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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
Forums
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete in today's market. Just beware because we do have a sense of humor.
I've Just Landed So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts - NWOE Novel Writing Guide
Crucial Self-editing Techniques - No Hostages- 48
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George, "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, and "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many horrid and writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom in the novel writing universe. All topics are unlocked and open for comment.
Margaret Atwood Said What?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups- 24
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of informative, entertaining, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on Youtube. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Members of the Algonkian Critics Film Board (ACFB) include Kara Bosshardt, Richard Hacker, Joseph Hall, Elise Kipness, Michael Neff, and Audrey Woods.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?- 92
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read fascinating articles and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side. Also, check out the UMS SFF short story contest. Now taking entries.
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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- Half-Lives
- By Admin_99,
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. If you're in the early or middle stages of novel writing, you'll get a lot from this. We cannot thank her enough for this collection of literary dissection.
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2024
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New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
- New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
- New York Write to Pitch Conference Reviews
For New York Write to Pitch or Algonkian attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Assignments include conflict levels, antagonist and protagonist sketches, plot lines, setting, and story premise. Publishers use this forum to obtain information before and after the conference event, therefore, writers should edit as necessary. Included are NY conference reviews, narrative critique sub-forums, and most importantly, the pre-event Novel Development Sitemap.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Writer Conferences nurture intimate, carefully managed environments conducive to practicing the skills and learning the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive commercial or literary novel. Learn more below.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
Algonkian Conferences - Ugly Reviews
Algonkian's Eight Prior Steps to Query
Why do Passionate Writers Fail?- 243
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Algonkian Novel Development and Writing Program
This novel development and writing program conducted online here at AAC was brainstormed by the faculty of Algonkian Writer Conferences and later tested by NYC publishing professionals for practical and time-sensitive utilization by genre writers (SF/F, YA, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, etc.) as well as upmarket literary writers. More Information
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Half-Lives
“Sex Was Everywhere” Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere: in Lisa’s sixth-grade locker with her breath mints and roll-on deodorant; in Dr. Perlman’s walk—slow and tight-calved; in Mr. Robinson’s guitar, playing Cat Steven’s “Wild World” each afternoon before the bell; in Mrs. Taylor’s wavy, knee-length red hair, smelling of Wella Balsam and cigarettes. Sex was in the heat that gathered under the ceiling of the gym—when you climbed the rope to the very top, you came down smelling of it. Sex was baked into the raviolis Gina’s mom pinched shut around spoonfuls of meat while Gina snuck thick slices of last night’s chocolate cake for you to share upstairs as you admired her confirmation dress, all white eyelet and pearls. Sex was in John O’Connor’s towheaded curls, limp on his damp scalp as he leaned in to marvel at the hugeness of your thighs. There were strong urges in contradictory directions: Gina’s older half brothers, so shaggy and sideburned that you asked to take your plate up to Gina’s room so you wouldn’t have to face them over dinner. Then you spied on them from the top of the stairs, blood pounding in your throat with every swallow. And Sam in your class, who you wanted to press against the wall and kiss, and whom you kicked instead, so hard he turned on you and screamed “what’s wrong with you?” See Eros (life force) and Thanatos (death drive) in later psychoanalytic theory. It was a land where everything was safe until it wasn’t: Ted Bundy, arm in a sling, waiting for you by every car. It was a land where you walked two blocks from school to the Luncheonette for a dollar twenty-five hot dog special, followed by a school-wide assembly introducing the Safe House program—“look for the orange Safe HouSe card in the front window if you need to ring the bell,” too late for little Maria-of-the-transparent-skin who’d returned to school with bruised cheeks and bloody veins in the whites of her eyes. And Mr. McMann was suddenly no longer the boys’ swim team coach because he was a “bachelor.” And Maggie told her mother something that made her mother fire the babysitter and then every week Maggie talked to a doctor named Leda while her mother waited in the car outside. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were body parts. Gina leaned into the window of a lost driver’s car to answer his question and his purple penis was propped against the steering wheel. Lisa’s father slept naked, and when you slept over, you saw his long white buttocks as he left the bathroom in the middle of the night (like quivering poached pears). One day, Teo, a distant older cousin from Israel, appeared and told your little brother (who told you) he liked to lick salt off girls’ breasts. The gardener’s son, rumored to be a rapist, worked shirtless in the backyard doing things to the flowers; his back rolled and glistened like a buttered croissant. There was food. There was a seven-ounce smoked gouda devoured during General Hospital, followed by graham cracker sandwiches filled with Betty Crocker cream cheese frosting during Edge of Night. There were stomachaches, and there were fantasies of Baryshnikov and David Cassidy. Insert here a feminist history of gorging and female sexual repression from the primordial to the postmodern. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there was fever. It was the year of the chickenpox and then the extended family cruise on the Statendam: mothers in halter tops and Bermuda shorts sitting outside in the sun, silver reflectors under their chins, when you fell asleep on your stomach by the pool and your back crisped so that nothing—not Noxzema, not vinegar, not leaning forward for a week—nothing brought relief and you glowed heat and untouchability. And your sister sleepwalked onto the ship’s deck (she could have walked right off the boat into the moony ocean), and then went back to the bunk across from yours and snored with her mouth wide open beneath the ledge with the pennies she must have swallowed since they were gone the next morning. The rest of the week, your cousins calling, “Hey Drea, got change for a nickel?” Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were words whose meanings you pretended to know— ménage à trois and fellatio. And there were jokes whose punch lines you pretended to understand—Why does Dr. Pepper come in a bottle? Because his wife died. It was a land of intimations. There were Annie and Esme who cleaned the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays (lived together, had no boyfriends). There was the piano tuner who was a man one time and a woman the next (Peter to Peterpa). There was Harold and Maude. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were rumors: Mrs. Donoghue (divorced) and Mr. O’Hara (single) team-teaching, winking over your head. There was Lisa at the end-of-school dance, arms around Timmy’s neck. Why had you never seen him before tonight? And how had he gotten so tall without your noticing? There was the rock star whose stomach was pumped because of all the semen he’d swallowed, and Peter’s sister’s best friend who got pregnant from a toilet seat after her best friend got pregnant from her boyfriend’s pee. There were live gerbils and dill pickles in all the wrong places, and there was the spider that laid eggs in some girl’s cheek so when she scratched what she thought was a mosquito bite, hundreds of baby spiders crawled over her face. Banisters were for straddling. The stuffed unicorn was for rubbing between your legs and then throwing in the trash when its horn smelled. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there was fear. There was the drainage hole in the stone wall that opened into nothing but air over the quicksand inlet at the end of the dead-end block. And there was your neighbor Jimmy—square-chinned, squint-eyed, and broody—who you dreamed of kissing before he tripped on his stairs with his fishing rod in hand and the end of the rod went through his eye and into his brain. You stayed up all night praying he would live, that if God let him live, you’d be kinder to your siblings and less fresh to your parents, and he did live, but he was never the same. It wasn’t just the cane and the stiff leg he had to grab by the thigh and swing around the side when he walked. His face was crooked and he was moved to the special ed class, and when your parents invited his family over for dinner and your father asked him what piece of chicken he preferred (“I’m a leg man because the leg never gets old, are you a breast man, Jimmy? Come on, you’re a breast man, right?”) he just sat there with a half-grin on his face, and you wondered if your prayers for him to live were not specific enough. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there was competition. There was Steven on his bike on your way home from school who you were supposed to ask to the square dance on Gina’s behalf, but who you managed to get to ask you first. There were tie-dyed shirts cut into strips at the bottom onto which you threaded wooden beads that clacked and clapped as you walked so Timmy would turn away from Lisa when you entered the room. There were dances you danced at the talent show so the boys could see your hips and poems you wrote for class so the boys could hear your voice. There were boys too skinny and boys too dull, boys not smart enough and boys not mean enough. Boys whose chairs you pulled out when they were about to sit down and boys you made sure you were cast opposite in plays. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were placebos—hooker costumes on Halloween, sleeping bags in the wayback of the station wagon. Catwoman and hot pants. Chest hair peeking out of collars and wrap skirts that flew open in the wind. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there was a whole rich life of love. There were afternoons on the front lawn loving back walkovers and back handsprings, and there was running barefoot to meet the Good Humor truck at the end of the street (pretending the ice cream was for your little sister) and cutting your foot on a piece of glass and Lucy from up the street with her choker made of hemp, smelling like bubble gum and sixteen-year-old-girl sweat, lovingly carrying you back home. It was a land of tube tops and velour and somewhere in the future were your very own children waiting to be slung over your shoulder like the most adorable purse straps. There were swans’ nests in the reeds across the inlet at the end of the block. Potato bugs and daddy longlegs. Black-eyed Susans at the garden wall and, after two weeks in Vermont, a gigantic sunflower— dad-tall, plate wide—nodding its weird love. Not everybody’s father was as handsome as yours. Lisa and Gina liked to come over and watch him play the guitar, admiring how his hands moved up and down the fretboard. This section left intentionally blank. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere, and there were dreams—hiding that you could fly until you couldn’t take it anymore, then flapping your arms hard and taking off over roofs, naked and slick; dropped overboard from a boat and sinking to the bottom before realizing if you sucked hard, you could breathe underwater, slowly, thickly. You were movie stars and murderers in the making. Some of you had big plans. Others went along. Two of you designed a restaurant that served only breakfast and dessert. Afterward, you made and sold painted dough pins in the shape of meaningful and repeatable objects— hearts, moons, roller skates. You were entrepreneurs and chauvinists and other French-sounding things. Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere—and there was death. There was the boy on his bike on his way to school caught under the 18-wheeler who you offered a minute of silence to during first period, though the principal wouldn’t say his name over the loudspeaker, and you couldn’t picture how it had happened and you couldn’t stop picturing how you almost could picture the truck on your bike, on your leg, on your chest. There was the Billig boy diving into the shallow end of the pool. There was the girl who walked onto the neighbor’s frozen pool and fell in and couldn’t get out and no one heard her or held her or saw her as she died, blue and alone. There was Jonathan Livingston Seagull all summer long, on the boat in swells—you were limitless, your body your own idea—with your parents saying, “when are you going to get your head out of your book and live a little?” __________________________________ From HALF-LIVES. Used with the permission of the publisher, AUTUMN HOUSE PRESS. Copyright © 2024 by LYNN SCHMEIDLER. All rights reserved. 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Elle Marr on Mining Personal Experiences for Writing Inspiration
Whether authors will admit it or not, some of us use personal experiences as inspiration for our writing. In the case of my latest psychological thriller The Alone Time, I drew inspiration from a plane crash that I survived when I was a child. The influence of my experience can be identified in the first few chapters of the book, while the rest of the story and its characters are all highly fictionalized. Yet, writing this book while drawing on my real-life memories led me to wonder just how many other authors do the same thing. Was I overstepping in mining this moment for creative purposes? Has anyone else also felt the pressure to leave reality as subject matter alone? I learned that I am far from the first author to have existential questions regarding a writer’s duty to their work versus a duty to their loved ones. Author of Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer had an interesting take on life’s matrixed path: “My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.” This resonated with me when I first read this quote years ago, and then again as I was writing The Alone Time. Although I’ve had a few individuals insist that I never write about them—and I never have—, I find it strange to think I could write my own thoughts and feelings without bordering or overlapping the moments I’ve shared with others. Safran Foer is right in that we can’t separate our stories from others’, not entirely. Another great quote regarding our communal experience is from Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk: “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” This likewise hints at how inseparable our paths are from the people we encounter. I always feel this most acutely when I go to write a dedication page for a new book; how can I single out one person when so many contributed to a new story in overt and inadvertent ways? (Alas, I suck it up and make a choice.) Knowing all this—let’s say, being in agreement on the above, Eudora Welty’s words in On Writing hit hard: “Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.” Welty could have been narrating my life as I wrote The Alone Time when she said this, as it sums up my perspective here. It’s from the personal trauma of the plane crash I survived that the catalyst for my story was born. It was through imbuing my characters with reactions that I saw or had myself during the actual crash, the weeks that followed, or during the moments just before the crash, that I gave my characters their foundations. This basis in reality led me to explore my characters’ subsequent worlds as alternate realities, in a way, to what could have been mine. Finally, I think that if we are taking on the complicated task of writing from our own experiences, then it should be done with rigid respect to the story. Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones, said, “I realised that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.” To my mind, and to Ward’s point, it’s not enough to take inspiration from an author’s personal life—we must mine the darkest parts of this existence to bring depth and believability to the page, even at the cost of presenting real places or real events in less than favorable filters. Bearing this responsibility in mind, I highly doubt that I could ever recreate an actual location or person with my words. We as humans are too complex, layered, and contradictory to fully be transferred to my laptop. And, to be clear, I believe that people who are writer-adjacent deserve their privacy; the individuals who were involved in my plane crash could not have predicted that I would one day write a story stemming from the pivotal event (—and as a child, neither could I), which is why the plot of The Alone Time is the work of my imagination. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t think we shouldn’t try, occasionally, to build on hurts or shocks that we know well for the sake of the story. *** View the full article -
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Fifteen Minutes a Day, Celestine: The Crime Writing Career of Nedra Tyre
After the publication of Nedra Tyre’s first book, a collection of dramatic monologues based upon her career as a social services caseworker entitled Red Wine First, the native Georgian author joined a writing group in Atlanta, one of whose members, Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, would, over the next forty-odd years, devote occasional columns to her colleague in the pages of the Constitution. After Nedra’s death in 1990 Celestine recalled that in their writing group, ironically named the Plot Club (“We had no plots and it was no club”), Nedra as a successfully published author “heard us read [our work] and encouraged and advised us.” To her contemporaries Nedra strikingly possessed a demurely genteel and innocent appearance, being, according to Celestine, a blue-eyed, “tiny, pixie-like creature who wore her red hair in a ponytail and dressed like Alice in Wonderland in full-skirted childlike frocks and Mary Jane slippers.” She looked about twelve, Celestine added, although at the time they first met she was thirty-four years old, and she spoke with a “soft, high voice, and she was shy!” As any mystery fan will tell you, appearances can deceive. As a social worker, Nedra knew all about the facts of life (and death). “Social work can be emotionally exhausting,” she explained in a 1954 newspaper interview about her crime fiction. “But as background for murder, it was just what I needed.” Upon its publication in 1947, Red Wine First was condemned by nationally syndicated newspaper columnist James Farber as an unladylike and indeed “unpardonable tome” besmirched by “gutter language” (i.e., the actual language of Nedra’s clients).[1] The book’s author could be direct in person as well. She once implored another member of the Plot Club—genteel crime writer Genevieve Holden, whose first mystery novel followed Nedra’s own debut effort into print by a year in 1953—when she was giving a halting reading from her latest thriller: “Go on, Gen, get to the incest!” The other ladies in the room–including Celestine Sibley, who at her death in 1999 was described as “the last voice of the white-glove, tea-and-apple-blossom set that had not a sharp edge on it”–promptly dissolved into laughter. This ladylike yet every so often unexpectedly earthy southern crime writer was born on October 6, 1912 to Henry Tyre and his wife Frances “Fannie” Hull in Offerman, Georgia, then (and still today) a tiny town of under five hundred souls located in rural Pierce County in the far southeastern corner of the state, not all that far distant from the Okefenokee Swamp and the Georgia-Florida border. The 1910 United States Census records Henry and Frances Tyre as newlyweds living in Offerman, where Henry served as the little burg’s chief of police. Henry died eight years later—possibly a victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic–and two years after his death the 1920 US Census records that Frances, employed as a primary schoolteacher, was living with her seven-year-old daughter, Nedra, in the city of Marietta, Georgia, today part of the sprawling metropolitan Atlanta area. By 1930 mother and daughter had moved to Atlanta proper, where they resided together in rooms at a series of boarding houses and Frances found permanent employment as a stenographer with Anchor Hocking Glass Company. After graduating from high school, Nedra took a job as a Dictaphone operator for Devoe and Raynolds Paint Company, during which time she also began attending classes at the Georgia Tech Evening School of Commerce (later Georgia State University), whence she graduated with a B. S. degree in 1936. She received an M. A. in English from Emory University a couple of years later (in recognition of her thesis on “dear Mrs. Gaskell,” as she later preciously put it) and attended classes at the Richmond School of Social Work (now the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work), before finally taking employment as a caseworker with the Fulton County Department of Public Welfare in 1939, just a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. In her 2019 Crimereads article on Nedra Tyre, “Nedra Tyre: A Sweet Southern Lady’s Guide to Murder,” Sarah Weinman characterizes Nedra as the quintessential southern lady crime writer, one who while wearing white gloves—and Nedra did wear white gloves–could delicately drive a stiletto, or perhaps a hatpin, into your back in the most genteel manner. While Weinman certainly makes a good point, Nedra’s southern lady looks and demeanor were perhaps to some extent performative, belying and denying a life which appears to have consisted as much of hard knocks and tough cookies as it did of tea and apple blossoms. As we have seen, Nedra’s father, a (very) small-town police chief, died when Nedra was only five or six years old, prompting her mother, who never remarried and seems to have been remarkably bereft of family relations, to move to the big city (Atlanta had a population of over 200,000 in 1920), where, in order to make ends meet, she became a stenographer with the country’s premier manufacturer of cheap, mass produced “Depression Glass.” Nedra herself had to take a secretarial job at a paint factory, all the while dutifully attending night school classes. In 1928 the genteel English author Virginia Woolf famously pronounced: “A woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction.” For her part, Nedra–who did not have Woolf’s luxury of a private income and often found the importunities of life constantly pressing down hard upon her wearied soul–poignantly advised her friend Celestine Sibley, who herself wanted to write a novel: “Fifteen minutes a day, Celestine, that’s all it takes—Fifteen minutes a day.” It is obvious that Nedra held great empathy, born partially of her own personal travails, for the struggling souls on relief whom she daily encountered while working with relief cases in a poverty-stricken region still struggling with grim anguish to pull itself out of the depths of the Great Depression. Nedra’s experience of eight years in three states in this field filled to the brim her impressive debut book, Red Wine First, a work which intoxicated reviewers across the country, some of whom compared the author, in terms of her depiction of the South’s downtrodden plain people, to Erskine Caldwell, Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner. James Agree, who wrote the text to the seminal photo book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), might have been mentioned as well. Montgomery Advertiser reviewer Ray Gould deemed Nedra’s Wine “an experience never to be forgotten. It is shockingly frank…lewd, ribald, and sometimes it delves into subjects too delicate to discuss, but, above all, it is honest….brutal…startling…powerful stuff.” For his part future Pulitzer Prize winning Atlanta Constitution columnist Ralph Emerson McGill, who first introduced Nedra and Celestine Sibley to each other, rhapsodized the author, a “small, red-headed, intense young lady from Atlanta,” as having an ear so fine-tuned for “language and conversation” that in her book “you seem to be listening to [human speech].” Doubtless Nedra’s experience as a Dictaphone operator at the paint company came mightily into play here as well. Nedra’s career as a writer seemed off to a smashing start, but it was five years before there appeared another book by her, the mystery novel Mouse in Eternity (1952). Fifteen minutes a day may get a novel done, but it will not get it done rapidly. While it may have taken a while for Mouse to appear in print, however, the end result was roundly huzzahed by crime fiction critics. Heading the list was noted New York Times reviewer Anthony Boucher, who lauded Nedra as a “highly talented writer who has joined the small group which is trying to relate the detective story to human reality.” The Saturday Review’s “Sergeant Cuff” (aka noted bibliophile John T. Winterich) chimed in more succinctly: “Watch this gal.” Two more crime novels came with surprising celerity from Nedra’s hand over the next couple of years, Death of an Intruder (1953) and Journey to Nowhere (1954), and these works were also applauded by critics. Celestine Sibley’s own favorite among Nedra Tyre’s crime novels, Death of an Intruder “combines the cumulative helpless horror of a compulsive dream with surroundings that scrupulously avoid any trappings of the horrendous,” observed the novel’s notice in the Oakland Tribune, neatly capturing the dichotomous appeal—what might be termed cozy cruelty–of mid-century domestic suspense, of which Intruder is an outstanding example. Under the title “Dispossessed,” Intruder was filmed in 1955 as an episode in NBC’s Matinee Theatre anthology series, which Nedra herself failed to watch when it aired. Mystery writer and reviewer Frances Crane deemed Journey to Nowhere, which closely followed Intruder, “as chilling [a novel] as any I have ever read,” and approvingly concluded, after mentioning Mouse and Intruder: “Nedra Tyre has done another A-1 job.” Anthony Boucher concurred with Frances Crane, assuring his readers: “[Y]ou’ll remember the terrors, and the economy and insight with which they’re depicted.” Director Fritz Lang personally optioned Journey for a film adaptation, which was to be scripted by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett and star, Lang hoped, rising young actress Anne Baxter; but sadly the project fizzled, resulting in Nedra missing what turned out to be her only shot at a lucrative big screen adaptation of one of her novels. Only three mysteries followed Nedra’s initial trio, appearing very sporadically indeed over the next sixteen years: Hall of Death (1960), Everyone Suspect (1964) and Twice So Fair (1971). On the other hand, beginning in 1955 with the prize-winning “Murder at the Poe Shrine,” Nedra would publish twenty-six short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, her last tales there appearing in 1987, just a few years before her passing at the age of seventy-seven in 1990. Between 1962 and 1978, Nedra also placed another ten pieces of short fiction, including the once much-anthologized “Killed by Kindness,” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, as well as another half-dozen stories in additional periodicals, making a total of at least forty-two works over three decades. Short fiction, after all, was easier to write when one could spare but fifteen minutes a day. Nedra’s beloved mother Frances–who had been gravely injured, breaking both of her ankles, when, returning home from work one day in 1946, she had inadvertently stepped off a street car into a pothole–had died in Atlanta on March 10, 1951 at the age of sixty-four, leaving her unmarried daughter, approaching forty years of age, at a loose end in life. Nedra, who had devoted the last five years of her mother’s earthly existence to her constant care, had Frances laid to rest in Atlanta’s Westview Cemetery under a modest headstone with her mother’s initials and the words “Quiet Consummation,” drawn from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline: “Quiet consummation have; and renowned by thy grave!” Frances Tyre’s death helps explains Nedra’s profusion of fiction writing at this time. The next year the author left Atlanta boarding houses behind her and bought a house in Richmond, Virginia, where she taught English and sociology at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). She remained domiciled in Virginia for the rest of her life, gradually losing contact with her Atlanta friends like Celestine Sibley, to whom we owe so much of what we know about Nedra–though she returned to Georgia in 1957 to teach a class on detective fiction at Georgia Tech. By 1961 Nedra had taken a position with the Christian Children’s Fund (today ChildFund), headquartered in Richmond, in which capacity she helped find foster parents for children orphaned by the myriad martial conflicts of the tragically war-torn middle century. In 1961 Nedra, whom Celestine Sibley more than once characterized as a desperately publicity-shy individual, consented to sit for an interview with Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist and author Louise Withers Ellyson, which the newspaper carried under the byline “Richmond Author Plots Crime in Her Spare Time.” Nedra’s interviewer described the author as a bustling, “tiny blonde” who “each evening and Sunday…tries to get to her typewriter to work on her latest mystery novel.” Nedra declined to discuss her current writing project (she had just published the well-received Hall of Death the year before), but she spoke in some detail of her views on the art of mystery writing, which she took quite seriously, being herself an ardent reader of mystery fiction. In contrast with Agatha Christie, she noted, “I don’t plot in the grand manner…I start with a clash of personality and build from there. Sometimes I find it easier to begin in the middle, to write what is uppermost in my mind at the time. The act of violence and the setting are clear before I start, the rest develops as I go along….It is not hard to create people capable of crime; I see so much hostility [in my social work] that it is not too difficult to imagine anyone committing murder.” She allowed that often “I don’t even attempt to hide who did it, but it is not from lack of application. I rewrite, polish and revise everything. But I have so little time!” (Fifteen minutes a day, Celestine….) While Nedra’s novels won praise from critics, the remuneration which she received for all her labor could not have been great. Over two decades she managed to publish only six crime novels, which were far from bestsellers; and only two of them, evidently, ever appeared in paperback editions in the US: Mouse in Eternity, under the dreadfully basic title Death Is a Lover, in a Mercury Mystery digest edition; and Hall of Death, under the title Reformatory Girls, in a titillating Ace edition obviously aimed at attracting the market for salacious juvenile delinquency fiction. Moreover, Nedra’s short stories were published in mystery magazines which paid only $150 per story. Patricia Highsmith, who also published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, viewed this forum disdainfully as strictly a last resort. Fortunately Nedra enjoyed her salaried work, which also gave the author her greatest contact with other people, a social intimacy which she mostly lacked in her private life. Chronically short of money, Nedra is said nevertheless to have given generously to those in need and rigorously scrimped and saved in order to take trips to England (for all of five days) and Mexico, which she justified to herself as research for her writing. She also was known to take additional odd jobs, like clerking at bookstores and envelope stuffing for political campaigns (the latter of which features in her novel Twice So Fair). When Celestine Sibley questioned Nedra about not having a telephone at her home, believing that the intensely private author had deliberately and eccentrically eschewed the instrument, Nedra bluntly informed her that, to the contrary, “It’s not what I like–it’s what I can afford. And I can’t afford a telephone.” Whatever the reason, however, the result was the same: Nedra remained “incommunicado until she was ready to reach out to her friends.” Only at that point would there come, in Nedra’s own meticulous cursive script, a “pretty, funny, enchanting little handwritten missive,” like a rainbow out of the clouds. Eventually Nedra’s charming notes stopped coming, and Celestine lost touch with her old friend. Finally in 1990 the unhappy news arrived in Atlanta that Nedra, who was then seventy-seven years old, had passed away on the eleventh of July at a Richmond nursing home. The previous year she had, like her mother, suffered a “bone-breaking fall,” and after that mishap she was no longer able to live on her own, as she had for the nearly four decades since her mother’s demise. Nedra’s official cause of death was given as cardiopulmonary arrest, but a Virginia friend sadly informed Celestine: “She was tired and ready to die.” At Nedra’s request no funeral service was held, but her ashes were returned to Atlanta and scattered over her mother’s grave. “My funeral service was when my mother died,” she told her friend, who related this melancholy observation to Celestine. “I want no other.” * In her 1961 newspaper interview in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Nedra Tyre told Louise Ellyson: “I do not draw [my characters] from life but altogether from imagination.” Nedra would not have been the first author to have deceived an inquisitive interviewer (and, possibly, herself). In my eyes an examination of her crime novels Death of an Intruder (1953) and Twice So Fair (1971) removes any doubt that the author derived her primary inspiration for these two novels from her own frequently beleaguered life. Like Kind Lady, the classic 1935 suspense film starring Basil Rathbone in full villainous form that was based upon Horace Walpole’s short story “The Silver Mask” (both of which works are referenced in Nedra’s novel), Death of an Intruder is a sort of genteel home invasion story, but here there is a feminine despoiler at work. The novel, subtitled A Tale of Horror in Three Parts, is a major (albeit largely forgotten) example of the “psycho-biddy” subgenre of suspense fiction, where, in its most classic form, two isolated middle-aged or elderly women find themselves claustrophobically locked in a battle of wills, seemingly unto the death, for control over a house and/or estate. Other notable examples of this subgenre which followed Death of an Intruder into print are Shelley Smith’s The Party at No. 5 (1954), Henry Farrell’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960), Ursula Curtiss’ The Forbidden Garden (1962) and Elizabeth Fenwick’s Goodbye, Aunt Elva (1968). With the notorious1962 film version of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, directed and produced by Robert Aldrich and starring deglammed fiftysomething Golden Age Hollywood icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the whole psycho-biddy horror film subgenre was launched as well. Aldrich would go on to produce a film version of The Forbidden Garden, starring Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon, under the title What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), and he had planned as well a film version of Goodbye Aunt Elva, under the working title What Ever Happened to Dear Elva?, although this project never achieved fruition. The subgenre largely petered out in the 1970s. Critics have condemned the term “psycho-biddy” for carrying misogynistic and ageist connotations and, at the least, it seems a frivolous term as applied to Nedra Tyre’s brilliant little novel, which in any event preceded the formal recognition of the subgenre. While Tyre herself with her tale’s subtitle termed it a horror story, what she obviously had in mind was classic supernatural literature and Gothic fiction. Gothics have been called, tongue in cheek, stories about women who get houses, but this adage indeed sums up the plot of Death of an Intruder. Miss Martha Elizabeth Allison, “a spinster in her middle years,” finds, after the lingering death of the long-ailing aunt whom for decades she had diligently nursed, the home of her dreams, purchases it and contentedly settles in with her old dog Dora, only to have her blessed haven somehow invaded by an improbable intruder: another middle-aged, single working woman named, symbolically, Miss Withers, an odiously banal and blandly overbearing individual who simply will not voluntarily depart the premises. And try as Miss Allison gently might, she seemingly cannot oust Miss Withers from her demesne. Over the course of a hag-ridden year with her unwanted housemate, Miss Allison concludes that murder is the only solution to her increasingly desperate dilemma. Presumably Nedra Tyre wrote Death of an Intruder in 1952, when, having entered her fortieth year, she settled into her own house in Richmond after the death of her invalid mother back at their tiny longtime lodgings in Atlanta. Nedra lavished loving attention on her new house, her first real home, meticulously decorating the walls with carefully selected art prints and canvases, which, she told Louise Ellyson, helped to inspire her writing. (Miss Allyson’s love of modern art, particularly Henri Matisse’s Blue Window, plays a central role in Intruder.) It seems impossible to me not to see this novel as anything but an expression of the solitary author’s own personal nightmare fantasy: What if some horrid person “invaded” my wonderful little house? In terms of the way a house becomes an object of mortal battle, as it were, I am reminded of P. D. James’ splendidly nasty little short story “A Very Desirable Residence” (1976), although there the protagonist is male. Nedra’s crime novel, reminiscent of Georges Simenon’s série noire tales, is itself quite short and she maintains complete control of its tight, compelling plot, from its memorable opening scene of two ladies at table to its ironic conclusion, which of course must not be disclosed. Nedra prudently smudges details here and there, but in its general outlines Miss Allison’s life story darkly mirrors her own. Miss Allison, we learn, “had lived a protected girlhood, an only child encircled by the protection of her parents,” but then her mother, “a gentle, gracious and serene person, had died, after a long illness, when Miss Allison was fourteen”; and her father had followed his wife to the grave “after two bedridden years.” Miss Allison had “left her home town and had gone to live with her only relative, an aunt of her mother’s. In the comparatively large and bustling city of Kingborough where her aunt lived Miss Allison had taken a business course and at twenty-one she had started her long employment with Mr. Smithson.” Compared to the current awful situation with Miss Withers, her previous life had not been such a poor thing, she reflects: Her aunt would say: think ahead to that time when I am dead, think what you want your life to be; but Miss Allison had been too busy with the day and the moment; life had been sad but it had been good; she had savored it, though she had lived on its perimeter; though most would have shuddered to have borne the burden of her monotonous job and the chronic invalidism in her family, she had not found it glorious but on the whole she had found it pleasant. Anyone who has read the first part of this introduction can see the similarities between Nedra and her fictional creation. Like Nedra, Miss Allison is a fervent believer in the strict code of the lady: “She was so gentle, so proper, so completely a lady in its true sense,” Nedra observes of Miss Allison, who wears gloves too. After Miss Allison’s code falters in the face of Miss Withers’ monstrously determined dullness, she develops, like Nedra, an abiding passion for ingenious tales of murder, both fictional and true. In these murder tales she begins to glimpse a solution to the problem of Miss Withers. “It was surprising and sad that one so gentle and ladylike as she,” Miss Allyson reflects, “had been forced to the point where she could ask herself with deadly intent and complete composure: How can I get rid of Miss Withers and at the same time save my own neck?” How, indeed? See for yourself what fate befalls the intruder. Like the anguished Miss Allyson, Rosalind Wells, the protagonist of Nedra’s 1971 crime novel Twice So Fair, remains a remarkably isolated character throughout the tale which unfolds to us through her eyes. When her university professor husband and one of his pretty coed students are discovered dead from asphyxiation in the student’s studio apartment, Rosalind is not only tortured by grief, but plagued with tortuous questions. Were the dead man and woman having an affair? Were they victims of accidental death, suicide or murder? And what is the strange story behind the mysterious young man who keeps appearing at her door? Although she interacts with other characters in the novel, particularly the enigmatic young man named Carl, there is a striking interiority to Twice so Fair, as Rosalind wanders dejectedly around her house, now tragically emptied of her loved one, and tries to think through the weird mysteries enveloping her. I cannot help but feel that with this novel the author was casting back two decades, recovering and re-experiencing her feelings of desolation and loss after the death of her mother Frances in 1951. This passage about what are termed, with unintended irony, “sympathy calls,” ritualistically paid after an unfortunate family bereavement, has the elegant precision of unhappy personal experience: No callers appeared during the dinner hour, and then they surged again. Now as earlier some stood at the front door as if to enter a house of bereavement might engulf them in death itself, invite death into their own lives; others stood in the hall iterating and reiterating Matthew’s talents as a professor and as a critic; still others settled rather overlong in the living room and assented when she offered them cake and other refreshments. Dr. Thompson, of the Philosophy Department, happily consumed three wedges of pecan pie, and Rosalind thrust the rest of the pie upon him to take to his bachelor apartment. He had left cuddling the pie against his plump stomach as if he had been a young guest at a children’s party and had won the prize for pinning the donkey’s tail. “Done in Miss Tyre’s expert style,” perceptively commented crime writer and critic Lenore Glen Offord of Twice So Fair, “this is as understated and moving as a dim nightmare.” Both Twice so Fair and Death of an Intruder have that that quality of a dreadful dream from which one cannot awaken and free oneself. Discovering just how Rosalind and Miss Allison escape from their respective solitary waking nightmares makes compelling reading indeed. Social Work May Kill You: Nedra Tyre’s Mouse in Eternity and Hall of Death “[A]s background for murder, [social work] was just what I needed.” So divulged native Georgian crime writer Nedra Tyre to a newspaper interviewer in 1954, upon the publication of her third full-length mystery–her third such in three years. Among Nedra’s half-dozen essays in the genre, both her much praised debut crime novel, Mouse in Eternity (1952), and her exceptionally grim fourth effort, Hall of Death (1960), draw, most effectively, on her professional background as a social worker in the American South. Partially orphaned as a young child by the untimely death in 1918 of her young father, Henry Tyre, chief of police of the small town of Offernan, Georgia, Tyre moved with her mother Frances, a schoolteacher by training, to the state capitol, Atlanta, where both mother and daughter resided at a succession of unsatisfactory boarding houses and found life-sustaining employment in the secretarial field. Often attending evening classes, Nedra in the Thirties received BS and BA degrees from Atlanta universities and attended the Richmond School of Social Work in Virginia. In 1939, just a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, Nedra at the age of thirty fatefully accepted a position as a caseworker with the Fulton County Department of Public Welfare. It is obvious from her writing that Nedra held great empathy, born partially of her own personal travails, for the struggling souls on relief whom she daily encountered while working with relief cases in a poverty-stricken region still struggling with grim anguish to pull itself out of the depths of the Great Depression. Her experience of eight years in this field in three states (Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee) filled to the brim her impressive debut book, Red Wine First, a pungent collection of earthy regional dramatic monologues which intoxicated reviewers across the country, some of whom compared the author, in terms of her depiction of the South’s downtrodden plain people, to Erskine Caldwell, Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner. James Agree, who wrote the text to the seminal photo book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), might have been mentioned as well. Nedra published Red Wine First in 1947, not long after her beloved mother was gravely injured in a street accident when returning home from work one day in 1946; and during the next five years until Frances’ death at the age of sixty-four, Nedra, in addition to carrying out her professional duties, cared for her invalid, ailing parent. After Frances’ death, Nedra, then nearing forty years of age, left both Atlanta boarding house life and case working behind her for good and bought a little house filled with reproduction fine art in Richmond, Virginia, where she taught English and sociology at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). There she also rapidly published a trio of crime novels, in the most productive years of her writing life. In 1928 genteel English author Virginia Woolf famously pronounced: “A woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction.” Finally Nedra had these, as well as a precious bit of time in which she could actually write. * Into her oddly titled first crime novel, Mouse in Eternity, Nedra retrospectively poured her dozen years’ experience in social work. Set a decade earlier in 1942, the novel suggests that, while within her diminutive body the author was filled with a great reservoir of sympathy for the region’s poor and downtrodden, the “weak and the weary” (to quote from a Pink Floyd song), she abominated the grueling grind of her job and the cruelly callous indifference of her bureaucratic overseers. In Mouse–the novel derives its strange title from a poem that speculates “one may either be/A cat that nibbles a moment/Or a mouse in eternity”–soulless bureaucracy is symbolized by the odious, pedantic ogress symbolically named Mrs. Jennifer Patch, who is roundly despised by all the caseworkers in her office–and by everyone else who encounters her. The novel is narrated by caseworker Jane Wallace, a confirmed detective fiction freak (like the author) whose best friend and crime fiend alike is one of her cases, an elderly decayed gentleman invalid by the name of Mr. Lawrence, who lives alone with “his devoted friend” Andrew. Their talk about crime fiction is one of the highlights of the novel. (We learn that Jane’s favorite mystery short story and novel are, respectively, “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” and The Nine Tailors, while Mr. Lawrence’s are “The Two Bottles of Relish” and The Moonstone; the two respectfully disagree on the merits of Sherlock Holms, with Mr. Lawrence pro and Jane con.) It is Mr. Lawrence, in classic armchair fashion, who will eventually solve the murder of Mrs. Patch (speak of the devil), but only after Jane herself has almost been done to death by a desperate murderer, by means of an acutely described sleeping pill overdose: I was sinking deep inside nothingness, being welcomed wherever I was going softly, with the gentleness of tender fingers on a tired, aching head. Death was entering, as a lover, kind, generous, soothing me, caressing me, foundling me. Life was the enemy, calling me back to its stupid, unendurable tasks, trying to cajole me into resistance, trying to tear me from the sweet peace and inaction of death, Life with its harshness had nothing to offer so good as death’s soft calm. Mouse in Eternity earned roars of approval from critics, including such leading names in the field as Anthony Boucher, who lauded Nedra as a “highly talented writer who has joined the small group which is trying to relate the detective story to human reality”; Dorothy B. Hughes, who praised Mouse as one of the best crime novels of the year; and Doris Miles Disney, who allowed herself to be quoted in a back cover rave: “It is the authentic background and the way people…are developed that makes the story so unusual. It is certainly not run-of-the-mill mystery fare. I shouldn’t think anything Miss Tyre wrote would be.” I agree with Doris Disney that the authentic regional and professional background of Mouse is the story’s greatest strength. (A review of this novel which I published about a decade ago I now believe egregiously underestimated its virtues.) Some readers may be reminded, as I was, of the feminine dress shop milieu in English detective novelist Christianna Brand’s Death in High Heels (1941). However, the most intriguing characters, aside from Jane herself (surely to a great extent a self-portrait by the author) are that odd male couple Mr. Lawrence and Andrew. Only later in the novel is it made clear that the younger man, Andrew, is black (the only character of color in the novel I recollect). Throughout the tale Andrew is portrayed with uncommon respect and dignity for the period, but, even more than that, just what exactly is the relationship between the two men? It does not seem merely that of master and servant. I suspect that the two men are same-sex partners, in the accepted modern sense of the term, presented with all the care and discretion required at a time when publishers deemed positive representations of such relationships unseemly and unacceptable. It is a quietly remarkable portrait. * In its depiction of the drudgeries and draining nature of social work, Mouse in Eternity can seem dispiriting at times, but the novel is spiritually sustained by Jane Lawrence’s steadfast love for certain of her co-workers and her gay (?) male friends. The book is, in fact, a veritable ramble in the park compared to Nedra’s bleakest realistic crime novel, Hall of Death. Nedra clearly found real life inspiration for Hall of Death in the nasty 1950s scandals at the Georgia Training School for Girls in Adamsville, Georgia, now a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Atlanta. (The Georgia Training School of course was segregated.) Like Mouse in Eternity, Hall of Death derives its title from a poem which Nedra suggestively quotes as an epigraph, Matthew Arnold’s Requiescat: Her cabin’d ample Spirit/It flutter’d, and fail’d for breath/Tonight it doth inherit/The vasty Hall of Death. The dark novel is set primarily–and unnervingly claustrophobically–at the Training School for Girls in the city of some unnamed, obviously southern and rather socially backward, state. However, as Nedra’s old Georgia friend Celestine Sibley, a beloved longtime columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, noted when reviewing Tyre’s novel in 1960, the connection of her pal’s fictional school–more a prison, really–to the Georgia school for delinquent girls is obvious. A half-dozen years earlier Celestine Sibley herself had written a series of articles about the problems at the Georgia school, contrasting it rather unfavorably with Florida’s Industrial School for Girls at Ocala. Sibley condemned Georgia’s school for its “inhuman treatment of students” (including shaving their heads as punishment), not to mention “recurrent runaways, old and inadequate facilities and unsuitable or untrained staff.” Sibley thought it telling that at the Florida School the entrance sign cheerily read “WELCOME!” while at the Georgia school the sign read forbiddingly “Enter on Business Only.” At the Florida school, walls gleamed with fresh paint, while at the Georgia school walls were scrawled with profanity. At the Florida school, “shining window panes [were] framed with crisp curtains and potted plants,” while at the Georgia school “shattered window panes” had been replaced with “boards and iron bolts.” In Hall of Death, Nedra excels at portraying this grim atmosphere of pervading gloom. “If you’ve ever been in a penal or reform institution of any kind,” Celestine Sibley assured her readers, “….You’ll smell the tired old plumbing, hear the rats in the walls, taste the sponge cake and canned fruit.” What the girls at the school are forced to endure, Sibley noted, is not wanton cruelty, but the banality of bland societal indifference–“a terrible bleakness engendered by the fact that the state, which held them as wards, was really indifferent to them. They were cared for by the ‘Manual of Operation’ put out by the State Department of Welfare and there was nothing in the manual that mentioned love or healing damaged spirits or restoring confidence. So the girls themselves and the nine women staff members are grimly suitable figures for Miss Tyre’s drama of hatred and murder.” The narrator and protagonist of the story, Miss Michael (I do not believe we ever learn her first name), is the idealistic new assistant to the stolid, by-the-book school superintendent, Miss Spinks. At one point the latter woman bluntly tells her new assistant (who also teaches English and grammar at the school): “Miss Michael, please don’t philosophize. Just try to protect yourself.” So Miss Michael keeps speculations like these to herself: No one ever seemed to look directly into a girl’s eyes. I suppose there was too much agony and defiance in them. To establish contact with angry, hostile persons the easy way is to appeal to their anger and hostility, to claim their emotions and hatred as your own. The way to love and kindness is infinitely more difficult. Reflecting her bleakly resigned commitment to blanket punitive incarceration, Miss Spinks lectures Miss Michael with fatalistic finality: We’re carrying out instructions and it’s not for us to question them. I’d like to have an adequate staff. I’d like to have comfortable buildings. But we have to make out with these barns. You’ll get along much better, Miss Michael, if you don’t criticize. We haven’t a rehabilitation program. The girls are here to be punished. They don’t want to change themselves and there’s nothing we can do to change them. In spite of Spinks, Miss Michael tries to reach the girls somehow. She makes connections of a sort with two of them in particular: an angel named Lucy and a devil named Johnny. With interesting results, to say the least. For readers interesting in learning about a certain horrible place in terrible time, Hall of Death delivers the deadly goods. In its own way it is as memorable a female institution mystery novel as Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night or Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, though it will never be as generally popular, I would imagine, on account of its pervasive gloominess. (Many people like their murder fiction to be gay, as it were.) Nedra Tyre herself loved British novels of manners, including manners mysteries, but in this particular book her tone is altogether more earnest and her outlook frequently pitch dark. Yet there is also a very nice little mystery tucked away in the text of this book, which, after all, includes two suicides, a couple of murders and another attempted one. It is fairly clued, with some fine strategies of deception. In other words, in contrast with some other of Nedra’s crime novels, Hall of Death is a genuine detective story. Like Celestine Sibley, Anthony Boucher, a great admirer of the author, highly praised the book, as did others newspaper reviewers. “Told with a perception and sensitivity that few mystery novels can match,” declared the Miami Herald of Hall of Death, “it is a story of chilling violence.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch concurred, proclaiming of Hall: “A chilling story of terror and despair written with discernment and compassion.” Both novels suggest that social work may kill both body and spirit. [1] Celestine Sibley later related that Loretto Chappell, head of the children’s division of Georgia’s State Welfare Department, felt compelled to resign her office after being summoned before a legislative committee in 1951 and accused of being a Communist or Communist sympathizer. It seems that the head of the committee, one Bush Mims, had espied subversive literature in the welfare department’s library, including a copy of Red Wine First. History repeats itself! View the full article -
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Who Am I?
The notion of “Identity” can be regarded in multiple ways: Identity (noun): the condition or fact of being a specific person or thing; the ways that people’s self-concepts are based on their membership in social groups; the characteristics and qualities of a person, considered collectively and regarded as essential to that person’s self-awareness. This discussion explores ways in which each of these concepts can be central to crime fiction and how, as an author, I have explored each of them. * In mysteries and thrillers, it’s often customary to follow a plot to find out “Whodunnit?”, that is to uncover the identity of the perpetrator of an illegal act. Some crimes suggest the offender knew the victim. In this case, friends, lovers, exes, co-workers, and acquaintances may be scrutinized to determine motive and opportunity: Had they recently broken up? Were they arguing? Did someone harbor a long-held grudge against the victim? Were they spotted together just before the crime? Other offenses may appear to have occurred at random, and the breadth of possible suspects is wider. Did anyone near the incident see anything unusual? Hear something? Was anything left at the crime scene to provide a lead? In either case, the detective or protagonist looks for clues—often left unintentionally, sometimes deliberately—and uses these scraps of information to lead them to the culprit. The perpetrator dropped cigarette butts, left heel prints from size 10 boots in the dirt outside the crime scene. Witnesses saw a Chevy van with New Jersey plates careening away at the time of the incident. It’s the detective’s skill in recognizing, pinpointing, and determining the significance of such clues that brings the quest to a successful resolution, and the identity of the perpetrator is revealed. But often the pieces don’t come together smoothly, and the investigation involves misidentification of suspects. In my 2009 novel, The Labrys Reunion, a group of women gather to mourn the murder of one of their daughters. Frustrated by the perceived indifference of the police, they follow clues that seem to suggest a suspect. With no training, only a fervent thirst for justice, they take it upon themselves to detain this potential perpetrator and, overcome with a lust for vengeance, almost become executioners of what turns out to be an innocent man. “Whodunnits” primarily concentrate on the first definition of identity provided above, to name and apprehend the guilty party. It’s somewhat rarer to concentrate on the psychological profile of the perpetrator, although in some novels, readers may learn a lot about this in the search for clues. The reader is also sifting for for evidence right alongside the investigator, and making determinations about whether we draw the same conclusions or have our own ideas about who the offender might be. This engagement of the reader, drawing on our own skills of assessment and discernment to weigh and discard possible scenarios, makes crime novels such an exciting read. * Beginning in the late 19th century, mysteries began to introduce detectives of diverse identities—female, Asian American, Native American. Often, these characters were drawn from the imaginations of writers who were white and male and could therefore present inauthentic or stereotypical representations, such as in Earl Derr Biggers’ characterization of the detective, Charlie Chan. While women writers and writers of color were publishing detective fiction during this period, they often chosen protagonists who were white and male, perhaps due to commercial considerations. Although José F. Godoy is considered the first Latin American writer to write a mystery novel (Who Did It? The Last New York Mystery,1883), and Todd Downing of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma was one of the first commercially published mystery writers of Native American descent, both Godoy and Downing chose to feature white protagonists. The exception seems to be African American writers who, as early as 1901, featured Black detectives in their work. Perhaps due to the dearth of opportunities to publish in white publications, they understood their audience to be Black readers. In both Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901-02) and John Bruce’s The Black Sleuth (1908-09), the authors incorporate black vernacular, the music of black speech, as well as detectives whose black identity is essential to the solving of the murders. These novels also function as social critiques of pre-and post-Civil War racism, and pave the way for writers of diverse backgrounds to use the mystery genre as a vehicle for heightening awareness of the issues confronting their communities. From the mid-20th century to the present, female, Latino, Native American, Asian-American, and LGBTQ as well as African American writers explore their identities and communities through crime fiction. Leading with protagonists who represent those communities, stories reveal the social identities of and demonstrate how the protagonists are up against straight, white, male-dominated structures. Often these protagonists are called upon to prove themselves to a mainstream culture that questions their abilities. The protagonists in my novels are always lesbian and the stories illuminate aspects of that community. In my 2011 novel, Stealing Angel, the protagonist kidnaps the daughter she has co-parented when she learns that someone close to her ex has been physically abusing the seven-year-old child. She leaves the familiarity of her community and heads for a spiritual commune in the southern Baja. There she is an outsider, because she’s a lesbian, is not a member of that insular community, and its members disapprove of her choice to abscond with the child. She must win the trust of the community to gain their help. * In the psychological thriller, we may find more emphasis on the identity of the protagonist, who must resolve internal issues in order to survive the threat to them. In my most recent novel, Season of Eclipse, the protagonist loses her sense of self when she is forced to relinquish her identity and construct another. Marielle Wing is a successful author who unexpectedly witnesses a large-scale, public crime. As someone who may have seen the perpetrators, she is forced to enter the Witness Security Program and thus, give up her identity. Relocated to a new part of the country and assigned a new name and birthdate, she must then construct a new self-concept and story. This won’t be the first time she undergoes a change of name and visual appearance as she struggles to stay out of the clutches of those who are looking for her. This brings to the forefront the question of Who am I? once the trappings of our lives are stripped away. While not all of us solve crimes or go undercover, nearly everyone at one time or another must revise our self-image—whether as a result of marriage or divorce, parenthood, job change or job loss, or coming out. This aspect of identity turns out to be one with which most readers can readily identify. *** View the full article -
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Don’t Make Graves: The Essential Harlem Detectives
The Harlem Detectives arrived like a thunderbolt. Like a meteor screaming across the sky. I had seen detectives before, but nothing compared to this. Or so I felt when I was introduced to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. They make their appearance at the start of chapter 8 of A Rage in Harlem, the 1957 novel that started Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle, conducting their unique brand of “crowd control” at the legendary Savoy Ballroom: “Grave Digger stood on the right side of the front end of the line, at the entrance to the Savoy. Coffin Ed stood on the left side of the line, at the rear end. Grave Digger had his pistol aimed south, in a straight line down the sidewalk. On the other side, Coffin Ed had his pistol aimed north, in a straight line. There was space enough between the two imaginary lines for two persons to stand side by side. Whenever anyone moved out of line, Grave Digger would shout, “Straighten up!” and Coffin Ed would echo, “Count off!” If the offender didn’t straighten up the line immediately, one of the detectives would shoot into the air. The couples in the queue would close together as though pressed between two concrete walls. Folks in Harlem believed that Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson would shoot a man stone dead for not standing straight in a line.” In 1957, in Chester Himes’ New York City, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones are the only two black detectives in the NYPD. Their beat is Harlem. From 110th Street at the northern end of Central Park uptown to 155th Street. From the Hudson River crosstown to the East River. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are “just possibly the two toughest men alive,” according to Stephen F. Milliken’s critical appraisal of the Harlem Cycle. In his finely tuned biography of Himes, novelist James Sallis describes the two detectives as “larger-than-life” figures who possess “something of the power and authority of myth.” I consider Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to be the hardest of all the hard boiled heroes. They would crack Mike Hammer’s skull like a walnut without blinking an eye. If Freddy Otash visited Harlem, they would have used him up like a box of Kleenex. Here is how Himes’ describes them: Grave Digger and Coffin Ed weren’t crooked detectives, but they were tough. They had to be tough to work in Harlem. Colored folks didn’t respect colored cops. But they respected big shiny pistols and sudden death. It was said in Harlem that Coffin Ed’s pistol would kill a rock and that Grave Digger’s would bury it. They took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering to the essential needs of the people—gamekeepers, madams, street-walkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they were rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket. And they didn’t like rough stuff from anybody else but themselves. “Keep it cool,” they warned. “Don’t make graves.” I was introduced to Chester Himes and The Harlem Detectives by Charlie Donelan, a Central Massachusetts impresario and perennial PHD candidate at Clark University in Worcester. This was sometime in the late 1970s, around the time that Jimmy Carter was engaged in mortal combat with a fierce swamp rabbit (Sylvilagus Aquaticus) in the backwoods of Georgia. Donelan had his own connection to the Peach State. He claimed to have grown up in Waycross, Georgia where he drank rum and Dr. Pepper with Gram Parsons. He lived in a shack above the Clark campus, on one of the Seven Hills of Worcester, with the Allman Brothers Band on constant rotation, blasting from a massive pair of JBL speakers. Charlie was allegedly working on his dissertation on James Fenimore Cooper, but most nights he was holding court at the pool tables in the back of Moynihan’s Pub on Main Street. I don’t know if Donelan ever finished his dissertation – I think he got hung up somewhere between Chingachgook and Natty Bumpo. But I do know that when the good Professor handed me his worn copy of A Rage in Harlem one night before last call at Moynihan’s I considered it a mandatory reading assignment. In the opening chapters of A Rage in Harlem, Himes introduces his cast of Harlem eccentrics. “Stack of Dollars,” who runs the biggest standing craps game in Harlem. Undertaker “H. Exodus Clay,” the owner of Harlem’s busiest funeral parlor on Lenox Avenue who thanked his future clients every year at the Annual Undertaker’s Ball. “Sister Gabriel,” a Sister of Mercy who frequented both the craps game and the funeral parlor. For a price, Sister Gabriel would pray for your soul or bless your dice. For another price, Sister Gabriel was a stool pigeon for Grave Digger and Coffin Ed and their eyes and ears on the streets of Harlem. After making their unforgettable appearance at the start of Chapter 8, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger play supporting roles for much of the novel. The main action revolves around stolen money, missing gold, and swift, merciless death. But, by the end of the novel Grave Digger and his “blind rage” take center stage and animate the plot. \Grave Digger becomes a one-man police force to avenge his partner Coffin Ed, who is lying in a hospital bed, fighting to survive the mortal damage caused to his face and his eyes by the acid thrown at him by a crew of hard-boiled hustlers. Before Grave Digger heads out alone into the Harlem night to face down the crew, he tells the white Lieutenant in command of the Harlem Precinct and all of the other white police officers in the station house that he won’t need any backup: The lieutenant frowned. It was irregular, and he didn’t like any irregularities on his shift. But hoodlums had thrown acid in a cop’s eyes. And this was the cop’s partner. “Take somebody with you,” he said. “Take O’Malley.” “I don’t want anybody with me,” Grave Digger said. “I got Ed’s pistol with me, and that’s enough.” The economy and precision of Himes’ writing are diamond sharp. Everyone in that Precinct House and everyone in Harlem who had ever “heard the chimes at midnight” – all the hustlers and the pimps, all the brothel madams and the bookies – knew the score. They all knew that Grave Digger would be coming for the men who put Coffin Ed in the hospital. I knew it too. When I finished A Rage in Harlem I was hooked. I spent the better part of three years tracking down the rest of the Harlem Cycle. But no booksellers near me carried Chester Himes books. There was no market in Central Massachusetts for Himes, a Black expatriate with shadowy ties to the CPUSA, an ex-convict forced into exile from his home. I would come across a novel in the Harlem Cycle here and there over the years – in Cambridge, in New Haven, in Amherst – any town with a decent bookstore and a yen for civil rights. I read them all – Cotton Comes to Harlem, Blind Man With a Pistol, The Crazy Kill – eventually reading my way through the whole series just about the time Ronald Reagan was taking office. Then the Himes’ books practically vanished from the stacks, amidst rumors that Himes was on Caspar Weinberger’s secret “enemies list” and that the big booksellers best not traffic in the works of alleged “enemies of the state.” I don’t know if there is any truth to those rumors. But I do know that enemies are in the eye of the beholder and that Himes’s books hold a place of honor in my library. On the top shelf. So, in 2006, when Cap Weinberger finally shuffled off his mortal coil, I commemorated the occasion by screening a Chester Himes double feature: 1991’s A Rage in Harlem, an entertaining film which I don’t think has aged especially well, and 1970’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, a magical film which has aged like a fine claret. With Cap Weinberger dead and gone, few people think about Chester Himes these days, and fewer still read his crime novels. But maybe the worm has turned for Himes. And maybe Chester Himes and The Harlem Detectives are finally going to get a meaningful measure of the acclaim they deserve. If so, then we have to thank the Everyman Library’s 2024 publication of The Essential Harlem Detectives. The collection selects – curates really – four of the eight volumes of Himes’ Harlem Cycle: A Rage in Harlem (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1959), The Crazy Kill (1959), and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965). It is a beautiful book. The edition meets the highest production standards, with acid-free paper, full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. This edition also includes an introduction, a select bibliography, and a detailed chronology of the Chester Himes life and times. The introduction by crime fiction superstar S.A. Cosby is a heartfelt fan letter to Chester Himes and The Harlem Detectives. Crosby says this: “Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are not private eyes. They are police detectives and carry with them all the psychological and sociological caveats that come with that occupation in the Black community. And yet Himes is able to garner sympathy and adulation for these two men who, within the world of Himes’s Harlem, try their best to mete out justice equally under an inherently unjust system. They use abhorrent techniques to get information from abhorrent people. They never make the mistake of thinking they are the good guys. To quote another fictional policeman, Rust Cohle, they are “the bad men that keep other bad men from the door.” And this: “If Chandler is considered the poet of crime fiction and Hammett its great journalist, then Himes is the songwriter of the downtrodden. His stories sing with a fire and light that comes from a simmering sense of loss. A loss of respect, of humanity, of honor.” I could not agree with S.A. Cosby more. The sheer exuberance of the four novels in the Essential Harlem Detectives is intoxicating. Each of the novels is essential to The Harlem Detectives arc, from their “origin story” in A Rage in Harlem through Cotton Comes to Harlem where they confront the insidious perfidy of Reverend Deke and his breathtaking affinity scams, and make more work for undertaker H. Exodus Clay. The novels are chock full of predators, hustlers, scam artists, thieves and felons. They are all on the make, all on the lookout for the squares and the straights, for the “marks” that they can take. In the rollicking world created by Chester Himes, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are the only real law north of 110th Street. That law is swift and sometimes brutal and it’s not always fair. But every night Coffin Ed and Grave Digger go out into the mean streets of Chester Himes’ brilliant imagination. And every morning when the sun rises over the East River the only thing that stands between the straight and crooked, between the predator and the prey, are the shadows cast by The Harlem Detectives. Welcome back Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Welcome home Chester Himes. *** Bruce K. Riordan is a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. All of the views expressed in this review are entirely his own and do not reflect the views of his employer, the federal government or anyone else living or dead. View the full article -
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Six Books Featuring Killer Women
I love feminism, and I love serial killer novel, but for many years I could never find enough novels featuring feminist female killers. (Aside from Sweetpea by CJ Skuse, the evergreen classic series of this genre.) So I decided to write one. My novel Bad Men is the story of heiress Saffy Huntley-Oliver, whose hobby is killing bad men—murderers, rapists, sex pests, abusers. She’s on a one-woman crusade to take down the patriarchy. The problem is, that it’s hard to have a love life as a straight woman when you’re busy murdering men. So Saffy sets out to get a boyfriend, leaving way too many severed heads in her wake. Years ago, when I first tried to pitch Bad Men to my agent, she didn’t think there was a market for it. But then My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite happened. And then, How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie. Right now, there’s a wealth of female killer novels to choose from, written by feminist authors. Many novels, like mine, explore the vital real-life question of a female response to male violence, but others addressing female friendship, female aspiration, and gender-based systems of power, among other issues such as class, race and climate change. What a wonderful time to be alive! Here are a few of my choices. The Best Way to Bury Your Husband by Alexia Casale Calls to domestic abuse hotlines rose 65% during the Covid19 lockdowns, and this book takes this very grim statistic and turns it into a buddy novel about female solidarity and friendship. Sally, after years of coercive control, brains her husband with a skillet. While searching for the best way to dispose of his corpse, she encounters three other neighborhood women who are looking to do the exact same thing. Even though the murders are tongue in cheek, and I learned some new uses for cat litter, this book doesn’t gloss over the realities of domestic violence. Wahala by Nikki May In Nigeria, ‘Wahala’ means ‘trouble’, and that’s what friends Ronke, Boo and Simi get when they welcome glamorous and rich Isobel into their group. Issues about friendship and culture take the star places in this novel but there’s murder, too, all set in the Anglo-Nigerian community of London. Unlike the killer protagonists of the other novels on this list, Ronke is totally sympathetic—a food-loving dentist on the lookout for love—and the violence in the book is an expression of the toxic unspoken jealousy that can simmer beneath some female friendships. How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent Katy’s book is probably the most similar to my own on this list—they’re both about rich, glamorous female serial killers who target terrible men as a hobby—so if you enjoy one, you’re bound to like the other. Protagonist Kitty is an influencer who enjoys killing rapists, and as heiress to a meat-packing empire, she’s got a perfect way of disposing of the bodies. The problem is, once you start killing, when do you stop? Set in the socialite party-girl world of London, with lots of fashion, glamour and aspirational settings, this is breezy and bloodthirsty and very funny. She’s A Killer by Kirsten McDougall In near-future New Zealand, a rapidly worsening climate crisis has brought an influx of rich ‘wealthugees’, hogging resources and building gated communities to keep out the less fortunate. Alice, an unhappy office worker who hates everything and everyone except for her imaginary friend, finds herself entangled with a group of violent activists, including Erika, a teenage assassin with perfect eye makeup. This is compulsively readable and deeply weird, while at the same time being a chillingly plausible glimpse into a world made more desperate by climate change. The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff Everyone in Geeta’s small Indian village believes that she killed her husband. Geeta didn’t kill him, but she doesn’t mind the reputation—it means they leave her alone, and she’s rid of an abusive man. But when other women in the village start approaching her for help getting rid of their own terrible husbands, Geeta’s quiet life is over. But she styles herself after Phoolan Devi, the legendary Bandit Queen, who smashed the caste system and fought against her abusers. A spirited, funny, touching book that, like most of these killer novels, is really about female community. As a reader, I enjoy the violence in the above books because it’s fictional. Even when the books address social issues, no real people have been harmed in their pages. But what about my more guilty obsession with true crime—which I also used as a plot point in Bad Men? So as a bonus book, here’s one nonfiction account: Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe This book is true crime rather than a novel, but it speaks to some of the ways that real-life women are drawn to violence—in one case, to the extent of planning a mass murder. Monroe examines the female attraction to true crime, by giving accounts of individual women who have, in some way, inserted themselves into crimes that they did not commit. It’s different from many classic true crime accounts because it looks at how the crime has affected people who are neither victims or perpetrators, but uninvolved spectators. From meticulous crime scene dioramas to true crime conferences to murder houses to fans of school shooters—Monroe asks how much of our obsession with crime is innocent pleasure, and how much is complicit in further harming victims. *** View the full article -
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Are You A Good Enough Friend To Hide a Dead Body?
Some time back, I saw a meme on social media about being a “good-enough” friend to help someone hide a dead body. It got me thinking: who would I help? My oldest childhood friends sprung to mind. If they killed someone and couldn’t—who knows why?—call the cops, there’d have to be a valid reason. What though? My answers to that spun into a novel about old friends, twisted secrets, and loyalty stretched to its limits. Authors write books about questions that intrigue us. How far would I go for my best friends? What’s inspired this fierce loyalty? How are we shaped by our oldest friendships? My early childhood was nomadic—a dozen schools before junior high. My dad was a gold exploration geologist and we often lived in wild places, with no other kids for hundreds of miles. When we moved to Victoria BC—on Canada’s gorgeous Vancouver Island—my folks promised we’d stay put until I finished high school. Once I made friends, I stuck to them like glitter glue. Approaching four decades on and living continents apart, if my childhood besties called in hysterics in the night, I’d hop on a plane, no questions asked. I’d also stop at Walmart to buy shovels. As Marlene Dietrich famously said: “It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.” I don’t think I’m alone in my deep loyalty for my oldest friends. We share a special—almost sibling-like bond—with friends made when we’re young. They’re our generation. Those early experiences shape us. In my novel, the two best friends have grown up to lead very different lives. Jo’s a struggling single mom, while Dana is fabulously wealthy. When Dana’s rich and domineering husband winds up murdered, Jo helps her dispose of his body. I wanted to test their relationship in every way possible. Would their childhood ties hold or would the stress of a coverup—plus their socioeconomic disparity—drive a corpse-sized wedge between them? To explain their grown-up relationship, I throw in scenes from their teenage past. I’ve long been fascinated by teen girl power dynamics and teen girl aggression, both overt and not. In 1997, in my seemingly idyllic hometown, a 14-year-old girl named Reena Virk was attacked by seven girls and one boy, all aged 16 or less. They burned her with a cigarette, punched and kicked her repeatedly, and dragged her unconscious body into a waterway, where she drowned. The media and public exploded with moral panic over teen girl violence. The boy, 16, and one of the girls, aged 15, were tried as adults and found guilty of second-degree murder. The boy, who showed remorse, got out of jail in 2010, while the allegedly unrepentant girl has been on day parole since 2017. The other six girls were convicted of assault in youth court, with punishments ranging from 60-day conditional sentences to one year of incarceration. Reena Virk’s parents channeled their unimaginable grief into a program to educate local kids about bullying and violence. In a final bitter twist of fate, Reena’s mom choked to death in a local café 21 years after her daughter’s murder. While I’d already moved overseas when this horrific crime happened, it made me think—a lot. I went to a public high school in a “good”—ie middle class—Victoria neighborhood, not that far from where Reena was murdered. The only physical fights I witnessed in my teens were between girls. At one grad-class campout, a girl attacked a classmate and broke her arm and ribs. This drunken brawl, reportedly over a boy they both liked, could easily have turned deadly. In contrast, I never saw any boys so much as argue. Was this undercurrent of female rage unique to my town and era? Given that Reena was twelve years my junior, it seemed the trend kept going. I wasn’t the only kid in my year intrigued by female friendships and their dark side. My high school bestie—to whom I dedicated A Friend Indeed, grew up to be a prominent sociologist who specializes in teen girl relationships and bullying. Obviously, we’re using very different tools to explore girls’ and women’s realities. But we’re asking similar questions about female relationships, anger, social pressures, and power. While A Friend Indeed is adult Suspense—and contemporary, Jo and Dana’s choices, behaviors, and relationship stem from their teenage past. I hope you’ll join them as they try to outpace their dubious choices. Most of all, I hope you have friends for whom you’d go far indeed—and vice versa. And yes, don’t worry: my husband and those of my oldest BFFs remain alive and well. *** View the full article -
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The Best International Crime Fiction of May 2024
I should really have titled this column “The Best International Crime Fiction of May Plus One From April and One From Last Year”: mistakes were made in my reading preparations, and when you read two-thirds of a book that came out last year thinking it was out this month, you feel compelled to recommend it. Thanks, as always, to my loyal readers, and our search engine overlords. Also, thank you translators! This column was initially conceived to showcase the intricate art of those who distill meaning from words, and the following titles are all testaments to their superlative skill. Layla Martinez, Woodworm Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott (Two Lines Press) This book is so creepy!!! In a visceral exploration of the absurdities of male control, a woman and her grandmother are trapped in a house of horrors, built by a husband who cursed his female relatives to be bound to the abode, only to be trapped there himself, along with numerous other spirits. It’s all pretty bearable if you don’t let the ghosts think you’re getting too vulnerable—just don’t look under the bed, and if something grabs your ankle, squash it ever so firmly. Grotesque brilliance, all the way through. Beatrice Salvioni, The Cursed Friend translated by Elena Pala (HarperVia) For some reason this one is comped only to Elena Ferrante, despite the fact that the FIRST SENTENCE IS ABOUT A DEAD BODY, so somebody needs to clear this up for me: does Ferrante Fever imply…murder?!? Or would this better be described as “Ferrante with a murder”? Anyway, The Cursed Friend is about two adolescent girls in 1930s Italy, who, on the first page, kill a fascist. He deserves it. Do I even need to say that? He’s a fascist. And the girls are badasses, but doomed badasses, because it’s 1930s Italy. Johana Gustawsson, Yule Island Translated by David Warriner (Orenda) Johana Gustawsson is a perennial favorite, and her latest chilling noir has the queen of Scandinavian detective fiction at the top of her game. In Yule Island, a bloody murder on a remote island is the catalyst for all kinds of chaos in the insular world of wealthy Swedish art collectors. Hehe insular in two ways…I’m writing this blurb very late at night, okay? Lina Wolf, The Devil’s Grip Translated by Saskia Vogel (Other Press) Lina Wolf is as cutting in her observations as she is knowing in her study of human behavior. The Devil’s Grip recounts the sordid tale of a toxic relationship in Italy between a traveler in Florence and her ugly-hot paramour (who I imagine looks exactly like Harvey Keitel). Despite an intense initial infatuation, things go downhill rather quickly, and soon enough, there are demons involved. Shumona Sinha, Down with the Poor! Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Deep Vellum Publishing) This is the one from last year, but it’s so good, y’all, and also I read the whole thing before I realized it came out last year. In this dark comedy of misplaced loyalties and imperialist corruption, a woman recounts her woeful, furious story to a police officer after being arrested for attacking a migrant man on the subway. She, too, is an immigrant, employed as a translator in an office where she must listen to the desperate pleas of those who know they are about to be rejected for asylum, and her hatred of the newly arrived masses ebbs and flows with her willingness to forgo solidarity in favor of identifying with the power structure. A timely and terrifying read. View the full article -
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Call for Entries: Unicorn Mech Suit Flash Fiction Contest (Prize $400)
Greetings all sci-fi and fantasy fans, Unicorn Mech Suit is now having our first short story contest. The winner will be published right here on UMS, and the top ten entries will receive personalized feedback. Authors will retain all rights. All entries should be between 500-1500 words and be broadly considered either science fiction or fantasy. (Horror will also be considered if it has speculative elements.) Please send entries to info@oliviafrias.com along with the best way to contact you. Prize: $400 The deadline is August 8th at 12pm pacific time! The winner will be announced in early September. So get writing. -
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Abir Mukherjee on Writing a Conspiracy Thriller “From a Position of Anger”
In the immortal words of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “And now for something completely different…” For Abir Mukherjee – the author of the award-winning, immensely popular procedural series that takes place in post-World War One Calcutta featuring Captain Sam Wyndham, a former detective from Scotland Yard with a taste for opiates, and Surendranath Banerjee, an Oxbridge-educated sergeant and first Indian member of the city’s police department’s criminal investigation department – this means a change of venue to North America, a change of century to the 21st, and a change of genre to a thriller. But, while these elements may be different, what drives Mukherjee’s fiction remains consistent: a desire to stretch his writer’s chops and a desire to “write something punchy, up to the minute, and dealing with the issues that we face today.” Nancie Clare In your recent interview with Publisher’s Weekly, you described yourself as a “wee boy from Hamilton.” And the funny thing is, I was discussing your books with Denise Mina and she used exactly the same words, “Oh, he’s just a wee boy from Hamilton!” Abir Mukherjee Denise Mina is my hero. I think she is amazing. And I say this because whenever I say nice things about her, she gets embarrassed and that’s half the fun. In my opinion, she’s the best writer of crime fiction in the world. Nancie Clare I’m right there with you. Abir Mukherjee Yeah. Have you read The Second Murderer, her take on Raymond Chandler? Nancie Clare Yes! I did an interview with her for Crimereads.com about it. Abir Mukherjee This is sacrilegious, but I think she’s done Philip Marlowe better than Chandler! Quite often you read books written in the style of other authors, and very quickly it degenerates into their own style. What she’s managed to pull off there is Raymond Chandler for the 21st century. The way she’s managed to capture his voice and inject her own thoughts and humor is just amazing. It is just a tour de force, that book. Nancie Clare Let’s talk about Hunted. You’re a successful author with a much-loved series set in Colonial India in the early part of the 20th century. How did it feel moving not just to the 21st century, but to North America? Abir Mukherjee It was great, to be honest with you. It was refreshing. I’ve spoken to a number of other authors about this: I think when you’re five, six books into a series, it’s very hard to keep things fresh. I wanted to do something different. I hope—I believe—in each of my books, I pushed myself a wee bit further. I think by the third book in the series, Smoke and Ashes, I had got the basics of writing down to a level that I was comfortable with. I mean, I can’t read the first book. It makes me cringe! With the fourth one, Death in the East, I experimented with two timelines. With The Shadows of Men, the fifth one, it was two narrators. But again, everything was first person. And I was getting to that stage where I was thinking, well, yes, I’m going to write a lot more of these, but I want to challenge myself. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Nancie, the world seems to be going to hell in a handcar over the last couple of years or last decade. Nancie Clare Umm, yes. I live in America, remember. Abir Mukherjee Yes, you do. And well, I mean, anything you can do, we can do worse. We are confident. Nancie Clare I’m not so sure about that, but please don’t try! Abir Mukherjee Well, yes, it’s a fair point. All of my writing comes from a position of anger. I write about things that are worrying me or are upsetting me but make them allegorical. When you’re writing stuff set a hundred years ago, it must be allegory. And sometimes, well, I don’t want to write allegory. I want to write something punchy, up to the minute, and dealing with the issues that we face today. It just felt right to me. And as for why America: you sneeze, and we catch a cold. America’s issues, America’s decisions affect the world. America has always been a fascinating place to me. I’ve always loved this sort of strange amalgam of different things, these idiosyncrasies, these things that are almost contradictory. I mentioned in the book that I’ve never been anywhere where people are so polite and so nice and tell you to have a nice day. And at the same time, if you look like me they’ll probably shoot you if you park in the wrong driveway. That sort of dual identity of being really, really nice, but being really, really scared of things they don’t understand is something I don’t understand. And I wanted to explore that. I wanted to explore this issue of hope because [the world] still looks to America. The American dream is one thing that I wanted to look at because it is a great ideal, but does it hold anymore? It doesn’t really hold for blue-collar Americans. And yet that American dream is still so powerful that people line up to enter the country, whether it’s people with visas from India or people from South or Central America trying to cross the southern border. People from around the world still believe in the American dream in a way that I think Americans don’t. That really fascinated me. I wanted to look at what happens when the certainties of your past, the things that you’ve grown up with, when those certainties no longer hold. What does that do to people? And I think a lot of the anger, a lot of the issues that we are dealing with, with populism—not just in America, but in the West—is about people who are brought up with intrinsic promises that have been cast aside. What does that do to people? And I really wanted to explore those ideas while killing people, obviously, which is very important in crime fiction. Nancie Clare: Right? Because of course it is a thriller. I have a craft question: The Wyndham-Banerjee books are procedurals, and Hunted is very much a thriller. Was it a difficult transition? Abir Mukherjee: Absolutely. I think the reason there’s been two-and-a-half, three years between my last book and this one is down to getting a handle on what makes a thriller. I had two or three attempts to get that element right, because thrillers are a different game completely from writing a procedural or a historical crime novel like the Wyndham-Banerjee series. And I’m an accountant by training, so thrills don’t come naturally to me. It was a battle. You know what really helped? I read The Accomplice by Steve Cavanagh. And it was amazing. Every chapter or two it felt like you were being hit in the face with a frying pan. It was that dialing it up to eleven. That’s what I took away from it. Like, my first reaction might be: that’s pushing it too far, that’s going too far, that’s not acceptable. Whereas I learned from Steve that readers give writers license if they take readers along for the ride. If we buy into the characters in the story, we will go along with the tension. In Hunted, at the beginning, there is a chapter where a bomb goes off in this mall, and one of the characters, FBI Special Agent Shreya Mistry, is investigating. In the first draft she investigated, and she walked back out. After having read Steve’s books, I thought, why doesn’t the mall fall on her head? And that’s what I did. I collapsed the mall on top of her. That was pushing it up to eleven. And having done that throughout the book, it made such a difference. It was about giving myself the confidence to be a bit braver and just dial things up. And when I got that mindset, everything seemed to work better. Much of that goes down to Steve, and I’ve told him as much several times, he’s probably sick of me telling everybody that I learned how to write a thriller after reading his books. But there you are. Nancie Clare In this thriller you have a story that jumps from the UK to British Columbia and then to the west coast of the United States, south to Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, and then back across the United States by cars, buses, and airplanes told from the point of view of three characters and the whole story takes place in a week and a day. I guess this is another craft question: Did you have to plot this on a board with sticky notes or cards? Abir Mukherjee The short answer to that is yes, I had huge sheets of A-3 paper [approximately 11.75” X 16.5”] and I plotted it out on those. I have to say though, it changed a lot. It was always going to be that chase across America because as I say, one of the things I wanted to do in this book was look at America and take the temperature of America, especially those parts that are in the middle—the people that essentially decide elections now. That’s where I wanted to write about. It was a big, big job to plan. But to be honest with you, it was the other part of that question, the three different narrators [that was really challenging]. There are seven characters, and the story is told from the points of view of three of them. It was that process which proved much trickier to get right. I mean, a plot is a plot. You can plot it out, it’s there. That’s your structure. You can stick to it to make that into a novel. To make this into a story, it’s all about the characters. The first time I wrote it, I had six points of view, which was ridiculous looking back and it didn’t work. So, I changed it to three characters, and that took time; each of those characters took a rewrite in itself. The story is told from the point of view of British Bangladeshi Sajid Khan, a Muslim, who’s looking for his daughter in the US; FBI Special Agent Sherya Mistry, a woman of South Asian descent who’s Hindu; and Greg Flynn, a white American military veteran in his twenties. And each are very different characters. And getting the voices, getting inside their heads was an exercise in itself. The easiest one for me was Sajid, because his is probably closest to my experience. The next one I think was Greg. Greg, I could understand and make him real. The toughest one was Sherya, the Indian American FBI agent. That was probably the hardest character to get right and make authentic. I just hope I’ve done a good enough job. I mean that’s for you and for the readers to say, but that to me was the real challenge in this novel. Writing a thriller and also getting those three characters right. Nancie Clare Well, I can say that you did get them right as far as I’m concerned. Abir Mukherjee [Laughs] You’ve got to say that, Nancie, don’t you? Nancie Clare [Laughs} Yeah, I do! In Hunted, the idea of conspiracy and its partner, manipulation, are key elements. Are conspiracies orchestrated? Are they organic? Or is some diabolical person or organization adopting a conspiracy and using it in a nefarious way? Can you talk about how a conspiracy acts in the manipulation of the characters in Hunted? Abir Mukherjee I think conspiracy and domestic manipulation are big threats in Hunted. I think a lot of the time these things start off with idiots in chat rooms. But very quickly those conspiracies can be weaponized. And once the conspiracy gets rolling is where I think a lot of these external actors can and do get involved. Western countries— democracies—are particularly susceptible because we have open societies and we have left too many people behind. There are enemies of democracy, enemies of a certain way of life who will try to take advantage of our openness. When it comes to the nature of conspiracy itself, I don’t tend to believe in them. I tend to believe in the idiocy of people more than I do in the old grand overarching plan. I also don’t believe in the smartness of people. I think people get things wrong and conflated and it’s magnified by different idiots along the chain, but then other people can manipulate that. We see that in domestic politics. I mean the whole Q-Anon thing started off on 4-Chan, and just snowballed to take in a lot of people around America. And that to me is the worrying thing. It’s less how things start; it’s how they’re manipulated and who manipulates them. That to me is the bigger risk in terms of this book. Yes, there is a conspiracy, but one thing I am not sure about is if there are any bad guys in this book. Nancie Clare Yeah, I think there are bad guys in your book. Abir Mukherjee If you look at, of course they’re doing bad things, but in their heads they are the noble people. And I think this is often the case with conspiracies, right? The people that are subject to the conspiracy feel they’re doing the right thing. And that’s really interesting to me. It’s the people who call themselves patriots that I’m most scared of. The ones who wrap themselves in the flag or claim to have some sort of monopoly on patriotism, not just in America, but across the world. Here in Britain we’re seeing it. We are having politicians saying, “I want my country back.” I wonder when somebody says “wanting their country back” that it’s a coded message that people who look like me have robbed them of their birthright, which is nothing of the sort. It’s not the people arriving on dinghies who are robbing these people of their birthright. It’s the people that run countries. It’s the global elite. It’s the people who can move a factory from Ohio to Beijing to save one cent on a widget and destroy a community in the process. It’s the ones that control everything that have taken the country, not the poor. And that to me is fascinating. We’ve punched down, we always punch down because it’s easier to understand and it’s easier to manipulate. And that’s one of the biggest things that make me angry. Why is it that we always attack the wrong target? The people that are coming here for a better life, whether they’re coming with degrees or they’re coming with the skills of their own hands, they’re not the threat. They’re not the ones that have destroyed your communities. They’re not the ones that addicted your population to opiates. And yet these are the people that are the easy target. It’s easy to point at the alien and say, “you are responsible for why my life has gone to shit.” And yet it’s not. It’s the people who dress better than us and fly above our heads that are the ones causing the problems. Sorry, I’ve gone off on a rant! Nancie Clare That actually leads to my next question. In Shadows of Men, which is the most recent book in your series, your story is about mightier powers manipulating the little guy. I see similar themes of manipulation and getting disadvantaged people to do the dirty work in Hunted. Abir Mukherjee Don’t you see that today? Subconsciously, I keep coming back to this because it is the thing that is probably my greatest fear right now. It’s the manipulation of the powerless by the powerful just so that the powerful can maintain their own position and it’s getting worse. Nancie Clare You and I are talking the week before Easter. I love Easter eggs in books and all dedicated fans of crime fiction love to find them. I think I found one: Luca Vesta? Abir Mukherjee I have two. Luca Vesta and Mike Craven, who is Mike Raven in the book. Nancie Clare Didn’t catch that one. Thank you. Nancie Clare I understand that you’re writing another Wyndham-Banerjee book. Do you think that your series and other series by such writers as Vaseem Khan, Sujata Massey, Nev March and Harini Nagendra, among others, have opened a window into the British Raj in India? The idea of colonialism? Abir Mukherjee I hope it has. I mean, look, the issue about colonialism, and let’s take the British time in India until we came along, the story was really only told from the point of view of the colonizer, even when that was the most benign perspective in say, The Far Pavilions. What I’m trying to do is redress that balance. What I won’t do is write from only one side. I don’t think balance means writing purely from an Indian point of view. I mean, I can understand Indian sensibilities, but I’m not a hundred percent Indian in the same way that my Britishness is different from most other people’s Britishness. I sit in the middle, and I can give you a different perspective. I think anyone who is a minority of whatever type will live their life to a degree in stereo. They will see one point of view because that’s the society they live in, but they will have another insight into things from the particular group that they’re part of. I started writing out of anger. I wrote my first Wyndham-Banerjee novel because we have this vision in Britain that the empire was a force for good, and we think it was benign when in so many ways it wasn’t. And all we’re trying to do is provide a bit of perspective. I’m never going to say that one side was all good and one side was all bad. I think with my rants, I do apologize. Nancie Clare Please don’t apologize! Your “rants,”—your word, not mine—are brilliant. But is there any other thing you want to say about Hunted? Your hopes for the book, in addition, of course, to being an entertaining and crackerjack read? Abir Mukherjee Two things: I started writing this before the attack on the U.S. Capitol. All of this is plausible. And some of the reviews have already said that it is chillingly plausible: The other thing that I would love people to take away from this, especially white American readers, is that maybe a slightly different view or an insight into non-white people, non-white Asians. Especially to somebody like Sajid who is a poor Muslim man—a representative of 99.9% of Muslim men in Britain or America—and just a struggling everyman. It’s his color and his religion that make him different. But how is he any different from a blue-collar worker in America who’s just looking after his family and trying to make ends meet? And that’s at heart of the book; very little separates us. We all want the same thing, but we demonize people because we don’t know them. View the full article -
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The Three German Extremist Friends Who Robbed Banks and Murdered Immigrants
One autumn afternoon in the German town of Zwickau, a woman splashed ten liters of gasoline around her apartment, then set it on fire. She had been dreading this day for years, hoping it wouldn’t come to this. But on November 4, 2011, it did, and she needed to act quickly to save her two cats from the flames. Their names were Lilly and Heidi. One was black with white spots on its paws, while the other had gray and black stripes. She scooped them up, put them in their carriers, and walked downstairs to the street. Version 1.0.0 A passing neighbor recognized the woman by her “strikingly long, dark hair.” Everyone seemed to fixate on this feature, perhaps because nothing else about her seemed distinct. She was five foot five, the average height of women in Germany. She was neither heavyset nor slim. Her face was wide, flat, expressionless, with thin lips and hazel eyes. Later, when her face became famous across Germany, there was one trait that nobody seemed to use to describe her. Which was strange because it was the only one that mattered: The woman was white. Four years later, at the trial that would captivate the country, the white woman would claim that she waited to set the fire until the two men renovating the building’s attic left for a break, so they wouldn’t be hurt. That she had tried to warn the older lady who lived downstairs— who looked after Lilly and Heidi when she was away— buzzing and knocking hard on her door, to tell her to run from the flames. Her lawyer would tell a courtroom packed with judges, prosecutors, lawyers, journalists, neo-Nazis, and police that she’d taken great care to save lives the day she set the fire. The lives of other white Germans, and her two precious cats. She wouldn’t have needed to set the fire if only the fifteenth bank robbery had gone as well as the fourteen before it. For over a decade, her two best friends, and sometimes lovers, had been robbing banks at gunpoint in towns across Germany. On their previous heist, the two men— who shared the same first name— had walked in carrying two pistols, a revolver, and a hand grenade, one wearing a vampire mask and the other a ski mask. They walked out with 15,000 euros in cash, making their getaway as they always did— on bicycles. Over the years, they’d stolen hundreds of thousands of deutsche marks and euros, worth nearly a million dollars today. For their fifteenth heist they drove two hours from Zwickau to Eisenach, the birthplace of composer Johann Sebastian Bach and where Martin Luther translated the New Testament from Latin and Greek into German. On November 4, 2011, at 9:15 a.m., they walked in wearing sweatpants and sneakers, one in a gorilla mask, the other in a mask from the movie Scream. They pistol-whipped the bank manager, leaving a wound on his head. They pedaled away with 72,000 euros in a bag. At 9:30 a.m., police issued an alert for officers to be on the lookout for two men on bicycles. Twenty minutes later, a witness told officers he’d seen two men ride bikes into a hardware store parking lot a half mile from the bank. They were in a hurry. They loaded their bikes into a white camper van and drove off. Hours passed without any sign of the culprits, and police theorized they might attempt to drive deeper into Saxony, the eastern German state where other recent bank robberies had taken place. Officers fanned out to patrol the roads leading west toward the city of Chemnitz. But at four minutes past noon, police spotted a white camper van parked on the side of the road a few miles north of the bank. Two officers got out of their vehicle and approached it. Just then, they heard a gunshot, then another. The officers took cover behind a nearby car and a dumpster. Another shot rang out. Then the van went up in flames. The cops radioed firefighters, who rushed to the scene and quickly extinguished the blaze. Carefully, they opened the side door and looked in. Lying on the floor were the bodies of the two bank robbers, each with a bullet through the head. After setting the van on fire, one of them had shot the other, then turned the gun on himself in a sensational murder suicide. Searching through the carnage, a police officer inspected the guns. On the vehicle’s right-hand seat was a Pleter 91 submachine gun and a Czech-made semiautomatic pistol. A black handgun was lying on a small end table between the two seats. But what caught the officer’s eye were the two shiny, brass-colored bullet cartridges. They looked just like the casings of his own, government-issued bullets. Could the bank robbers be police? Investigators had learned little from the series of bank heists across eastern Germany in the preceding years. Two months earlier, police in the town of Gotha described the suspects as “both about 20 years old, slender figures, approx. 180–185 cm, masked, dark brown hair, darker skin tone, German language without an accent.” That last phrase— German-speaking, without an accent— seemed intended to distinguish the men from immigrants or foreigners. The robbers were German, or at least they sounded the part. But the second to last phrase— “ darker skin tone”— seemed to differentiate them from the typical German, by implying they were not white. But the Gotha police got it wrong. That much was evident as officers looked inside the van at the bodies of two men, some of their white skin charred by the fire. When news reports began circulating that two bank robbers had killed themselves in a blaze of fire and gunshots, only one person in all of Germany knew who they were: the white woman with the long dark hair and two cats. Knew that they weren’t just two money-driven men with a death wish. Knew that while robbing banks had been a talent of theirs, it was only a means to a more sinister end: murdering immigrants, to keep Germany white. They weren’t merely bank robbers, the woman knew— they were serial killers, terrorists. She knew this because she was one, too. * * * The three friends were not predestined to become killers. It was the culmination of their decade-long indoctrination into Germany’s far-right world. They didn’t radicalize alone, but as part of a white supremacist community. Its ringleader was a government informant who used taxpayer money to turn disillusioned young Germans into violent political operatives. Some tried to warn the world about what they were up to. One leftist punk began photographing far-right rallies and documenting the white supremacists who attended, unaware that some of them would grow up to be terrorists or that she would one day be called upon to expose them. Before the murders began, a police officer had tried to arrest the trio for their other, foreboding crimes. But he was sidelined by a law enforcement system that cared less about protecting the public than protecting its own. Growing up in eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, far-right youth called themselves National Socialists— Nazis. Like the original Nazis half a century before them, they blamed minorities for their ills. They despised Jews and didn’t consider them to be part of the white race. They derided Blacks. But above all they fixated on immigrants: workingclass men and women and their children, from Turkey, Vietnam, and Greece. Children like Gamze Kubaşık, whose family emigrated from Turkey to Dortmund, where they opened a corner store. Children like Semiya Simşek, whose parents came from Turkey and sold flowers at stands across Bavaria. But to the white woman with long dark hair, and to her two white friends, these immigrants posed an existential threat to the white nation they wanted Germany to be. And so they killed them, or killed their next of kin. One year before the Islamist terror attacks of September 11, 2001, three German terrorists set out to rid their nation of immigrants. Over many years, and in many cities, they shot immigrants where they worked and bombed the neighborhoods where they lived. Shot them in their corner stores, kebab stands, a hardware store. Bombed them in a grocery store, a bar, a barbershop. German authorities didn’t catch on to what they were doing. Blinded by their own prejudice, they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that sixty years after the Holocaust, some white Germans could still be radicalized to the point of carrying out racist mass murder. And so each time an immigrant was killed, officers would lie to the victim’s family, fabricating evidence to feed officers’ fantasies that immigrant crime syndicates were to blame. While police ignored evidence that the killings were being carried out by white Germans, men of Turkish and Greek background continued to be murdered one by one. Thirteen years passed before the trio’s crime spree finally ended. The country’s reckoning Munich courtroom, the city’s largest, renovated just in time to hold Germany’s trial of the century. Each day, former far-right skinheads and former leftist punks filed into the courtroom as witnesses, defendants, lawyers, spectators. Each day, for five years. The truth trickled out slowly. The spy in the cybercafe. Taxpayer funds given to far-right extremists. The intelligence agents who shredded documents in a frenzy. The trial would force Germany to grapple with what drove an ordinary German woman and her ordinary German friends to carry out a serial assassination of innocent people— people selected for the country from which they came, the accent in their voice, the color of their skin. A nation that liked to think it had atoned for its racist past would be forced to admit that violent prejudice was a thing of the present. That sixty years after Hitler’s Nazis led Jews and other minorities to their deaths during the Holocaust, German police were so blinded by bias that they couldn’t recognize the racist violence unfolding around them. The case would compel Germans to acknowledge that terrorism isn’t always Islamist or foreign. More often, it’s homegrown and white. And that in an age of unparalleled mass migration, the targets of white terrorism are increasingly immigrants. This is true not just in Germany, but in Western democracies around the globe. Since 9/11, more people in the United States have been murdered by far-right extremists than by any other kind, including Islamist ones. And it’s getting worse: The year President Donald Trump took office, American white supremacists murdered twice as many people as the year before. Trump’s anti-immigrant, antidemocratic rhetoric inspired white terrorists across the globe. In Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, minutes before a white man shot up a mosque during Friday prayers, he circulated a manifesto that called for the “removal” of nonwhite immigrants from Europe and praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” He wasn’t the first white man to find common purpose in terrorizing immigrants and racial minorities, Muslims, and Jews. And he wouldn’t be the last. Another white terrorist found it at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, slaughtering nine Black worshippers in 2015. Two years later, another found it in a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, where he opened fire just after an imam led the congregation in prayer, killing six people and injuring five. One month after that, another one found it in Olathe, Kansas, where he yelled at two Indian engineers, calling them “terrorists” and “illegal immigrants,” and screamed at them to “get out of my country,” before shooting and killing them. A few months after that, another found it on a train in Portland, Oregon, shouting racist and anti-Muslim slurs at two Black teenagers before stabbing three people, killing two. Yet another white terrorist found it at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, killing eleven Jewish people and injuring six. Another found it as he hunted Mexicans in the aisles of a Walmart in El Paso, killing twenty-three. Another one found it in the Asian American spas and massage parlors of Atlanta, where he killed six Asian American women and injured two others. One month later, another found it at a FedEx in Indianapolis that employed Indian Americans, killing four Sikhs and four others. Another one found it in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, where he entered a grocery store and slaughtered eleven people, almost all of them Black. Another found it in a store in Jacksonville, Florida, where, on the sixtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in August 2023, he ordered white people to leave before killing three Black shoppers in a suicide attack. To stop this carnage, we need to acknowledge who the terrorists really are. Just as in Germany, most terrorists who strike in the United States are homegrown and white. Today, some Germans want to confront their domestic extremists. But many wish to look away. It’s a sentiment shared around the world. No one wants to believe that their neighbors, friends, and fellow citizens may be radicalizing around them, or that white terror is on the rise. They’d like to think it doesn’t happen often, or that it couldn’t happen here. Germany’s failure to recognize its first white terrorist spree of the twenty-first century— much less stop it— is a chilling warning for other nations that are failing to fight extremists at home. Having briefly earned a reputation as a haven for the world’s refugees, Germany is now struggling to protect them from violence by native-born whites. “There are those in the east and the west who want to see Germany as an open society”— one that embraces immigrants, said Heike Kleffner, a German journalist who investigates the far right. But there are other Germans who would like to make Germany white. “This rift is played out in families, in small towns, big cities, villages. It’s a battle about defining this country.” This upheaval is transforming Germany’s politics and calling into question what being German even means. Similar debates are engulfing nations around the world. When three white Germans began their anti-immigrant spree, white terrorism was already a global phenomenon, though few yet knew it by that name. To understand what white terror is, who is spreading it, and how to stop it, we must look to Germany’s east, where three friends from a small town set off to murder immigrants— and the government that was supposed to stop them chose to look away. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Look Away: a true Story of Murder, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, by Jacob Kushner. Published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright 2024. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article -
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My Life and Times with Clive Cussler
Authors tend to be solitary creatures, so the idea of collaborating with one another is a rather odd event. That said, when Clive Cussler called me up some years back and asked if I’d like to work on his Oregon Files series of adventure novels, I said yes even before we discussed salary. Clive liked to say, tongue firmly in cheek, that he made the money while I did the work. But nothing could be further from the truth. Writing and editing are two entirely different disciplines. I know a legendary editor in New York whose only attempt at writing a novel churned out one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And most authors can barely edit themselves, let alone someone else. That said, Clive wore both hats with ease. I read the first books in the series to familiarize myself with characters and plotlines and then handed in an outline with a few sample chapters for our first book, Dark Watch. Clive then invited me to his Arizona home to discuss my work. I’ll never forget what transpired. He told me that he liked what I’d come up with, but the smuggling of nuclear waste as a plot device had been done to death. He told me to come up with something else—and promptly left for a nap, giving me a one-hour deadline. Fortunately, I work well in a state of panic. I worked in a human trafficking angle, and we were off and running. Our system, and the system he employed with all of the other co-authors, was this: once the outline was agreed upon, I would write a third of the book and wait for his feedback. Clive had a great attention to detail and as a writer of complex plots understood that a minor tweak in the beginning of the story had repercussions throughout that had to be considered. He did not ask for structural changes to the plot without giving it a lot of thought, and for that I was always grateful. That isn’t to say he didn’t put his stamp on each page. He knew when I was overwriting a scene, or becoming too enamored of my research, or telling rather than showing, or falling into any of the other traps that befall an author. He loved his fans and took the time to make sure each of the books that bore his name also had his style of writing— his signature adventure plots loaded with intrigue as exciting as we could make it. After writing seven books this way, no matter how smooth the collaboration had been, I grew restless and went back to writing solo novels. It was nice to answer to no one for a change—but like being in the Mafia, I couldn’t really escape. Clive invited me to helm the Isaac Bell series and I turned him down flat. For a day. Then I got the brilliant idea of introducing Isaac Bell into the Raise the Titanic storyline—retconning is the term for it, meaning retroactive continuity of a pre-existing narrative. I pitched the idea of turning a Cussler book on its head with a prelude set in the modern world and the rest in the past. Clive was actually angry that he hadn’t thought of that himself. Working on that book, which was published as The Titanic Secret, was like our first effort all over again. Very soon we were onto another Bell adventure, this time set in Panama at the time of the canal construction. We again upended the Cussler formula and gave the book Agatha Christy-type twists. It was two thirds complete when Clive died rather suddenly. I soon learned that his son, Dirk, would be taking over Clive’s role. I was sure life would be just like before. Oops…. Dirk didn’t like how I’d structured this story and felt that, with Clive not around, deviating from his classic formula wasn’t such a great idea. After cursing Dirk for several days, I reluctantly agreed, and for the first time in my professional career had to rewrite one of my books. To his credit, Dirk understood the ordeal he’d asked me to endure and worked with me closely to minimize how much I’d have to redo. In the end, we put out arguably my best Isaac Bell novel. Since then, collaborating with Dirk has been just about as easy as it had been with Clive. I’m not sure how other co-authorships work, but I know for myself that keeping my association with the Cussler name is as simple as remembering to write the best Cussleresque novels that I can. And so, here we are now with The Heist. *** View the full article
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