in my idea, it becomes natural if not inevitable that l lose interest and drop it. My novels fall into the category now pejoratively labeled “pastiche,” which I confess I find irritating. All art is a history of cut and paste. Are James Bond movies with different Bonds also pastiches? Star Treks with different Spocks? As Michael Chabon has observed, all fiction is fan fiction. What are the Odyssey and Aeneid but fanboy spinoffs? There is something to be said for pouring new wine into old bottles. Don’t we sometimes get off listening to covers of The Beatles? Just to see what someone else does with their songs? Isn’t it cool to hear Sinead O’Conner’s riff on “Nothing Compares to You?” To listen to Tiffany’s version of “I Think We’re Alone Now”? The words of the Catholic mass are pretty standardized, but who would argue that Mozart’s “Requiem,” Bach’s “B Minor Mass,” Verdi’s “Requiem” or Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War” are “pastiches”? The music makes them different. Seeing what can be done with Holmes and Watson while adhering to the rough outlines set forth by Doyle, seems to me as legitimate a challenge as setting new music for the text of the “Dies irae.” No one confuses Mozart with Verdi. Most of my ideas reach me indirectly; they begin as someone else’s; in however incoherent form, I trip over them. Or someone primes my thought pump. “What about Holmes and…?” and I’m off and running. Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud; Holmes in London’s theatre world; Holmes encounters the Phantom of the Opera; Holmes and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Lately, Holmes in Egypt. This last notion was no more than those three words. It was all I needed. I find that taking Holmes out of his element (England, and specifically London), making him in effect, a fish out of (Thames) water, allows my creative juices to flow. I am not interested in limiting myself to Doyle’s vocabulary or never allowing Holmes an action that he hasn’t performed earlier someplace. Mere variations along those lines strike me as inevitably a species of taxidermy. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but in my opinion in order for Holmes to come to life he must change. But he must always change in character. It is a fine and arguably abstract line that I am drawing and while I’ve no doubt there are Doyle imitators who successfully adhere more literally—and literarily – to Doyle than I do, I am not certain the results are more lifelike. Of course, I’ve not read many other Holmes novels and stories, for two reasons: firstly because there are now so many that if I attempted to canvas the competition I’d never have time to read anything else. Secondly, I shy away from other Holmes books, not because I suspect they might be dreadful but because I am just insecure enough to fear they might be better—much better—than my own attempts. I’ve read some that are and the result is a kind of brain freeze wherein I become creatively inhibited. Or worse, I start to imitate other Doyle imitators. Writing Holmes, of necessity, involves an enormous amount of research. Whether it’s a novel or a screenplay, entering a different narrative milieu is like starting medical or law school. You write down everything because you’ve no way of judging at the start what will prove pyrite or gold. You go for long walks, notebook in hand. You think about possibilities as you fall asleep and as you wake. You try things in different combinations. Somehow the result must seem inevitable, one event leading to inexorably to the next. Besides our dynamic duo, who are the characters? What are Holmes and Watson doing in Egypt? In Russia? What is the mystery? (Hint: a body always helps). How much description can the reader (used to moving pictures in all venues) tolerate? How much modern and how much ancient history do you—and the reader—need to know in order to follow the story? How much information is too much? Research is like painting stage scenery. All you need is what you want the audience to see, not what’s hidden in the wings, fascinating though it may be. It’s like fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube. But it is more than that. For all the research, the hesitations, the false starts and frustrating stops, it cannot be denied that writing a detective story provides—for this author, at least—many of the same pleasures as reading one. It is, in short, a great escape of its own. And, to mix a metaphor, it can only be hoped that my great escape proves contagious, that what I stuff into my bottle will entertain and divert those who chance upon it. __________________________________ Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram From Hell by Nicholas Meyer is published by The Mysterious Press and will release on August 27th, 2024. It is available for pre-order here. 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I grew up in the former USSR surrounded by books on shelves built by my grandfather. The books came in multiple numbered tomes – grey, brick red, pale green – and bore the names of the authors in gold lettering that glistened under the light of the lamp. Chekhov. Pushkin. Akhmatova. One collection – Tolstoy – numbered in 14 emerald-colored volumes. There were foreign ones too: the Brontës, Hemingway, London. It would be a while until I learned that such collections were a status symbol for the Soviet middle class and that they were very hard to come by. Back then, long before I became a debut author in the U.S., they were simply a backdrop – weighty and venerated. Before I dared open one – in fact, before I even learned to read or write – I entertained myself by making up nonsensical rhymes. I loved that words could be used to build worlds. To make magic. But the words I heard adults around me use weren’t magical. They were strange, complicated, dry: synthesis, psychotechnical, methodology. My parents worked as psychologists and all their friends – and my potential role models – were psychologists too. Even Santa Claus, who came to our apartment one year, turned out to be my dad’s colleague who, after ho-ho-hoing, took off his white beard to drink vodka in the kitchen and talk shop with my dad. While I secretly wanted to grow up into someone who made magic with words, when adults leaned over to ask what I wanted to be, I dutifully said, a psychologist. Saying a writer – putting myself in the vicinity of the gods on our bookshelves – felt sacrilegious. After living in Ukraine, we moved to Moscow where, in third grade, a tall, assertive teacher with a booming voice walked into my Reading class. He announced that instead of Reading, where we’d been suffering through short, deadwood passages of Soviet-era textbooks, he had come to teach us Literature. Literature! I still remember how that sophisticated word – and the dignity with which he said it – cast a magic spell on my mind. I thought of the gold-lettered books back home. As the teacher teleported me from the boring textbooks toward the transcendent poetry of Pasternak, I knew I wanted to be part of this World of Literature. Within a couple of years, I was composing my own Russian poetry. On a long winter bus ride to school, I wrote a poem about Pushkin, which won an award in a school competition. When assigned to write a fairytale based on a real historical event, I wrote an animal-populated version of the 1991 putsch, a coup attempt that resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I stopped saying I’d become a psychologist and began to believe that I was on a path toward a literary future. I allowed myself to dream that I would become a novelist, with a gold-lettered tome of my own. Then, in the summer before seventh grade, my mother dropped a bombshell: we were immigrating to the U.S. At 13, I found myself walking into an ESL class in a public middle school in San Francisco. No one there would care for a girl writing in Russian. My main purpose in life became mastering English and fitting into the strange and fraught new world of American teenhood. I’d studied English back in Moscow, but the proper British version in my old classes included no Californian slang or cultural references. Plus, there was the accent. I’ll never forget how the whole class giggled when my “can’t” came out like “cunt”. I learned the pledge of allegiance and the concept, drilled into me daily, that this was the best country on earth, that I was lucky to be here, and that to be American meant abandoning the past and reinventing yourself in this land of opportunity. I was, in the words of Emma Lazarus, “the wretched refuse” of my ancient homeland “yearning to breathe free.” What I heard behind the American welcome was: my homeland was lesser than, my language was unnecessary, and my past irrelevant. All those gold-lettered books that traveled with us to San Francisco were a shrine to my past. They would never be a gateway to my future. In high school, I took Psychology where I confirmed that I had no talent or interest in following in my parents’ footsteps. By the time I got to college, I’d decided to major in Comparative Literature. I might not have the language chops or cultural knowledge to become an American novelist, I reasoned, but at least I could immerse myself in the writing of others. My classes focused on international literature and, unsurprisingly, were much smaller than the those in the English department. I read Doctor Zhivago, learned about Futurism, where we studied Marinetti and Mayakovsky, and did an independent study project on Akhmatova’s connection to Italian literature. I was finally making use of the books my mom dragged across the ocean, though I also felt college years were an indulgence. No one would pay me to do any of this in the real world. Even if I were to write a novel, the very concept of “The Great American Novel” excluded me, I felt. Though by then I’d become a U.S. citizen, who was I to say anything about my adapted homeland? It didn’t help that I kept wondering what would have happened to me had I never immigrated. In that alternate universe, unencumbered by foreignness, was I becoming a young novelist? At 19, I landed a summer internship at a Russian-language newspaper headquartered in the Empire State Building. As I rode the elevator – up, up, up – for a moment I felt there was value in my native language after all and maybe, even in America, I could carve out some niche and become a real working writer. My first assignment was to interview a Soviet émigré artist who made sculptural paintings using found objects. He was in his 40s and lived in a crowded studio apartment on the Upper East Side. Though his life didn’t seem glamorous, I admired that he was able to find himself as an artist in this new country and was jealous that his craft was free of language. As I was about to leave, he asked me what I wanted to be. When I told him, he said, “To be a writer, you first need to live a little.” Instead of seeing through his condescension and sexism, I accepted that I hadn’t lived enough real life stuff to say anything substantial. By my age, Hemingway had been injured in World War I. Chekhov had assumed full support of his bankrupted parents. Jack London had gone to Japan as a sailor, had ridden trains as a hobo, and was jailed for vagrancy in London. In comparison, my immigrant life was pretty conventional. I didn’t have the confidence to appreciate what I had already lived through: growing up in Russia during the brutal violence of the 1990s, coming to America, being separated from my father, losing my first love to a car accident, and having grandparents who’d survived the Ukrainian famine, World War II, and Stalin’s repressions. The artist confirmed what I had already internalized as an immigrant: the stories from my culture didn’t matter. For the next decade, I didn’t write fiction or poetry. Not a single creative word, in any language. I was convinced that I had to live a little, whatever that meant, and that I had nothing meaningful to offer to American readers except occasional articles about things happening in this country. It took ten years and a divorce that sent me to Moscow where I marched in the biggest wave of anti-Putin protests for me to see that maybe I had some things to say that could bridge my upbringing in Ukraine, Russia and America. The protests were followed by arrests and, soon, by an armed conflict between my two homelands. At the time, in 2014, the conflict was centered in my family’s hometown in Ukraine. The world didn’t yet know that soon it would grow into the biggest land war since WWII. But I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to stop being afraid that I hadn’t lived enough and that no one in the U.S. would care to read a story that happens in another place, another time, to other people. It took me almost three decades to go from ESL class to seeing value in my history and culture. I only wish I could tell my younger self not to wait, but to write while life happened. To practice the craft. To record the experience of living in an insecure, confused, immigrant body. And meanwhile, not to let those old, gold-lettered books gather too much dust. *** View the full article

Given how much I love reading and writing about dysfunctional families, it’s no wonder I would soon turn my attention to evil mothers! While my new book, Darling Girls, is about the relationship between three women who grew up in foster care together and call each other sisters, once you meet their foster mother Miss Fairchild, you’ll understand what I mean. Here are some of my favourite thrillers that feature evil mothers, all of which definitely provided inspiration for Darling Girls… Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent This incredibly twisty book is an absolute page-turner! Strange Sally Diamond is told from two perspectives. We have Sally Diamond, now orphaned in her forties and grappling with her less-than-average upbringing as she tries to function in ‘normal society’ in the small Irish town where she lives. Then we have another narrator, living in New Zealand, who’s also grappling with their strange childhood and telling the story of the past. Do their stories intertwine? What do evil mothers have to do with it? You’ll need to read to find out… None of This is True by Lisa Jewell Where I live in Australia, it seems like everyone is talking about None of This is True by Lisa Jewell… and for good reason. The story follows two mothers who meet in a restaurant bathroom and both realise it’s their 45th birthday. The protagonist, Alix Summers, is a popular podcaster, and Josie Fair sees an opportunity to tell her own story. Alix agrees to interview Josie, and quickly we realise we have no idea what’s true. I can’t really talk about the evil mothers storyline without spoilers, so you’ll have to trust me! Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford Originally published in 1978, Mommie Dearest was one of the first harrowing memoirs of child abuse that gained global attention. It also shed light on the behind-the-scenes life of Hollywood actor Joan Crawford who was an alcoholic and abuser of her adopted daughter, Christine. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy While we’re on the subject of true stories, how could I skip over I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy? Not exactly an evil mother in the true crime sense, but the title says a lot about the toxic and abusive relationship that child actor Jennette experienced at the hands of her mother for many years. White Oleander by Janet Fitch White Oleander technically isn’t a thriller, but the mother character, Ingrid, has always stayed with me. She’s a gorgeous, talented poet locked away for committing murder, and a master manipulator to her daughter who’s being shipped from foster home to foster home in her absence. It’s also beautifully written (Oprah reads the audiobook, if that tickles your fancy!). Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews One of the most evil mothers in crime fiction history, I would argue, is the mother in Flowers in the Attic, a book (series of books) that has haunted me since I first read it many years ago. I remember this being a book my friends passed around at school…it really had us in its grasp! Let’s just say the mother stores her children in the attic with unwanted furniture. Need I say more? *** Version 1.0.0 View the full article

If you follow the news at all—on TV, newspapers, social media—you are aware of crimes perpetrated both at home and in faraway places. You might read them, feel a pang of grief for the victim or a flare of rage at the villain. But our fast-moving media often gives us only a glimpse of the crime itself and then the news cycle is on to the next crime. Most of the time, the aftereffects of crime aren’t acknowledged. It’s not because those reporting the news are bad people. There’s just so much crime and only so many minutes in the day. Part of it may also be our own viewing habits. In these days of instant connection with a single click, I think our attention spans have become shorter. We read a news story and then we’re on to the next. But every crime has aftereffects. Some are more widespread than others. I call these “ripples.” A pebble tossed into a pond makes a small ripple. A larger rock makes a bigger ripple. But there’s always a reaction. It can be psychological, physical, or financial. It can affect only the victim or it can touch their family and friends. The news rarely focuses on these aftereffects, but for me—both as a writer and as someone who’s been touched by these ripples—it can be life changing. Acknowledging these life-changing ripples gives depth to the characters of a story. And in real life, it can help survivors deal with their trauma. In a basic example, a father is murdered in a random shooting on his way home from work. His family and community mourn. There will be a funeral and speeches. There might be flowers or teddy bears left at the scene. But when the speeches are over, when the flowers have died and the teddy bears cleared away, the victim’s family is left to pick up the pieces. The victim was the primary breadwinner for the family. Now there is no income. If the family was at the poverty line prior to the murder, they might not even be able to afford a funeral. A family who’d been getting by paycheck to paycheck might find themselves homeless. Even a middle-class family might have to sell their home and move somewhere smaller and probably a lot less nice. In either case, the surviving spouse must find a way to pay the bills amidst her grief. The kids will need to depend on free lunches and other charity at school and the other kids can be cruel about such things. If there were any savings or college funds, they’ll be used for daily expenses. The children will no longer be able to go to college, their entire future compromised. An entire family can be bankrupted. Those financial ripples go on to cause other trauma—shame, fear, hunger. No one steps up to pay for this family. The cops aren’t responsible. The city isn’t responsible. The only one responsible is the person who committed the murder and, statistically, if they are caught, they’re unlikely to be sentenced in a way as to bring peace to the family. The family suffers for years for the actions of a single murderer. There are other kinds of ripples, of course. Here’s a more detailed example: A psychologist is nearly killed by a client while trying to keep the client from hurting/killing everyone in their place of work. The client is angry because his court-ordered therapy required him to be on time for the therapy sessions. He’s missed several and his probation has been revoked. He’s going to jail and he’s filled with rage. If he’s going down, he’s going to take everyone with him. He sets the practice’s building on fire in an attempt to smoke out the therapists and other clients there for treatment. He’s waiting in the lobby for the occupants to exit—armed and ready to cause real pain. Occupants and therapists are huddled behind doors barricaded with desks and chairs so that the client can’t get in to hurt them. Smoke is spreading. They are terrified. Only two people have not been able to retreat behind closed doors—the owner of the practice and one of his therapists. The owner confronts the rage-filled client, but the owner is a man of small stature and the angry client is over six feet tall and muscular—and armed with knives. This isn’t going to end well. Luckily the other therapist hasn’t been seen. He’s standing in the shadows, frantically trying to think of what he should do. He’s got martial arts experience and wrestled in high school but that was nearly twenty years before. Luckily his skills come back to him. He attacks the much-larger client, taking him down, pinning him to the floor—and somehow he holds the man down while the fire department arrives to put out the fire. The firefighters then hold the client down until the police arrive. Crisis averted. For the moment. The client is arrested. You’d think he’d go to jail for a long time, considering he’s committed arson and attempted murder. But he’s sentenced to only thirty days in jail. Thirty days. And, as he’s dragged away from the courtroom, he turns to the therapist who’d wrestled him to the floor and threatens the man and his family. Ripples ensue. The therapist is traumatized but doesn’t realize it yet. It hasn’t quite sunk in and won’t for years. He’s just getting through each day. His first action is to quit his job, because it’s not the first time his life has been threatened by a client. It’s the third. He’s got a wife and two young daughters and he’s afraid the next time he won’t be so lucky. He’s just a dissertation away from his doctorate, but he walks away from that too. He can’t bear to think about the field of therapy now. Every client is a potential threat. His career as a therapist is over. He was a good therapist. He helped a lot of people. But now, the world is missing one good therapist and anyone who might have come to him cannot. The remaining therapists will have to take on more clients. These therapists will now have to work harder, longer. Clients have lost an ally in their recovery. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The therapist’s wife is also affected. Besides the fear that never quite subsides—she’d come so close to losing the love of her life—she is now the sole breadwinner because the trauma runs far deeper than either husband or wife are aware. PTSD is an insidious condition, affecting everyone a little differently. For the therapist, it’s going to be several years before he’s ready to tackle a structured job in public. With people who might be threats. When he’s able to, he thrives once again, but there’s always the knowledge that an attack can come from anywhere at any time. He’s always vigilant. Continuous vigilance is physically and mentally exhausting. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The therapist and his wife are afraid of the rage-filled client’s threats, that after his thirty days in jail, the man will follow through and come after the therapist, his wife, and his two young daughters. They sell everything and move. Start all over again in an uncertain economy. More ripples. The family moves several more times, trying to find that new start. Their children’s lives are disrupted and their home not as stable as it once was. There are financial ripples. Money is very tight. One of their children is sick, but knows that Mom and Dad are stressed, so she doesn’t say anything. The child gets worse and worse until she finally admits how sick she is. The parents now feel guilt on top of everything else. The therapist becomes a teacher and tells his students not to become therapists. It’s too dangerous. (Which is true, in his experience.) The world may lose other good therapists before they can even begin their journey. On the other hand, those people will be a lot safer in other jobs. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. The other clients in the building that day faced their own trauma over the years. They’d come to a place of healing, only to have their sense of safety ripped away. One hopes that they found help elsewhere or they probably would have continued to suffer, dragging their families along with them. The therapists who huddled behind those barricaded doors will always wonder if the new client in their office is the next one who’ll become violent and hurt someone—maybe the therapist. They are always vigilant, which, again, is exhausting. So many lives were affected that day—and no one was even physically harmed. So many lives were affected that day—and no one was even physically harmed. The therapist who took the client down walked away with only bruises that disappeared over the next few days. It was the psychological bruises that took years to heal. If the second example sounds personal, it’s because it is. It happened to my family. My husband was the brave therapist who saved lives that day. I was the wife who didn’t want to let him out of my sight. My daughters were the children whose lives were uprooted. All because one rage-filled client got violent when faced with the consequences of his own actions. Ripples happen. I hope the next time you read a story about crime that you think about the victims, about how their lives will go on. Because while the loss of life or the crime itself is horrific, the aftereffects—the ripples—can continue for a lifetime. *** View the full article

The beetles could help her disappear, but not in the same way the others had. She would do it for a better life. This was why, even though someone had trashed her van, even though her cell phone was now one big useless glitch and even though her mother was probably sick with worry, Chenoa Cloud had hiked for days to reach this ravine in the dark. If the beetles were nocturnal, so was she. The November wind whirred into the chasm and up the sleeves of her jacket like a threat, carrying with it loamy soil laced with the scent of decay. Chenoa tried to clear her head, to think instead of the waist-high switchgrass that had been gentle company as she walked across Oklahoma’s eroded plains, but the memories of missing friends were too intrusive. The moment her mind went quiet or she felt hopeful or—and this was especially annoying—she was alone in the dark, they were there with her too. The ones who left and never came back, or who couldn’t come back. How many girls had she known who’d never been heard from again? Rez girls gone. Families that searched. Or didn’t. Fleeting news coverage. Then gone again. A shiver trailed across Chenoa’s scalp as she took careful steps through the lonely cut that ran the edge of the reservation. Forget the switchgrass. Think of the beetles. She trailed her hand along the ragged sandstone wall flanking the narrow trail and knew she must be close. The smell of death, that harbinger of the American Burying Beetle colony, grew stronger. Maybe she would come upon them, feeding on a carcass right in front of her. Or maybe they would be tucked into a cave, an expanse suddenly opening under her fingertips in the dark. The image of a black and red beetle on a screen at the front of a lecture hall flashed in her mind. Any graduate student who could find and document an endangered species or, better yet, a species long-feared extinct, would be awarded grant money and a Smithsonian job at the end of the rainbow. It was the moment that had changed the angle of her future. That’s when she’d realized she had a secret, hard and smooth as a seed, its electric shock singing through her body. In an instant, she knew why the American Burying Beetle looked so familiar, and she knew exactly how to win. She was going home. Excerpt continues after cover reveal. Every weekend since, Chenoa had driven her Volkswagen from campus to the rez—a risky endeavor for the unreliable van—to conduct a search that started to feel pointless. Until she found a single crumbling carapace in this, the last place on Saliquaw Nation land that she knew to look. The crimson markings on the dried-out shell were enough to drive her onward. No matter the weather, no matter the hell she’d catch from her mother, no matter what she was afraid to find. Chenoa stumbled to the floor of the ravine, the sound of gnarled branches creaking overhead, her visibility doused by the inky night. A pungent odor filled her nose, her mouth, like fetid, fermenting fruit and something fleshier, rotten, underneath. Here was the source of the smell at last: A raccoon, its ribs picked clean, its tail still thick with fur. Chenoa moved carefully, using her headlamp to illuminate the decay from every angle, and found her future: a pair of American Burying Beetles in a clash of antennae and pincers, the victor to gain a mate. To gain it all. A place in the world where it could survive, even on this land that made people fight for all they had. A thrill began to work its way up from her belly. It spread through her chest and into her throat, which she exposed to the hidden moon, grateful. She’d found them. They were her ticket out. The American Burying Beetle would be a triumph for the reservation, thanks to the recent passage of a Recovering America’s Wildlife Act that would dedicate annually nearly $100 million in federal funds directly to tribal nations for on-the-ground conservation projects. Or it would spell disaster, bring the reservation’s development plans to a screeching halt with punitive fines for habitat damage. Either way, nothing would stop her from proving its existence. It was her way out. Rez life isn’t for everyone, Chenoa whispered over the battling beetles. The night sounds closed in. Chenoa began to recite their names. The girls, gone. Kimberley. Tayen. Loxie. Aileen. She needed to tame her thoughts, put memories into a manageable order, ignore the warning that chirred inside her like an organ. Chenoa stood, feeling the tingle of blood rushing into her thighs. Her headlamp made her blind to anything outside its range of light. If she heard the sound, it only registered as a feeling. The snap of an instinct breaking open inside of her. There was someone else. Out here, in the ravine. Where only she should have been. Where she should have been alone. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.” A man, hands outstretched in front of him, fingers wide. “Sorry, didn’t mean to spook you. I just…” He was close now, talking fast, and Chenoa was standing, rooted. Her mind was trying to make sense of it, of someone out here, with her. In the dark. Then he lunged. __________________________________ From MASK OF THE DEER WOMAN. Used with the permission of the publisher, BERKLEY. Copyright © 2025 by LAURIE L. DOVE. View the full article

The Bond Girl. The phrase itself is a source of celebration and contention. Few other thriller writers before Ian Fleming placed such emphasis on creating rounded female protagonists with their own backgrounds, motives and agency. Few other action films attract such attention with the question of who will play the next female lead. At the same time, the word “girl” rather than “woman” suggests a childlike, even subservient helplessness. Bond would never be described as a “boy” rather than a “man”. A possessive apostrophe seems to hover nearby in invisible ink: Bond’s Girl – defining these women by their relationship to a man. Such duality reflects both the sexist reputation of James Bond and the often-overlooked legacy of women in the world of 007. As a lifelong Bond fan and feminist myself, I am often asked how both can be true at the same time. There is the sexist image of Bond – recently, a clip went viral showing Sir Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger slapping Dink on her bikinied bottom with a dismissive, ‘Man talk.’ It’s not hard to find moments of sexism across the novels and films. However, to dismiss Bond on these terms would be not only to deprive ourselves of something rare in culture – a character who lives beyond the page or screen in popular imagination, an elite rank shared with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Peter Pan – but also to deprive ourselves of the opportunity to examine the culture that produced such a character. On top of that, we’d miss out on Fleming’s inimitable style. I first read a Bond book when I was twelve or thirteen, and have been transfixed since then by his uncanny imagery, vivid and journalistic eye, taut suspense next to exquisitely flowing sentences, wit and wisdom. The literary and cinematic Bond of the fifties and sixties represents both post-war feminism and the backlash against it. Taken as a whole, we might say the James Bond films are a series of lasting images. Yes, one of those images is James Bond dismissing a woman with the words ‘Man talk.’ Yet another is Connery warning Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore that Goldfinger ‘kills little girls like you.’ Honor Blackman’s arch reply: ‘Little boys, too.’ What an icon. I’ve always felt the role of women in Bond deserves more credit. Ian Fleming writes women who are independent, capable, courageous, witty, intelligent, vulnerable, dangerous, haunted. They are often orphaned or exiled; pursuing careers that defy expectation, whether as a journalist or a Special Branch agent; or attempting to survive and escape abusive men, whether as a mistress or a smuggler in a diamond chain. Take these moments across three books where Bond meets ‘The Bond Girl’ and adds up his impressions: “She might sleep with men, obviously did, but it would be on her terms and not theirs.” – On Domino in Thunderball (1961) “She was beautiful in a devil-may-care way, as if she kept her looks for herself and didn’t mind what men thought of them, and there was an ironic tilt to the finely drawn eyebrows above the wide, level, rather scornful grey eyes that seemed to say, ‘Sure. Come and try. But brother, you’d better be tops.’” – On Tiffany Case in Diamonds are Forever (1956) “The whole picture seemed to say, ‘Now then, you handsome bastard, don’t think you can “little woman” me. You’ve got me into this mess and, by God, you’re going to get me out! You may be attractive, but I’ve got my life to run, and I know where I’m going.’” – On Tilly Masterton in Goldfinger (1959) I’ve got my life to run, and I know where I’m going. There is a strength here that might surprise people. There is also a depth to these characters that might surprise. Take, for example, The Spy Who Loved Me, which bears zero resemblance to the Sir Roger Moore film of the same name. This is one of my favourites, the only Bond novel Fleming wrote in first person, told from the perspective of protagonist Vivienne Michel. Part One, titled ‘Me’, details with empathy Vivienne’s struggles as a single, professional woman in sixties London, smashing against the glass ceiling and going through an abortion alone. I first read this as a teenager –Vivienne’s experience aged seventeen facing sexual pressure from her boyfriend to ‘be a sport’ rang true then, and still rings true for women now. Or take Thunderball, where we are treated to one of Fleming’s greatest introspective passages, as Domino tells the story of her life through the lens of a fantasy she constructed growing up inspired by the illustration on a packet of Players cigarettes. This depth of character creates a convincing and distinctive female gaze, which Fleming turns on Bond. Gala Brand is an undercover Special Branch agent. One of my favourite characters, she never made it to film. Here’s Brand assessing Bond after meeting him for the first time in Moonraker (1955): “Commander Bond. James Bond. Clearly a conceited young man like so many of them in the Secret Service. … He could probably shoot all right and talk foreign languages and do a lot of tricks that might be useful abroad. But what good could he do down here without any beautiful spies to make love to.” Gala Brand is primarily concerned that Bond will ‘blow her cover by doing something stupid.’ I love that Fleming gives us such a driven, cool-headed female agent in 1955, a time when post-war advertising was urging women to leave work and get back to the kitchen. And here are Vivienne’s thoughts on Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) after she answers the motel door, desperately hoping for someone to help her against the gangsters who have taken her captive: “At first glance I inwardly groaned – God, it’s another of them! He stood there so quiet and controlled and somehow with the same quality of deadliness as the others. And he wore that uniform that the films make one associate with gangsters – a dark blue, belted raincoat and a soft black hat pulled rather far down. He was good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way and a scar showed whitely down his left cheek. I quickly put my hand up to hide my nakedness. Then he smiled and suddenly I thought I might be all right.” This is a rare opportunity to see Bond through someone else’s eyes, and not as the hero of the story, but as a passing battleship in the night. We’re so used to judging Bond by his own self-perception that it’s a shock to the system that these ‘years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear’ have left him with the ‘same quality of deadliness’ as the villains. That Fleming does this through the eyes of Vivienne underlines the significance of his female characters. The Bond of the novels experiences a character arc perhaps not seen in the films until Daniel Craig’s tenure, one that’s in many ways defined by his relationships with women. Bond’s journey begins with his love for Vesper Lynd, a British operative forced to become a double agent under duress. Her seeming betrayal and suicide leaves Bond with a ‘cold heart’. But his relationships aren’t actually all that cold, only fleeting. After a passionate journey on a train with Jill Masterton, there are no ‘regrets’ for either character: “Had they committed a sin? If so, which one? A sin against chastity?” This is the Bond of 1960s Free Love. (Or it would have been if Goldfinger hadn’t murdered Jill by painting her gold.) Bond cares for the women he connects with even if he knows it won’t last. He tells Domino that he loves her before she leaves to risk everything in a bid for revenge against Emilio Largo. He leaves Vivienne a note urging her to contact the Secret Service if ‘you ever want me or need any help’. There is something about the phrase If you ever want me that I find desperately lonely. Towards the end of his arc, Bond meets Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and his heart thaws. Bond realises, “I’ll never find another girl like this one. She’s got everything I’ve ever looked for in a woman. She’s beautiful, in bed and out. She’s adventurous, brave, resourceful. She’s exciting always.” After grieving for Vesper and avoiding lasting relationships, Bond realises he is ‘fed up of all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience. I wouldn’t mind having children.’ He and Tracy are ‘two of a pair, really. Why not make it for always?’ But their happiness is not without a shadow for long. Blofeld murders Tracy hours after the wedding, freezing Bond’s development, stopping his watch as he cradles her dead body in the crashed car and yet tells the patrolman: ‘we’ve got all the time in the world.’ In Fleming’s final novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), Bond ends the series with the realisation that while he might find happiness with Mary Goodnight, his former assistant and now Number Two at Station J, he can never commit to a lasting relationship, never commit to peace, never commit to stability in the same room with the same view. Many of the women in Bond’s world, from books to films, have achieved iconic status: Vesper, Tracy, Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Octopussy, Dr Holly Goodhead. (The names alone call for a whole other essay.) I grew up as Pierce Brosnan’s Bond hit the screen – I fell in love with a hero who was attracted to accomplished women who weren’t fools and didn’t suffer them either. Natalya Simonova, a computer programmer to whom the mission is just as personal as it is to Bond. Wai Lin, a secret agent played by Michelle Yeoh in a role that catapulted her to Hollywood stardom. Elektra King, the only female arch-villain of the franchise. And, of course, Dame Judi Dench cast as M, a defining moment in cultural history because it became so much more than just a moment. The world of Bond remains evergreen because it evolves and is capable of self-reflection. Judi Dench’s M begins by calling Bond a ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’ and a ‘relic of the Cold War.’ From here, M and Bond go on to form the most meaningful and lasting relationship of all, until she dies in his arms in Skyfall (2012), telling him that he is the one thing she got right. Reader, I cried in the cinema. And that’s only the women in front of the camera. Behind the camera, the first two James Bond films were co-written by the real-life Johanna Harwood. Dana Broccoli and Jacqueline Saltzman were both true creative partners to producers Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Barbara Broccoli has now helmed the films for decades alongside her stepbrother Michael G. Wilson. Eileen Sullivan was the wardrobe mistress for the first five Bond films. Daniel Craig, whose style has grabbed headlines and shaped men’s fashion, has benefited from a run of incredible costume designers: Lindy Hemming, Louise Frogley, Jany Temine and Suttirat Larlarb. Debbie McWilliams has been casting Bond films for over forty years. Phoebe Waller-Bridge co-wrote No Time to Die (2021). The list goes on and on. Women have also played crucial roles in the evolution of the novels, from artist Pat Marriott’s striking covers for the first editions of Diamonds are Forever and Dr. No, to Fay Dalton’s celebrated illustrations for the Folio Society, which I display proudly beside my desk. Samantha Weinberg put Moneypenny centre stage in her series The Moneypenny Diaries. The Fleming family continue to shepherd the books. Ian Fleming’s nieces, Kate Grimond and Lucy Fleming, have been deeply involved in the family business since the 1970s. Literature is in their blood. As part-owners of the company and spokespeople for the Estate, Kate and Lucy’s shared passion has ensured that Ian Fleming Publications is still flourishing over 114 years since Ian was born. Today, the next generation of Flemings – Kate’s daughter Jessie Grimond, working with Diggory Laycock and Fergus Fleming – are honouring their legacy whilst looking to the years ahead. The company has benefited from talented editors, including Kate Jones, Zoë Aquilina, Sarah Fairbairn, Josephine Lane, and my initial editor on the Double O series, the luminous Phoebe Taylor. Corinne Turner first became involved with Ian Fleming Publications Limited in 1988, and has led Ian Fleming Publications as Managing Director since 1999. Corinne has been an inspiring and guiding light for me, endlessly encouraging, classy and cool – so much so that 003 drives Corinne’s car. Just as the history of the Secret Service itself is the story of women and men – something Ian Fleming personally experienced as a Commander in the Intelligence Office during World War Two with close female colleagues – so is the story of James Bond. Maryam d’Abo, who starred opposite Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights, writes that ‘being a Bond Girl was… about being independent enough to stand alongside James Bond and all his history.’ The women of Bond stand in their own history, creating a legacy that will last forever. I feel humbled to step forward and stand alongside them. Bibliography GoldenEye. Directed by Martin Campbell. United Artists, 1995. Film. d’Abo, Maryam and Cork, John. Bond Girls are Forever: The Women of James Bond. London: Boxtree, 2003. Goldfinger. Directed by Guy Hamilton. United Artists, 1964. Film. Fleming, Ian. From Russia with Love. London: The Folio Society, 2016. Fleming, Ian. Moonraker. London: The Folio Society, 2017. Fleming, Ian. Goldfinger. London: The Folio Society, 2018. Fleming, Ian. Diamonds are Forever. London: The Folio Society, 2018. Fleming, Ian. Thunderball. London: The Folio Society, 2019. Fleming, Ian. The Spy Who Loved Me. London: The Folio Society, 2020. Fleming, Ian. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. London: The Folio Society, 2020. Fleming, Ian. The Man with the Golden Gun. London: The Folio Society, 2021. Skyfall. Directed by Sam Mendes. United Artists, 2012. Film. View the full article

Statically speaking, when someone hurts a woman, her intimate partner, whether current or former, is the most likely culprit. We don’t protect teenage girls from this reality, either. They’re exposed to its foundations during one of the most emotionally vulnerable periods of their life: middle school and high school. Experiencing first love and first heartbreak might be considered canon events when it comes to growing up, but so is experiencing the first time the person you like pressures you into doing something you’re not ready to do; the first time you reject an advance; the first time you are punished for rejecting an advance, whether that is socially, emotionally, or physically. Dating is a large part the social currency in high school, because high school is a microcosm of our patriarchal society. The male gaze has currency because we’ve decided it has currency. Who you date—and if you date—means something. Being the only girl without a date at a school dance/the only girl without a boyfriend/the only girl who isn’t ‘experienced’, etc., can cost you social currency. And suddenly a girl might find herself feeling pressured to say yes to a boy who she innately doesn’t want to be with just to fit in. There’s the flipside of this coin, too: being seen as a boy who can’t ‘get’ a girl (as if a girl is something to ‘get,’ like a prize) can be equally as mortifying and even emasculating. It doesn’t help that over the last few years, we’ve seen a rise in the backlash to the #MeToo movement. Men like Andrew Tate gained a following by targeting impressionable young men to groom. At the heart of their messaging is entitlement: that men are entitled to women and their entitlement trumps all. It all sounds very Handmaid’s Tale but it is certainly not fringe and it is certainly not new, though perhaps it is bolder. This kind of entitlement seeps its way into teenage relationships through pressure and manipulation. If you really love me, you’ll do this. I really love you, and that’s why I’m doing this for you. To you. I love you. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Romance can break your heart figuratively or literally, though when it becomes the latter, it morphs into something other than romance. It becomes violence. Falling in love can be wonderfully thrilling or deceptively dangerous. It’s difficult to believe the person we’re baring our heart and soul to and swapping bodily fluids with could harbor nefarious intentions, especially as a young person, when we’re often less wordly and less jaded, and when emotions are just a lot more intense. Is every kiss a deception? Is every date a brush with danger? A teenager might be more prone to ignoring red flags with a controlling boyfriend simply because they have less experience with recognizing them. They might continue a relationship, hoping the red flags will disappear or improve as the relationship progress. Love can blind us. It can make us ignore the feeling that’s telling us to run. And that is precisely why it makes for a compelling plot device in a young adult thriller. A suspicious love interest might be able to pull the wool over the eyes of even the sleuthiest of main characters, if their heart is invested enough. A recent YA thriller that does this especially well is Alexa Donne’s Edgar-nominated Pretty Dead Queens, and one that subverts the trope in highly bingeable fashion is Megan Lally’s That’s Not My Name. Even Angeline Boulley’s knockout of a debut Firekeeper’s Daughter uses a romantic subplot to cast suspicion on characters not being what they seem, at first glance, which is a theme that continues all the way to the heart stopping conclusion. I came of age when stranger danger was preached loud and hard. Be wary of strangers, of men in white vans who will lure you with the promise of a puppy or candy. The reality is that the people who are most likely to hurt us are the ones who already have access to us. They can be our family friends. Our teachers. Our boyfriends. They know the ways in which we’re vulnerable; they know our routines; they have our trust, and they can use all of this against us. It’s a bit of a shock, the first time you feel that self-preservation instinct kick in around someone you should be able to trust. I write for teens, and while books are a form of escape and entertainment, they can also act as a mirror. They can be a warning and a safe place to explore dark and disturbing themes and ideas in a way that’s still appropriate (because, spoiler: teens are often dealing with things that adults might find dark or disturbing, but that doesn’t make them any less real). In my debut YA thriller, The One That Got Away with Murder, romance is not only a subplot but it’s truly at the crux of two cold cases. When my main character Lauren moves to a new town, she’s eager to leave the traumatic end to her last relationship behind her. As much as she tries to downplay it, she’s still in a vulnerable state. The first person she meets is Robbie Crestmont, an enigmatic boy who she begins a no-strings-attached relationship with. She feels a closeness to him, and because they’re intimate, some part of her already trusts him. After all, she trusts him with her body. However, upon learning of her new flame, Lauren’s soccer teammates warn her to stay away from Robbie: he was the last person to see his ex-girlfriend Victoria alive before her body was found floating in a lake. But Lauren can’t reconcile this piece of information with the boy who she is beginning to fall for. Those emotions wield significant power. This leads her to ignore some of her own instincts for self-preservation, even after she finds out Robbie’s brother Trevor was also the last one to see his girlfriend Jess alive. Two brothers, with a dead girlfriend each? What are the chances? Statistically, they’re not low. When Lauren finds disturbing evidence that could prove her teammates were right all along, suddenly her biggest problem goes from trying to survive being the new girl to trying to survive, period. It is always the boyfriend. It is, at least, in my novel. The question is: which one is it? *** View the full article

The phrase “people often ask me” sounds like a setup here, but it’s true that people often ask me why it is I’ve chosen to write about small-town Texas. And every time, the question sort of takes me aback—not because it’s an unusual one, but because the setting of my books feels inherent to me, the first thing that comes when I sit down to write; it doesn’t feel like much of a choice. The straightforward answer is that I’m writing what I know: I grew up in small towns and rural areas. I enjoy wide-open spaces and have a need to spend time there in my mind. There’s also an intrinsic relationship between crime fiction and small-town settings—small-town mysteries their own subgenre, really—that I gravitate toward as a reader, and I couldn’t resist not tossing my own hat in the ring. The melancholy of a crime novel is a natural counterpart to the ache, to the yearning felt by someone who’s ever lived for long in a quiet place. A place where the matinee is at seven p.m. and all the restaurants close shortly after, where the only thing left to do is stir trouble or cook up some drama. And then, there’s the self-possession, the nostalgia that the ones who get away feel—I’m a romantic, a leaver myself, but as a crime writer, I know better than to be so rosy-eyed. Small towns, like any place, are as full of contradictions as they are rooted in tradition, as changing as they are stagnant. I love a book that looks inward and tells me a true story—a story about how in all that quiet, you might find an answer to who we are and where we’re headed. And so, without further ado, here’s a list of titles that use crime as the vehicle and small towns as the fuel, all in service of a well-told story: Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy A beautifully written, sharply observed novel told in alternating viewpoints of the residents of Colliersville, Indiana, Tornado Weather’s plot centers around the disappearance of a five-year-old girl who is last seen at the bus stop near her home during a tornado watch. But the real small-town mystery here is actually how the people in a community—in much of America, really—are both disparate and interlocked. Using the kaleidoscopic framework of many different voices, Kennedy examines the forces that both connect and divide the town’s residents: race, class, the feeling of being trapped (by poverty or sheer inertia), gossip, and perhaps even more powerfully, what’s left unsaid and unknown. Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron The Deborah Knott series is a favorite of mine, both for Maron’s smart, wry protagonist and her detailed portraiture of small-town North Carolina. This, the first in the series, follows attorney Deborah, whose family has lived in the community for generations, as she runs for district judge. If elected, she’ll be the first woman to hold the position, and if her Republican opponent wins, he’ll be the first Black man—one of the many intrigues of this series is its chronicling of local politics and a community poised for change (the books were written and are set in the early nineties). Meanwhile, an unsolved murder case comes to Deborah from a family friend, and this investigation dovetails with the campaign and her shifting sense of identity in unexpected and satisfying ways. The titular bootlegger’s daughter, Deborah learns that the past—hers, and that of her community—is never so far away. Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke Lyrical and tense, the second entry in what Locke has announced with be a trilogy featuring Texas Ranger Darren Mathews opens with a scene that haunts my memory years after I’ve read it: a young boy is on a boat, winding through the ancient cypress on swampy, labyrinth-like Caddo Lake when the boat’s motor dies right as night falls. Later, to investigate the boy’s disappearance—the boy is be the son of a white supremacist he arrested in the previous book—Darren must set up camp in a small town where the main drag is a tourism shrine to antebellum Texas, and where racial prejudices seem to match that era. In addition to being a fast-paced procedural, the book asks deeper questions about who really who owns a place and who gets to tell its story; as layer upon layer peels back, Locke grounds the reader in Darren’s search for purpose, for justice, and identity as a Black lawman in our ever-tumultuous present. Bone on Bone by Julia Keller Another brilliant series, the Bell Elkins mysteries are, like many of the genre, concerned with crime and punishment, but what sets them apart is the overarching theme of retribution in all its forms and what it really means to hold ourselves and our institutions accountable. A native of the small town of Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, Bone on Bone opens with former prosecutor Bell returning home after a prison stint. She has it in mind to begin work on a long-term project holding big pharma responsible for the ravaging of her community by opioids, but soon narrows her focus, hired to look into a drug-related homicide by the thinly-stretched local law enforcement. The grip the opioid epidemic has on this town is tight, and it’s hard for anyone—the law, the family of those lost to overdoses or the addicted themselves—to imagine a way forward. Keller doesn’t pull any punches, but the book is not overly grim in its portrayal of the region; the deep, thoughtful characterizations of the community members who haven’t lost all faith—Bell, also a disabled former deputy and the new county prosecutor—show that in the pursuit of truth, in loving a place even when it’s complicated, you might work through some of your own demons and find glimmers of hope for a better future along the way. The Searcher by Tana French The previous titles on this list are of native residents going on a journey of the heart, or of prodigal sons and daughters returning, but this is the other classically satisfying plot: a stranger coming to town. When it was announced that Tana French had written a western, I don’t know that I’ve ever been as excited for a book’s release—and of course, The Searcher did not only meet all my high expectations but exceeded them. In this Shane-esque suspense, former Chicago PD officer Cal Hooper has moved to the West of Ireland searching for the quiet idyll of life in a small village, and naturally, things turn out to be not what they seem. Beyond her deep characterizations and mesmerizing prose, part of what is so satisfying about a Tana French novel is both her reliance on and ability to totally upend genre conventions; here, as in tales of the old west, there’s a slipperiness of the moral code, Cal having had to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong when no one was looking, and as the story progresses, he must operate outside the law where the local police have failed. The plot kicks into high gear when Cal reluctantly agrees to help a local boy find his missing brother. Cal gets much more than he bargained for in this initiation to the small town’s secrets, its cruelties and its dangers. “Disaster Stamps of Pluto” by Louise Erdrich I first encountered this story in a short fiction anthology I’d been assigned to read in college, an excerpt from the novel The Plague of Doves, and all these years after reading the opening line, “The dead of Pluto now outnumber the living,” I’m still moved by this beautiful, austere tale. An octogenarian in rural North Dakota, a retired physician who writes the historical society newsletter, is feeling the weight of time and loneliness while staring down the twilight of her life. After years of setting every snippet of the town record straight, there is still a bit of history that needs to be recoded—a truth so unsettling she’s hesitated to bear witness to it for all these years. A truth she’s yet to face about the night she was an infant and her entire family was murdered, and the manner with which she discovered the true killer. Disaster stamps are literal postage in the story—collectible pieces of mail that have survived earthquakes and wars—but they’re also the morbid, darkest relics of ourselves and our collective past that we both cling to and push away. The story asks, in a town that’s dying, what will remain of our time here, and examines the urgency with which the living feel called to preserve it. *** View the full article

It was an introvert’s paradise. Two weeks after Fidel Castro forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959, Justin Gleichauf found himself as the one and only employee of the new CIA operation in Miami. Part of the Domestic Contacts Division of the Directorate of Intelligence, the CIA field office (meaning Gleichauf) was tasked with monitoring and reporting on developments in Cuba. Gleichauf missed the fighting in the Second World War because he was too underweight for combat action (he was the water boy in college at Notre Dame because he was so skinny). Instead, he served as a technical advisor in the Office of Price Administration and on the Board of Economic Warfare. In. 1950, he joined the CIA, and was assigned to an office that debriefed American professors and businessmen who had just returned from trips to Europe. During the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Gleichauf directed the interrogations of Hungarian rebels who came to the US after fighting Soviet troops. When he first got to Miami, the first wave of exiles had already arrived, and he set out to learn what government agency was doing what with the new Miami residents. According to Gleichauf, thirteen different federal agencies were working the problem, including the INS; Border Patrol; Customs; the Coast Guard; the State Department; the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW); FBI; and Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence (along with a myriad of local law enforcement agencies). And now the CIA. At this time, the US government still hadn’t decided what it was going to do about the new regime in Cuba. The US intelligence community had very little information about what was happening there, so Gleichauf collected as much open-source intelligence as he could, like newspapers, magazines, and any other printed material that might have relevant information. This open-source sweep also included Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, and Verde Olivo, which gave some insight into the Cuban military. To attract new contacts, he listed his CIA phone number in the telephone book and handed out business cards with his home number. The results were mixed. For every solid lead, Gleichauf explained, there was “a motley collection of weirdos,” and opportunists who were looking for a way to earn some money from the US government. There were also “lots of would-be Mata Haris, eager to do anything for the cause,” and American mercenaries, who thought Cuba would be a quick and easy way to get glory and riches. Gleichauf consistently tried to warn them off, with limited success. There were also Castro sympathizers in Miami: A brick was thrown through the windshield of my car parked outside the house, and my wife received a number of threatening calls along the lines of “. . . [x-date] will be a day that you and your family will never forget . . .” I received a barrage of late-night phone calls, with the caller remaining silent while I answered. I memorized Spanish insults, which I directed at Fidel via the open line. The calls eventually dwindled. With so many exiles entering Miami at that time, the CIA finally realized Gleichauf could not do this all by himself, so it beefed up his office’s staffing. To four. The new additions were one air force and two army intelligence officers. Thankfully, they all spoke Spanish. In the meantime, the government had finally figured out how it was going to react to Fidel Castro: he had to go. The CIA was working on multiple different operational plans against the new Cuban government. One of these involved air-dropping supplies to resistance forces still in Cuba. In late September 1960, the CIA made its first airdrop of supplies to rebels in Oriente Province (enough for one hundred soldiers). The operation, however, did not go as intended. Instead of supplying rebel forces fighting Castro, the airdrop landed seven miles from where it was expected—right into the hands of the Cuban revolutionary militia the arms were meant to be used against. And this wouldn’t be the last time something like this went awry. Richard Bissell, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans, lamented, “We never got to first base in Cuba in building an underground organization. . . . We only had one [supply drop] where we were reasonably sure that the people the supplies were intended for actually got them.” Then there was the story you might already have heard of—the CIA’s use of the mob against Castro. The Mafia was motivated. Before Fidel Castro came to power, Havana had been “the empress city of organized crime,” and a “free port for the mob.” Havana was the main tourist destination in the 1950s, and people came there from all over for the gorgeous weather, the beaches, the gambling, and the bordellos. Even tourists from Miami headed south for activities forbidden at home. Batista was a supporter of this world, at least for the right price (he received serious kickbacks for his protection). Now he was gone, replaced by a regime that was taking it all away. The Mafia could not find a way to control Fidel Castro, which meant he had to go. It was nothing personal, just business. In August 1960, Bissell approached the CIA’s Office of Security to see if they had any assets that “may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action. The mission target was Fidel Castro.” The CIA had used a man named Robert Maheu in the past for some of their shadier operations. A former special agent in the FBI, Maheu left the Bureau and opened a private investigation office in Washington, DC, in 1956. He was what was known as a “cut-out,” a middleman, or someone that allowed the Agency to maintain distance from these kinds of things. According to CIA documents, “over the years he [had] been intimately involved in providing support for some of the Agency’s more sensitive operations.” He had contacts in the underworld and would be the person who insulated the CIA from any direct contact with the mob. Maheu reached out to Johnny Roselli, whom he had met on more than one occasion in Las Vegas. Roselli would eventually link Maheu (and the CIA) with Momo Salvatore “Sam” Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr., two men, incidentally, on the list of the attorney general’s ten most-wanted. Trafficante was the head of the Mafia’s Cuban operations, and Giancana was the chief of the Chicago branch of the Mafia and considered the successor to Al Capone. Together, Roselli and Giancana had controlled a massive Mafia empire, reportedly larger than the organization run by the five families of the New York Cosa Nostra—combined. Maheu had been authorized to offer the mobsters $150,000 for the job, but they declined. They would do it for free. Why? Well, for one, they stood to make far more money if Castro was removed from power, and they could restart their gambling interests in Cuba. Also, they likely assumed helping the US government in such a way could pay off later if they found themselves in, say, legal trouble. In September 1960, Maheu met up with Johnny and Sam at the Boom Boom Room at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. The men discussed a variety of options for taking out Castro. The CIA was originally thinking along the lines of a “typical, gangland-style killing in which Castro would be gunned down,” but Giancana said absolutely no to the use of firearms. He argued that no one could be recruited to do this kind of job, “because the chance of survival and escape would be negligible.” Instead, the mobsters suggested the use of a poison pill. Giancana said he knew a guy, whom he identified only as “Joe” (it was Trafficante), who would serve as a courier to Cuba and could make arrangements there to get the pill into Castro’s drink. The individual who could get close to Castro in Cuba was Juan Orta, who was described as a “disaffected Cuban official with access to Castro and presumably of a sort that would enable him to surreptitiously poison Castro.” According to Roselli and Giancana, Orta had once received kickbacks from gambling profits, and now that that was gone, “he needed the money.” Orta was, at that time, the office chief and director general of the office of the prime minister, Fidel Castro. After Maheu reported back to the Agency, the chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD) was asked to develop a pill that “had the elements of rapid solubility, high lethal content, and little or no traceability.” The poison itself had to be “stable, soluble, safe to handle, undetectable, not immediately acting, and with a firmly predictable end result.” Botulin toxin met all those requirements and could be made into a pill. Six of these were produced and tested. And they didn’t work. When they were dropped in water, they didn’t even disintegrate, let alone dissolve completely, with “little to no traceability.” The TSD tried again, and successfully made a new batch that “met the requirement for solubility.” But would they kill someone? No. Guinea pigs were acquired for the test, but when the TSD tested the pills on the poor animals, they were found to be “ineffective.” Well, that didn’t work. Perhaps we should scrap this idea and move on to plan B? No. Roselli was given the useless pills and passed them along to Trafficante, who said they had then been delivered to Orta in Cuba. A 1966 CIA document states that, after several weeks of aborted attempts, Orta “apparently got cold feet and asked out of the assignment.” But by 1967, the CIA knew the real story: Orta had lost his position in the prime minister’s office in January 1961, while planning for the operation was still in full swing in Washington and Miami. Did Roselli, Giancana, and Trafficante know this? According to the CIA, yes. So why did they say they could deliver when clearly they knew they couldn’t? Only the three of them truly know, but one could surmise that they hoped to curry favor with the government by showing they’d tried. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami by Vince Houghton and Eric Driggs. Copyright © 2024. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 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“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows …” / Insert sinister laugh here. The Shadow, a proto-Batman who, unlike the Caped Crusader, was more than willing to gun down the bad guys, began as a character on a 1930 radio show and then backtracked into his own pulp magazine the following year. The shadowy crimefighter is probably the best-known pulp hero, but those cheap magazines delivered hundreds of heroes and villains into the hands of eager readers for much of the first half of the 20th century. Heroes like the Shadow and Doc Savage and the Avenger are remembered today – if they’re remembered at all – for their reincarnations in paperbacks and comic books beginning in the 1960s. But other mainstays of pulp fiction – to coin a phrase – included cowboys, detectives, secret agents, scientists, barbarians and even private investigators, many of them among the most-beloved characters in genre literature. Pulp magazines, also known as “the pulps,” were born out of publishers’ determination to make as much money as possible, so they were printed on the cheapest pulpwood paper. The writers of the pulps churned out hundreds of novels and stories for a few bucks apiece. Two hundred separate pulp titles were regularly published in the Depression years, according to “An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine,” Ron Goulart’s indispensable 1972 history of the pulps. In “The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps,” the hefty 2007 collection of pulp fiction, editor Otto Penzler raised that ante, saying that more than 500 titles a month were published. The pulps took the country by storm, filling the era between dime novels and comic books and, later, paperbacks. But because they were printed on the most disposable of paper and written and illustrated as cheaply as possible for New York publishing houses, they were, in their paper form, short-lived by design. When they were gone, they were gone. But the pulps, somehow, live on. Unlikable father of the pulps It’s not the sometimes-turgid prose or outlandish plots that keep pulps alive, at least in some segments of the population, today. No, it’s the characters. And some of the most memorable characters were those who created and produced the pulps. “Nobody liked Frank A. Munsey,” Goulart wrote in his guide to pulps, regarding the man considered the father of the format. Munsey, who died in 1925, was a money man, not a creative type. He bought up magazines and newspapers and tried to capture the public tastes of the day. Goulart notes that Munsey ruthlessly canceled his newspapers and magazines when they failed to generate enough revenue. Munsey printed his magazines on cheap wood-pulp paper and shipped them out with the ends untrimmed, solidifying the image of pulps. He founded Argosy magazine in 1888, publishing adult fiction following Argosy’s run as a children’s magazine, and it was one of his most lasting successes, publishing until 1978, more than a half-century after his death. Probably because of his desire to generate the largest-circulation magazines possible at the lowest cost, Munsey joined other publishers specializing in printing fiction. Writers, who were paid pennies or fractions of pennies per word, earned $10 or a little more for a novel-length story for Munsey or other publishers, could churn out fiction at an astonishing pace: Walter B. Gibson, ghostwriter and friend of magicians like Harry Houdini, wrote 112 book-length shadow stories between 1931 and 1936. When the Shadow magazine shut down in 1949, Gibson had written 280 novels about the character, Goulart wrote. Argosy sold a half a million copies a month in the early 1890s, Goulart wrote. In the first dozen successful years of Munsey’s publications, Munsey’s and Argosy, the publisher made a net profit of nine million dollars. Murderous cats and deep-sea corpses The characters in the pulps were introduced to readers by the covers of the pulps. Those lurid covers were, not surprisingly, the strongest selling point of pulps from Munsey and other publishers. The covers were a riot of color, with cowboys and detectives wielding weapons and damsels threatened by murderous creeps. All-Story Detective, which didn’t debut until 1949, really seemed to specialize in putting women in danger. The covers of the earliest issues are a parade of women reacting with open-mouthed terror to knives being thrown at them or thrust at them or guns pointed at them. Black Book Detective, first published in 1933, ran for 20 years. Square-jawed men and menaced women, often blondes in red dresses, were featured on the covers, while a masked crimefighter known as the Black Bat hovered in the background beginning in 1939 – the same year Batman debuted in Detective Comics, a straight comic book for DC. The titles of the featured stories in the pulps were insanely creative – or just insane. “The Cat Mews Murder” headlined the pulp titled Speed Mystery. “Hot Lead Hurricane” led off an issue of Red Seal Western. “Murder Can’t Be Drowned” – illustrated by a great cover of a deep-sea diver discovering an underwater skeleton with a knife stuck in its ribs – would have made Dime Detective Magazine a sure purchase for adventure lovers. Since the paper, stories and that vivid art of the pulps were so cheap, many of the issues were huge: Munsey’s Argosy reached nearly 200 pages in a typical issue. For a dime, those thick pulps were seen as a great buy. “I grew up reading pulps,” author Harlan Ellison wrote in an introduction to a section about villains in “The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.” “I was born in ’34, and unlike most of the Jessica Simpson-admiring twerps of contemporary upbringing, for whom nostalgia is what they had for breakfast, I actually remember what a hoot it was to plunk myself into the Ouroboros root-nest of the ancient oak tree in the front yard of our little house at 89 Harmon Drive, Painesville, Ohio, with the latest issue of Black Book Detective Magazine or the Shadow. Ah me, those wood-chip-scented, cream-colored pulp pages dropping their dandruff onto the lap of my knickers …” After railing on for a few hundred words about how 21st-century entertainment was lacking compared to that of decades before, Ellison allows that when read today, “The (pulp) fictions may creak a bit in the joints, some of the writing may be too prolix for modern tastes (don’t forget, they were writing for a ½ cent to a penny per word in those halcyon days of post-Depression America) and we have been exposed to an electronically-linked world for so long now, that some of the attitudes and expressions in these fables may seem giggle-worthy, but this is a muscular writing that sustained us through some very tough times, and their preserved quality of sheer entertainment value is considerable. So be kind.” Jellyfish and dames at breakneck speed The Black Mask pulp alone has a tremendous legacy of great crime writers, Penzler noted in the “Black Lizard” pulp compendium. “Every significant writer of the pulp era worked for Black Mask, including Paul Cain, Horace McCoy, Frederick L. Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, Erle Stanley Gardner, Charles G. Booth, Roger Torrey, Norbert Davis, George Harmon Coxe and, of course, the greatest of them all, Raymond Chandler,” Penzler wrote. In a 1932 edition of Black Mask, in the story “Honest Money,” Gardner introduced an attorney, Ken Corning, a character that would be perfected when Gardner later created lawyer Perry Mason. Gardner didn’t stint on the vivid writing as he described a would-be client that came to Corning’s office, which was so new the attorney’s name had just been painted on the door. “He looked as though his clothes had been filled with apple jelly…He quivered and jiggled like a jellyfish on a board. Fat encased him in layers, an unsubstantial, soft fat that seemed to be hanging to his bones with a grip that was not temporary. “His voice was thin and falsetto. “’I want to see the lawyer,” he shrilled. And how about this, in Dime Detective in January 1938, from Raymond Chandler, set in a California cocktail lounge where Philip Marlowe has just settled on a barstool. “The kid behind the bar was in his early 20s and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life…Marlowe looked around the room and observed a miserable-looking souse. “You sure cut the clouds off them, buddy, I will say that for you,” Marlowe told the bartender. “We just opened up,” the kid said. … “I ought to call a taxi and send him home. He’s doing his next week’s drinking too soon. “A night like this,” I said. “Let him alone.” In the “Black Lizard” book, the great Laura Lippman introduces a section of stories about women in pulps and acknowledges that “the pulps of the early-twentieth century will never be mistaken for proto-feminist documents.” She cites the then-recent incident of an astronaut who, wearing a diaper and armed with a knife, gloves and garbage bags, drove 800 miles to “confront a romantic rival.” The astronaut was a woman, Lippman notes, and so was her potential victim, who spoiled the scheme. “All I know is that I prefer the company of the dames within these pages, who parade before us in impeccable suits, filmy negligees, torn evening dresses and … a voluminous purple kimono worn over a corset. But not a diaper, never a diaper, thank God. Even the most venal among them have more class than that.” In his “Informal History,” Goulart notes, “Nobody noticed it at the time, but the pulp magazine was one of the casualties of the second world war. The mystery men chuckling in their capes and the bronze geniuses leaping out of penthouses didn’t fit very well in the world as it was after Hitler and Hiroshima.” Goulart notes that paperbacks, comic books and later, television, provided different shapes of romantic and adventurous escape. The pulp writers, great and not-so-great, left behind some memorable writing, but as Penzler noted, “The writers mainly had the goal of entertaining readers when these stories were produced. … stories written at breakneck speed and designed to be read the same way.” View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Victoria Houston, At the Edge of the Woods (Crooked Lane) “A rollicking comedy of errors combines mystery and romance.” –Kirkus Reviews Ava January, The Mayfair Dagger (Crooked Lane) “For fans of romantic suspense and cozies looking for intrigue in their next read.” –Booklist Samantha Jayne Allen, Next of Kin (Minotaur) “Atmospheric….Allen conjures a suitably noirish mood from the opening pages, and renders even her secondary characters in three dimensions. With regional intrigue and plenty of satisfying sleuthing, this series merits a long run.” –Publisher’s Weekly Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) “A Ukrainian soldier survives World War II to face a lifetime of secrets . . . Chapters set during the war alternate with chapters set much later; to begin with, Yefim, as an old man, has just died, and among his papers, his wife has found a letter to the KGB that seems to indicate that much of what he has told his family about his wartime experiences was untrue. Vasilyuk, a journalist as well as a debut novelist, sets out to comb through all this with patience, subtlety, and finesse.” –Kirkus Reviews Anne Hillerman, Lost Birds (Harper) “Heartwarming, gently humorous, occasionally dark, this slice-of-life book offers another entertaining read from a gifted author.” –Booklist Elly Griffiths, The Last Word (Mariner) “Griffiths expertly blends a well-wrought procedural with distinctive characters, academic politics, and romance. Fans old and new will be rewarded.” –Publishers Weekly Kim Sherwood, A Spy Like Me (William Morrow) “Sherwood delivers all the hallmarks of a Bond novel, including a complex plot replete with double-crossing and exotic settings, plenty of Easter eggs for Ian Fleming fans, crackling prose… and a jaw-dropping conclusion. Readers will be on tenterhooks until the final installment.” –Publishers Weekly Douglas Preston, Extinction (Forge) “A thriller as breathlessly riveting as you would expect from a genre master like Douglas Preston, but much more too: it’s meaty and thought-provoking, and tells us a lot about our distant past—and our immediate future. Spectacular!” –Lee Child Sally Hepworth, Darling Girls (St. Martin’s) “As in The Soulmate, compelling themes of trust, betrayal, and brittle façades circle the sisters’ relationships, raising the stakes of the investigation painfully high. Hepworth’s fans will be primed for her newest unnerving thriller.” –Booklist Vince Houghton and Eric Driggs, Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami (PublicAffairs) “Lucid and entertaining, this adventuresome account covers well-trod ground with panache.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article

I recently came across the first pages of a crime novel, written when I was eleven. It was called The Hair of the Dog and was about an author who steals someone else’s plot and is subsequently murdered. At this point in my life I’d never met a writer or written a book. Why was I already so interested in books about books? When I was finally published, just before my fortieth birthday, my first novel was a fictionalised account of my father’s life, called The Italian Quarter and written under my real name, Domenica de Rosa. Four years later I wrote Summer School which follows the fortunes of a group of students on a creative writing course in Tuscany. I adored writing this book, especially the parts where I could become the different writers: the aspiring children’s author, the smug lifestyle guru, the businessman who thinks it must be easy to write a best-seller, the horror fan and the retired civil servant turned crime writer. Their tutor, Jeremy, had a huge success with a book called Belly Flop but has been unable to put pen to paper since. He tells his students what to avoid in a plot: legacies, marriage proposals, happy endings, a hero on a white horse. Of course, all these things happen in Summer School. I thought Summer School would be my big break but that turned out to be the little crime novel that I wrote on the side. My original publishers didn’t want The Crossing Places so my agent suggested I change my name to something more ‘crimey’. I became Elly Griffiths and acquired a new publisher. Quercus (and Mariner in the US) have now published thirty Elly Griffiths books and, with the thirtieth, The Last Word, I’ve come right back to my original preoccupation: the dastardly deeds of writers. The Last Word starts with Edwin, self-styled ‘oldest sleuth in the country’, reading the newspaper obituaries. He starts to notice a sinister trend and the trail leads my trio of amateur detectives to a very sinister writing retreat and an even more sinister book group. To celebrate, here are ten of my favourite books about books. Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang This story of a writer who steals her dead friend’s unpublished manuscript was deservedly a smash hit. It is by turns hilarious and tragic and says important things about cultural appropriation and the corrosive nature of success. I used to be an editor and I defy any ex-publisher not to cringe at the editorial scenes. Possession by A.S. Byatt This is a literary tour-de-force including letters, diary entries and reams of poetry supposedly written by fictional Victorian writers Henry Ash and Cristobel LaMotte. Their love story is decoded by two modern-day academics, Ronald Mitchell and Maud Bailey. Did the dead authors have a relationship and possibly even a child? What is the written evidence and to whom does it belong? The investigation involves love, betrayal and even grave-robbing. Possession is, ultimately, both a detective story and a romance. It also has one of the best epilogues in fiction. The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Delilah Harris Nella Rodgers is the only black employee at a New York publishing house. Why, when another black woman joins, do people listen to her views while Nella’s are ignored? Part office comedy, part fantasy, this book asks serious questions about diversity in the writing world. Once again, the editorial meetings are spot on. The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves Ann Cleeves is one of the most successful crime writers in Britain. She also a great champion of books, reading and libraries. This book is set at a writer’s retreat with a stunning glass observatory. It’s the perfect location for a classic locked-room mystery with Ann’s usual clever twists and hall-of-mirrors misdirection. What’s not to love? As an added bonus, you have the delight of DI Vera Stanhope mixing with the arty types. If We Were Villains by ML Rio What do you get when you take a group of actors, add a country house with a sinister lake and garnish with Shakespeare quotations? The answer is a chilling murder mystery where you are never sure if the characters are acting of their own volition or whether an unseen director is pulling the strings. Do we suspect Richard, who is always the hero, or Alexander, who is always the villain? And what about Oliver and James, who are somewhere between the two? An assured and compelling debut novel. The Children’s Book by AS Byatt This is very much not a children’s book. Olive and Humphry live with their numerous offspring in a rural bohemian paradise. But all is not quite as it seems; there’s tension, sexual abuse and so many extra-marital affairs that several of the children are not sure of their parentage. Olive adores her son Tom, so much so that she writes a book just for him. However ‘Tom Underground’ is a nightmarish tale that eventually destroys its muse. Byatt was inspired by the tragic death of Kenneth Grahame’s son, Alastair, for whom The Wind in the Willows was written. The book spans the period from 1895 to 1918 and does not spare us any of the horrors. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn Amy writes a diary. So far, so straight-forward. But is the girl in the diary the real Amy or are we, the readers, becoming co-conspirators in a plot to implicate Amy’s husband Nick? And what about ‘Diary Amy’, the character we have grown to like and trust? Does she even exist? No-one has ever played the unreliable narrator trick better than Gillian Flynn. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes Part road trip, part literary fiction, this book follows retired doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite in his journey across France, visiting sites related to the author Gustave Flaubert. But how can Geoffrey ever discover the real Flaubert when even his parrot seems to exist in two places at once? Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury This classic dystopian novel is set in a world where reading is outlawed. Guy Montag is a fireman employed to burn books. Then, one day, he decides to read a book instead of burning it. What happens to society when creativity and imagination are silenced? Written in 1953 this book is still as relevant today. Real People by Alison Lurie The late, much-missed Alison Lurie is one of my favourite writers. This deceptively slim volume is set at an exclusive artists’ retreat. Janet Belle Smith, a moderately successful author, is thrilled to be amongst what she sees as her peers. Illyria is the perfect setting for a writer but why can’t Janet write there? It seems that, over the years, Janet has been taking away from reality rather than adding to it. This is why her stories are becoming shorter and her life less fulfilling. A cautionary tale for any creative. *** View the full article

When I first picked up Matthew D. Lassiter’s groundbreaking new text, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, I knew I had to interview him and bring the book’s essential reframing of an oft-misunderstood history to our readers. Lassiter makes a profound and necessary case against both criminalization and coercive rehabilitation, and time and time again, highlights the gap between white fears and white behavior. I was able to send Lassiter some questions over email, what follows is a lengthy and fascinating discussion that sheds light on many previously (may I say, deliberately?) ignored facets of the decades-long war on drugs. Also, we talk about how bad Traffic is. That movie is just ridiculously terrible. Why has so little attention been paid to the history of drug policy in suburbia? The American war on drugs has always been thoroughly pervaded by racial (and class) discrimination, and incarceration rates for drug-related crimes have long been much higher for nonwhite communities and especially Black residents of poor urban areas. This history of racial control through saturation policing, selective enforcement, and harsh sentencing has rightly received lots of attention from scholars, advocacy groups, and journalists. My book builds on this essential work by showing that the war on drugs has long operated in white middle-class suburban areas as well and that these stories have to be told together in order to fully understand the deeper causes and racial consequences of drug control policy. Starting in the 1950s, law enforcement began arresting significant numbers of white teenagers and young adults for drug crimes, especially marijuana. But the discretionary and discriminatory processes of the criminal and juvenile justice systems almost always diverted these white youth into rehabilitation without leaving any trace of a criminal record, if they faced consequences at all. Because millions of white youth were arrested, but very few ever ended up in prison, the familiar graphs about extreme racial disproportionality in mass incarceration actually obscure the extensive impact of drug control policy and discretionary law enforcement in white suburbia. The Suburban Crisis shows how white middle-class suburban “victims” have been as central to American drug politics and policy formation as the Black and Mexican American “villains” inevitably stigmatized as evil urban “pushers,” dangerous border traffickers, inner-city gangsters, and predatory ghetto addicts. White youth who chose to consume illegal drugs, once recast as the innocent victims of foreign and urban predators, became the primary justification for harsh and racially selective crackdowns on the supply side of the market. The drug-war prioritization of marijuana between the 1950s and the early 1980s can only be explained as a futile mission to keep this mild recreational drug away from white middle-class youth because of what it symbolized. White suburban communities have also been the primary beneficiaries of public health prevention and rehabilitation programs, with treatment in urban centers badly underfunded while there’s always plenty of money for policing and prisons. You talk about three eras of drug policies since the 1950s. What are these? What was the cause behind the drug war interregnum? The modern war on drugs really emerged in the early-to-mid 1950s when the U.S. Congress and key states including California and New York passed the first mandatory-minimum laws targeting sale and possession of both heroin and marijuana. These laws responded to grassroots pressure to protect white youth from urban and foreign “pushers,” accompanied by racist imagery from politicians and the mass media that young white females were becoming narcotics addicts and prostitutes in urban slums. This era also depicted marijuana and heroin as equally dangerous drugs based on the hype and mythology of the gateway progression syndrome, that youth who experimented with marijuana would almost inevitably become addicted to heroin. The second era, what I call the drug war interregnum, responded to a massive increase in marijuana use (a felony crime) by millions of white teenagers and young adults starting in the mid-1960s. Law enforcement prioritized suburban and college recreational marijuana markets during this era and arrested white youth at roughly their population share for the first and likely last time in American drug-war history. Arrests of white juveniles peaked at 89 percent of the juvenile total in 1973, compared to barely half after the launch of the war on crack cocaine in the 1980s. The criminal legal system devised an array of discretionary procedures to divert most of these white youth into rehab programs without leaving any trace on their official records. This was a massive government intervention against a relatively harmless recreational drug that had no real impact on demand and made the supply side more profitable. Congress nationalized these procedures in a major 1970 law that reduced first-offense possession of all illegal drugs to a misdemeanor, as leverage to divert even more users into rehabilitation, while increasing the mandatory penalties passed in the 1950s for “professional” traffickers. Mass arrests of white pot smokers led to a vibrant campaign for legalization in the 1970s, when several states led by Oregon and California decriminalized possession of marijuana. It seemed likely at the time that marijuana would soon be decriminalized nationwide, but then “parent-power” groups in affluent white suburbs began mobilizing against the threat of adolescent pot smoking as usage trickled down into the middle schools. In this third stage, suburban activists came together in the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth and pressured both the Carter and Reagan administrations to re-escalate the war on marijuana as well as cocaine, labeled the new gateway risk. Their zero-tolerance agenda profoundly shaped drug control policies in the 1980s, a bifurcated approach of public health “just say no” campaigns in white suburbia and punitive crackdowns in urban centers and foreign nations. This movement ultimately helped lead to the injustices of the racially targeted war on crack. How did marijuana use in the suburbs become the driving narrative of the war on drugs? Marijuana was the most important enforcement priority of the American war on drugs from the 1950s through the early 1980s because it was the illegal drug most likely to be sold and consumed by white middle-class youth. The vast majority of drug arrests nationwide were for marijuana possession, until the focus shifted to crack cocaine and Black urban centers in the mid-1980s, and a large majority of these marijuana arrests were of white teenagers and young adults. The obvious question is why would the United States spend so many resources in the failed effort to interdict a mild and non-addictive drug, and why would policymakers and law enforcement seek to arrest and then rehabilitate so many white middle-class youth—almost always defined as “otherwise law-abiding Americans”—to deter their recreational use of marijuana? “Marijuana smoking by white youth represented a symbolic threat to normative suburban values and capitalist ideologies.” There are plenty of specific reasons for each time period, but the overriding answer is that marijuana smoking by white youth represented a symbolic threat to normative suburban values and capitalist ideologies. The constant racial fear was that “ghetto” pathologies and behaviors were infiltrating the middle-class suburbs. In the 1950s, politics and culture portrayed marijuana experimentation by white youth as an invasion by Mexican and urban Black pushers that would lead suburban children to heroin addiction and even death in urban slums. In the 1960s, marijuana use accelerated in the context of campus protests and the counterculture, leading to fears that the drug was causing white youth to become political radicals, suburban runaways, and “hippies” in urban enclaves—that smoking grass was fueling the so-called “generation gap.” In the 1970s, politicians justified drug-war expansion by conflating marijuana and heroin to make the crisis seem universal, because only a few cities had major heroin markets but parents everywhere were worried about teens smoking pot and moving on to harder drugs. This decade also brought the unscientific diagnosis that lots of young white stoners were falling victim to the “amotivational syndrome,” causing laziness, apathy, and no desire to study hard or work productive jobs—an anxiety that again reflected racialized fears of ghetto contagion. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth also blamed marijuana for suburban family breakdown in the 1970s and 1980s—arguing that latchkey children with both parents working or divorced were smoking pot because of peer pressure and becoming insubordinate druggies and dropouts. You talk about how the seemingly opposed policies of criminalization and coercive rehabilitation were both sides of the same coin. Can you explain how those policies complemented each other and were racialized? Between the 1950s and the 1980s, liberal policymakers in Congress and in key states such as California were the main architects of the war on drugs and champions of its coercive public health framework. They argued that so-called “pushers” should be incarcerated for a long time while their alleged victims were “sick people” who should be forced into rehabilitation, if necessary through involuntary institutionalization in treatment centers and psychiatric facilities. Liberals tended to be more sympathetic than conservatives to some nonwhite drug users whom they also classified as addict-victims, but almost everyone across the political spectrum defined white Americans who broke the drug laws as the definitive victims who always deserved rehabilitation. “The genuine alternative to drug criminalization is some combination of legalization, decriminalization, regulation, and non-coercive harm reduction…” Mandatory rehabilitation depends on criminalization—the use of arrest and then diversion to channel certain illegal drug users into treatment programs and other alternatives to jail or prison. Our drug policy debate often portrays rehabilitation as the opposite of incarceration, but the genuine alternative to drug criminalization is some combination of legalization, decriminalization, regulation, and non-coercive harm reduction. Arresting people for using and selling certain drugs that government policy has arbitrarily criminalized, and then diverting a subset of those deemed “victims” and “deserving” of rehabilitation, is still a form of punishment and state coercion. The war on drugs has long operated, and still largely operates, through a consensus politics shaped by these intertwined policies of punitive law enforcement and coercive public health. Coercive rehabilitation is a discretionary policy that inevitably operates in discriminatory ways and gives law enforcement actors without medical expertise, especially police and prosecutors, the power to define drug “addiction” and “abuse” as they assess potential for rehabilitation. In the 1950s and 1960s, the criminal and juvenile justice systems designed a discretionary diversion process that explicitly used assessment factors including racial status (white youth without prior records always defined as not “real criminals”), grades and college plans, church attendance, parental income, social class standing, and geographic residence. Many recreational drug users, including plenty arrested for marijuana possession, faced coercive rehabilitation even as serious public health problems remained badly underfunded. In California during 1973-1974 alone, law enforcement arrested and diverted around 40,000 white marijuana offenders into formal rehab programs, taking up spots originally allocated for heroin addicts and others with serious drug abuse issues. Privileged white youth definitely resented being forced into any sort of drug rehab program, but they rarely faced incarceration or juvenile institutionalization, the outcomes far more likely for poor and nonwhite youth. You refuse to use the words “moral panic” to discuss white suburban opinions around drug use— why? I made a deliberate decision not to use “moral panic” as an analytical framework for a couple of reasons. First, I think there has been a lot of imprecision and oversimplification around the popularization of the moral panic concept, especially when it jumps from the careful work by sociologists into a catch-all explanation by journalists and some scholars seeking to provide popular audiences with an explanation for “irrational” and “hysterical” crusades, usually those undertaken by conservatives. Arguably the Los Angeles story in chapter one does represent a form of moral panic—the mass suburban campaign in the 1950s demanding life-without-parole sentences for the alleged invading “pushers” of heroin and marijuana, portrayed as Mexican villains. In fact, white youth drove to Mexico themselves to acquire illegal drugs and then supplied their friends and acquaintances. But even in this case, I decided to focus more on how a broad range of actors including law enforcement, politicians, media corporations, and suburban anti-drug groups strategically sought to produce a moral panic in order to justify harsh and discriminatory mandatory-minimum laws in the emerging war on drugs. The analytical framework in The Suburban Crisis relies not on the psychological frame of moral panic but on a more layered political history and state formation model of how policy formation unfolds. The book spends a lot of time critically examining how various actors with anti-drug agendas tried to generate public panic for specific policy goals, usually by deploying the “suburban crisis” framework of endangered white youth and lost white innocence. Politicians and the media exploited stories of white female victims and nonwhite villains to escalate the drug war and distract attention from its constant failure to suppress either supply or demand. The Nixon administration hyped the marijuana-to-heroin gateway to generate public support for its drug-war crackdown in the early 1970s. Drug warriors in both parties and their allies in media and law enforcement misrepresented the dangers of marijuana for decades, promoting many absurd arguments, to justify massive budget expenditures in a war on drugs that they just kept losing. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, a relatively small coalition of anti-marijuana activists from affluent suburbs, lamented the permissiveness toward teenage pot smoking of most of their neighbors while successfully pressuring the Carter and Reagan administrations to make marijuana the top priority of drug-war prevention, rehabilitation, and enforcement campaigns. Just because suburban social movements and their allies in the political-media-law enforcement nexus often emerged victorious, it does not mean that the general public was therefore caught up in a mass moral panic around youth drug use. How did housing policy intersect with drug policy in the story of American segregation? The American housing market was comprehensively segregated by race in the post-World War II decades, a product of deliberate government policy and also defensive resistance to integration by white neighborhoods in the cities and suburbs alike. The racial inequalities in the war on drugs (and the related wars on crime and delinquency) accelerated as part of this broader landscape of metropolitan segregation. White parents viewed racially segregated housing and schools in middle-class suburbia as key to protecting their children from the crime, gangs, and drug problems that they (wrongly) believed were contained in the Black and Mexican American sections of the cities. In 1956, the state of California officially instructed parents that living in a “homogeneous” neighborhood with others of “similar racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds” was the best way to ensure that “normal” youth would not be tempted by the delinquency and drugs associated with the urban centers. Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, the longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, often claimed that marijuana and heroin only appealed to “hoodlums,” whereas “normal” white youth were not at risk as long as they stayed out of urban slums and interracial settings. This strategy to protect white youth through segregated middle-class sanctuaries inevitably failed, again and again—not because the ghetto invaded the suburbs, but because suburban teenagers with cars had the freedom and autonomy to seek out illegal drugs and bring them back to their hometowns. Instead of dealing with this reality, activist parents’ groups, policymakers, and the mass media repeatedly blamed urban and foreign sources for contaminating the allegedly utopian suburbs, leading to enforcement crackdowns that as designed had racially discriminatory consequences. These outcomes—much higher incarceration rates in nonwhite areas, white drug crimes hidden from view through the arrest-and-diversion process—then reproduced the false logic that suburbs were safe havens and cities were dangerous and crime-ridden. You talk about the inherently political categories of childhood and youth—can you unpack that for us, in terms of the selective application of innocence? The politics and culture of the war on drugs has consistently portrayed white youth as innocent victims, even though these youths almost always insisted that they participated in drug markets willingly and had the right to break unjust and irrational prohibition laws. White middle-class youth have instead been depicted as victims in need of protecting from illegal drug “pushers,” victims seduced into crime and delinquency by popular culture and outside invaders, victims in need of diversion to rehabilitation whenever they break the drug laws, victims who must be shielded from the consequences of their criminalized activities, victims of overzealous law enforcement on the rare occasions they ended up in jail or prison for felony crimes. In the book I label these white youth “impossible criminals”—the phrase that appeared over and over in the historical record was “otherwise law-abiding youth,” meaning they broke laws but were not real criminals. The victimization framework removes political autonomy and responsibility from white middle-class youth and at the same time justifies extremely harsh treatment of Black and other nonwhite and poor youth… The victimization framework removes political autonomy and responsibility from white middle-class youth and at the same time justifies extremely harsh treatment of Black and other nonwhite and poor youth who are generally portrayed as villains and not victims, as possessing “real” criminality and therefore not capable of innocence. The discretionary and discriminatory processes of the criminal and juvenile justice systems then reproduce these assumptions about white innocence and nonwhite guilt, as do the political and cultural discourses of policymakers, the mainstream news media, and suburban activist groups. White youth have always been the innocent victims that matter most in every constructed crisis of the drug war—from the marijuana-to-heroin gateway of the 1950s and 1960s, to crack cocaine in the 1980s, to fentanyl today. Can you take a moment to discuss the history of racialized depictions of drug addicted white women as being sexually exploited by people of color? I’m glad you mentioned Traffic, I absolutely HATED that movie… The imagery of the white female, lured from suburban safety by the urban underworld of drug addiction and prostitution across the color line, is the most potent subset of white youth victimization and innocence in the history of the war on drugs. Law enforcement, politicians, and the news media repeatedly circulated stories of addicted white females in Black and Mexican American slums to justify harsh and selective crackdowns, from the war on heroin in the 1950s to the war on crack cocaine that the film Traffic recounts. The scene of Caroline as a “crack whore,” rescued by her father from a Black dealer’s shooting gallery, is designed to tap into the worst nightmares of white suburban parents. In the 1950s and 1960s, Commissioner Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics often justified tough mandatory-minimum laws by telling a similar story of a lost white daughter from the Midwest who ended up addicted to heroin, a prostitute in Harlem with a Black pimp, and ultimately dead. In a similar way, the mass media quickly transformed the narrative of white suburban youth who traveled to countercultural enclaves during the 1967 “Summer of Love” into a familiar tragedy narrative of runaway daughters who became heroin addict-prostitutes in San Francisco and New York City. When political and media actors seek to generate fear and anxiety about any new “epidemic” drug crisis requiring government action, this trope always resonates. You call California the bellwether state for drug policy. How does America’s most populous state compare to the nation overall in the history of drug laws and selective decriminalization? California passed its first mandatory-minimum drug law targeting marijuana and heroin in 1951, before the federal government did the same, and repeatedly escalated sentencing penalties during the next decade. The suburban grassroots movement for tougher drug laws in Los Angeles County also helped push the issue into national politics during this era, because most parts of the country outside of a few large metropolitan regions had relatively small illegal drug markets. Southern California was different than other drug centers, including New York City, because the proximity of the Mexican border created a very decentralized market where almost anyone could became a small-scale dealer or consumer of marijuana, heroin, and also illicit pharmaceuticals. The state of California, led by Los Angeles County, also arrested by far the most people for drug offenses during the 1950s and 1960s—more than half of all drug apprehensions nationwide. California had dedicated narcotics squads in operation before most other states and also a robust juvenile delinquency system that was a national model for the liberal rehabilitative philosophy of arrest and frequent diversion. California also became the cutting edge of the marijuana legalization movement in the 1970s, a grassroots mobilization against the mass arrests of white teenagers and young adults. This youth-led activism eventually resulted in the state legislature passing a decriminalization compromise in 1975, making simple possession subject to a small fine. The law maintained the tough felony penalty for selling marijuana, however, and the legislature also increased the mandatory sentences for heroin in order to target the “real criminals.” In the general pattern, the laws and policies established in California soon became models for federal legislation and then became nationalized—both the state’s get-tough measures and the loopholes designed for the white marijuana market. What was the parent power coalition? How did the feedback loop between advocacy groups and policy makers work? In the late 1970s, “parent power” groups began forming in affluent white suburbs out of alarm that increasingly younger teenagers and even preteens were experimenting with marijuana. They blamed the permissiveness of decriminalization and almost immediately succeeded in pressuring the Carter administration to reverse its initial support for that policy and to re-escalate the federal war on marijuana. They called themselves a nonpartisan “parents’ movement” and argued that marijuana use was causing “amotivational syndrome” on a mass scale, leading to a full-blown suburban family crisis. Of course they did not want their own children to go to jail or prison for breaking the drug laws, so they supported zero-tolerance educational programs and rehabilitation for suburban youth caught with illegal drugs, combined with militarized interdiction of the supply side of the market for not only marijuana but also cocaine. The Carter administration played a key behind-the-scenes role in helping these scattered parent power groups join together in 1980 as the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth. Then the Reagan administration embraced the coalition as part of Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” campaign and worked with its leaders and media outlets to publicize the message that strict parenting and anti-peer pressure messaging could overcome the marijuana crisis in the middle and high schools. This was the feedback loop in action, as federal and media support for the anti-marijuana movement ended up spawning thousands more chapters around the country, which turned mobilized white suburban parents into a formidable political force. The National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth denounced “responsible use” and “harm reduction” approaches to teenage drug and alcohol use—evidence-based public health programs that actually worked—and it helped shift massive amounts of federal and state funding from urban treatment programs to zero-tolerance moral crusades. You contrast the history of pharmaceutical abuse with narcotics use in fascinating ways. What is the history of the drug wars when it comes to the pill industry? This is only a secondary focus of my book, but it is definitely a major theme in the history and policy of the war on drugs. At every stage of the drug-war escalation, the combined licit and illicit market in pharmaceuticals was more deadly and dangerous in a public health sense that all illegal drugs combined. (Of course, the legal drugs of alcohol and nicotine are also major public health challenges). Every landmark federal law that intensified the war on illegal drugs was also designed by policymakers and corporate lobbies to protect and expand the market for pharmaceutical drugs, especially amphetamines and barbiturates. Criminalizing and cracking down on certain drugs, largely because of their association with stigmatized minority groups or (in the case of marijuana) with radical white youth, was always also an effort to monopolize the drug market for pharmaceutical companies in their quest for profits, in the U.S. and abroad. In the 1950s, Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics denied that prescription amphetamines and barbiturates had any addictive potential, which he knew to be false, and only promoted self-regulation for his allies in the pharmaceutical industry. Anslinger considered pharmaceutical drugs to be a “medical market” populated by white middle-class Americans, and he had no desire to criminalize even illicit use because of the race of the consumers and corporate profitability. These pills circulated illicitly in massive quantities, and American companies shipped huge amounts to Mexican border towns, aware that they would be immediately smuggled back into the U.S. Many white youth who smoked marijuana also took non-prescription “uppers” and “downers” as recreational drugs, but this never generated the same law enforcement response because of their pharmaceutical origin. When the comprehensive 1970 drug law created a new regulatory system that placed marijuana into the Schedule 1 category, alongside heroin and cocaine as very dangerous with no medical value, policymakers in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry kept even the illicit circulation of many hazardous pills in other schedules with much lower criminal penalties. Legally prescribed and illicitly circulating pills, especially barbiturates disproportionately taken by white women, caused far more overdose deaths than heroin did during the second half of the twentieth century, even before the recent exponential spike in overdoses due to the over-prescription of OxyContin. Here’s one of my favorite quotes in the book: “America’s long and never-ending war on drugs is unjust, counterproductive, and unwinnable for many reasons—but a central and underappreciated factor is that most of the white middle-class youth subjected to systems of criminalization and social control for their own safety and protection do not actually want to be saved.” Can you talk a bit about how actual suburban drug users reacted to these infantilizing efforts? I really tried throughout the book to bring suburban and white middle-class youth into the story as full political actors and historical subjects, to counter their constant portrayal as innocent and helpless victims. Teenagers and young adults often adamantly defended their right to smoke marijuana, and even to take LSD and cocaine and other criminalized drugs. When actually given a platform, they almost never blamed the “pushers” for tricking them into taking illegal drugs, but instead said that they willingly sought out the market as both users and dealers. High school students almost uniformly ridiculed the marijuana-to-heroin gateway mythology and the absurd classroom instructional films that smoking pot would ruin their lives. White youth were the driving force behind the marijuana legalization and decriminalization campaigns as well, although they had a definite blind spot when it came to recognizing the racial disparities of the war on drugs. They often argued that the government should go after the “real criminals” in urban heroin markets and leave them alone, when the logical and ethical civil liberties stance is that criminalization of drug use is wrong across the board. From the 1950s until the war on crack in the mid-1980s, the vast majority of drug-war arrests were for marijuana possession. This was a massive squandering of public resources, and a massive violation of civil liberties, in a futile mission to stop white middle-class youth from consuming a recreational drug because of its racial and symbolic associations, rather than any actual harm. I started this project with the understanding that the war on drugs has systematically criminalized and punished nonwhite communities, and I assumed that it had by design insulated white youth who broke the same laws from any consequences. Then I started digging into the arrest records and realized that the story was much bigger. There’s no question that racial discrimination is at the heart of the war on drugs, but I also came to view the entire system as a state project designed for the social control of all youth, with divergent outcomes but driven by the same overarching and unjustified policy of criminalization. View the full article

It’s spring. It’s officially spring in New York, where CrimeReads is based. Maybe you, like me, wear sunglasses year-round. But maybe you are just busting yours out for the season. There can be no denying that accessory’s association with warm weather. Nothing elevates a look like a pair of sunglasses. And there are many, many slick shades in the annals of crime film and TV. There are cool sunglasses in lots of movies (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Top Gun, Risky Business, Lolita… though Dolores wears cat-eyes, not the heart-shaped glasses, in the movie itself). But the crime genre has them in spades. So does the sci-fi genre; hey, it’s also a thing that sometimes CrimeReads covers sci-fi, so I’ve included a few sci-fi shades in here as well. We’ve rounded up some excellent ones here, but this list isn’t ranked. Leave Her to Heaven If I were ranking this list, which I’m not (whispers to self: “I’m not, I’m not”), I’d put these tortoiseshell-rimmed shades at #1. A perfect look for the psychotic cypher that is Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent. Léon: The Professional Jean Reno’s hitman Leon wears a pair of round acrylic glasses, which he pairs with a gray beanie, and stubble. The Terminator The Terminator’s Gargoyles glasses are iconic, pure and simple. This is what sunglasses look like when they’re going to murder you. The Big Lebowski John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak has one of the most extraordinarily memorable appearances in movies. Fishing vest, flat top, and a pair of yellow-lensed aviator sunglasses. Taxi Driver Randolph aviators, an army jacket, and a Mohawk… that’s how you do Travis Bickle. I mean, if looks could kill, right? La Piscine La Piscine, a thriller set poolside at a villa along the Côte d’Azur, features several pairs of very cool sunglasses. But the coolest? These enormous lenses worn by Jane Birkin. To Catch a Thief I’m going to caption this like a paparazzi shot in a tabloid: in To Catch a Thief, Grace Kelly pauses catching thieves for a moment to catch some rays along the French Riviera in a pair of these fascinating yellow sunglasses. The Matrix, etc. You knew this one had to be on here. The Thomas Crown Affair I’ve heard that Steve McQueen didn’t simply wear these Persol 714s in The Thomas Crown Affair, but in his personal life as well. Makes sense. North by Northwest Not only does North by Northwest have an ultra-suave pair of tortoiseshell Tart Arnel sunglasses, but it also has some fantastic dialogue about them. Grand Central Ticket Collector: “Something wrong with your eyes?” Thornhill: “Yes, they’re sensitive to questions.” Scarface I don’t know if the sunglasses that Al Pacino wore in Scarface are true Carreras, but they sure make his Tony Montana look like a shady character. (Get it?”) Men in Black A movie where Ray-ban Predators aren’t simply stylish, but are also an essential part of the plot. Kill Bill It’s very likely that the most famous sartorial choice of Kill Bill is the yellow leather jumpsuit, but if we had to pick the most famous accessory from that movie, it’d be… well, the sword, probably. But after that, it’s these amber, oval glasses. Shaft I mean… come on. View the full article

When Prohibition came into force in 1920, it was meant to end the production, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Instead, it was the beginning of perhaps the most infamous criminal period in US history because, very simply, most Americans liked a drink – and many didn’t care where it came from. At the time many wineries were based in downtown Los Angeles, which was surrounded by agriculture, and was the center of the wine region’s trade. There were more vineyards in the valleys just a few dozen miles away too. Barely a dozen of them made it to the end of Prohibition in 1933, and some merchants paid a higher price for their barrels and bottles than falling foul of the new law. Austrian-born Frank Baumgarteker was a successful Californian vintner who disappeared in 1929, and his mysterious disappearance hit the headlines for decades afterward, perhaps because it had all the ingredients of a murder mystery. Baumgarteker, 43, owned a winery in downtown’s Lincoln Heights, Western Grape Products in Cucamonga, some 47 miles east, as well as vineyards, several ranches, and a trucking company. A day or so before his disappearance, he cashed two checks for a total of $1,500 (nearly $27,000 today), and after lunch with an associate on November 25, he said he was driving to his trucking company to deliver the payroll – and was never seen again. Later that day, Baumngarteker’s wife Mary received a letter from Frank postmarked from San Diego, much further south than the trucking company location. It urged her not to worry, that he would write or call, and that “business was bad, as you know.” Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, UCLA Library Special Collections Mary was surprised, as this was the first time he had written to her in English, rather than their native German, and she recalled that before he left, Baumgarteker said he was “approached by six Italians from Chicago,” demanding that he sell them his operation. Baumgarteker had acquired one of special licenses that were an exception to Prohibition, and was now providing wine for “medicinal purposes,” the others being for “cosmetics,” home brewing, and sacramental use. Previous to that, Baumgarteker had been approached by a man named Zorra, who wanted to set up a still in the winery, but the vintner had refused point blank. Zorra was an associate of the Sicilian-Italian crime family who were looking to get control of bootlegging and whiskey making in the city, and Baumgarteker may have known his fate was sealed after kicking him out, as he told his secretary “I have signed my death warrant.” Some reports gasped that Al Capone himself had been one of the six, and while this was soon proved to be false, it certainly sold newspapers. Two days after Baumgarteker left LA that day in 1929, his custom-built purple Cadillac was found in a garage in San Diego with his empty wallet inside. An eyewitness had seen a man driving the car whose description did not fit that of Baumgarteker, and police found other items that did not belong to him, as well as a secret compartment containing checks and bills, but the only real clue was a splattering of distinctive red clay. Sharp-eyed detectives suspected it was from a location in Riverside County that was known as a “gangland cemetery,” but his disappearance kept hitting the headlines, as it was less than a year since the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago had shocked the country. Just a few weeks later in early 1930, the downtown winery was raided by federal agents, who seized 700,000 gallons of wine and 200,00 gallons of brandy, and arrested five employees. At the time it was the biggest haul in Southern California history, and people wondered: were the Feds showing they meant business to whoever was (now) in charge? In May, police thought they had found Baumgarteker’s body in a vat at the Cucamonga winery, but it was in fact Stiffano Botta, who had been overcome by fumes while cleaning the container. A few months after that, the rumor mill went into overdrive when an LA crime boss, Tony Buccola, who claimed to know what happened to Baumgarteker, himself went missing. More ominously, Baumgarteker’s other Western Grape partners, Joseph Neuman and Arnold Bosch, subsequently disappeared too. Less than a year after Baumgarteker’s disappearance, Neuman’s car was found with the door open and the keys inside, but no sign of him. There was suspicion that he had been playing ball with the mob, but had stepped out of line and was “taken for a ride.” Some said Baumgarteker had been cooperating with the mob and slipped up too, but his story just wouldn’t go away. Over the next few years there were “sightings” of him in places across America, Mexico and even in El Salvador. Skeletons were examined in Arizona, Mexico, and the Mojave Desert, among others, but none proved to be Baumgarteker, who had distinctive dental work and a metal plate in his shoulder. Following the plot of a good mystery, the issue of money came into play in 1937, when it was revealed that Baumgarteker had life insurance policies worth $360,000 (nearly $8m today). The insurance companies weren’t paying out of course, and instead offered a reward of $20,000 (nearly $440,000 today) for information, and Mary eventually had to go to court to fight them. She had offered her own bounty of $1,000 (nearly $22,000), also to no avail, and now some wondered whether Baumgarteker had left to start a new life. After all, he had said “business was bad, as you know,” in his last letter, and there was a case of tax fraud pending against him and several others at Western Grape. In 1940, the Swiss-born Bosch, Western Grape’s manager and resident chemist, who had repelled an advance from “Italian gangsters” in 1930 and perhaps assumed he was going to be left alone, wrote his son saying he was “leaving for the desert,” alongside a cryptic mention of “a couple of million of dollars.” He too was never seen or heard from again. Almost twenty after Baumgarteker’s disappearance and soon after Mary’s death in 1949, the LAPD got a tip, and excavated the basement of a Lincoln Heights home that once belonged to a bootlegger. Once again, nothing was found. Finally, in 1977 notorious mafia hit man Frank “Bomp” Bompensiero was murdered. He had many confirmed kills on his record, and more suspected. Baumgarteker was one of the latter, but since his body was never found, we will never know. In 2018, Angeleno Wine Company began operations in downtown Los Angeles. They were the first winery to open in the area since Prohibition, but the only dangerous decision now is whether to order red, white or rosé… View the full article