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Recently, Paul Giamatti received an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Holdovers—Alexander Payne’s period film about three loners stuck at a boys’ boarding school during holiday break. He was previously nominated for a supporting role in Cinderella Man in 2005. Many, including myself, are still enraged that he was not nominated for his expressive and powerful performance in Sideways, Payne’s 2004 dark comedy about two friends who go on a trip to wine country and wind up reckoning with their lives and choices. But allow me to suggest that Giamatti, an actor of boundless talent and irrepressible commitment, should have received his first Oscar nomination in 2002, for a performance in a Nickelodeon Studios kids’ movie called Big Fat Liar. Half of the people reading this will automatically agree. You know what I mean. You will remember. The other half of you won’t know what I’m talking about at all. To this half of you, I ask… nay, I beg: hear me out. HEAR me out. “Big Fat Liar. B.F.L. Bfl, as it’s come to be known.” The film is a cornerstone in the cinematic repertoire of persons who subliminally know the back half of the phrase that begins “call me, beep me,” who remember the Rachel McAdams-Ryan Gosling kiss at the MTV Movie Awards, who can recall seeing purple and green Heinz EZ Squirt bottles in the supermarket. In other words, the youngest millennials and the eldest zoomers. What’s it about? Everything. It’s the kind of splashy, kid-friendly studio fare that they don’t make anymore: a hilarious, grandiose adventure about two wiseass kids, and it’s also (like many movies aimed at kids from that era), a tribute to great movies from the 20th century. Frankie Muniz (2002, baby!) is a fourteen-year-old kid named Jason Shepherd. He lives in a nice Michigan suburb, skateboards to school, hangs out with his best friend Kaylee (Amanda Bynes). But he also complicates his blissful existence by lying constantly, using his silver-tongued gift of gab to slide around the rules, get himself out of undesirable situations, and ultimately… wind up in big, big trouble. Our story, which was directed by Shawn Levy, begins when Jason fibs to get out of handing in a school paper but gets caught in the lie. He’s given a very, very brief extension of a few hours from his teacher (Sandra Oh), and is hit with a stroke of genius. He begins to pen (furiously, due to the time-limit) a short story about a compulsive liar and the trouble it gets him in, which he calls “Big Fat Liar.” He names the main character after his dog. It’s all very ad-hoc. And it’s full of intriguing framing language like, “Kenny Trooper was the world’s biggest liar… they say a little lie can grow bigger and bigger… one man will pay the price.” If it sounds to you like the tagline to a movie or the VO in a trailer, then you’re thinking right. Let’s keep going. So! As Jason is biking to the meeting place to hand it in, he is hit by a car! Yes! Well, actually, it’s a limo. And the passenger of this limo, a Hollywood producer named Marty Wolf (Giamatti), agrees, very, very unhappily, to give him a ride the rest of the way. As Jason and Marty chat for a bit in the backseat, his backpack spills and the story falls out without him knowing. After Jason leaves, Marty picks it up and gives it a quick read, growing visibly intrigued (you can tell by the slow arching of Giamatti’s eyebrow). And Jason shows up to meet his teacher without it, frantically telling a wild story about getting hit by a limo driving a Hollywood producer who accidentally took his paper. No one believes him, he fails his class, and he is sentenced to summer school. It’s only when he’s at the movies with his friend Kaylee (Bynes) does he see a teaser trailer for a movie with the same plot and title as his paper, causing him to realize that Wolf had stolen his story and has begun adapting it into a big feature, next summer’s hotly-anticipated blockbuster. Yet, still no one will believe Jason about what happened, so he convinces Kaylee to run away to Los Angeles with him for a long weekend while his parents are out of town, planning on corner Wolf at his studio and get him to admit that he plagiarized his next big feature film. Only, Big Fat Liar is poised to be Marty’s biggest hit in a long, long time, and he doesn’t plan on letting go of it easily. Big Fat Liar is probably the first time my generation even saw Paul Giamatti. Maybe some of us did see him in small roles beforehand; we might have seen him as the bellman in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), or watched as he played the orangutan Limbo in Planet of the Apes (2001), unrecognizable in pounds of makeup. There was always one or two kids in my elementary school classes who bragged about being allowed to watch Saving Private Ryan (1998) so maybe some of them caught him in that movie, too. But it’s not only appealing to kids—rather, the kids we were in 2002. In the twenty-plus years since, my own father has always been compelled to stop flipping through channels every time he sees Big Fat Liar playing. He watches it through to the end, every time, and his loud belly laughs echo through the house. Critics will say that movies like American Splendor (2002) and Sideways (2004) made him the star he is now. But Big Fat Liar proved, early on, that he could do anything. Giamatti seems to have thrown his whole heart into this one, playing the obnoxious, perfidious, sneaky, general all-around jerk Wolf with a level of manic energy heretofore unseen in man. He is… incredible. He is far more committed to his role than anyone in this genre of movie need be and, as a result, he makes the whole thing gel. He’s never so vile that he’s unwatchable; in fact, the deeper Giamatti burrows into his unpleasantness, the more compelling he becomes. The intensity of performance is not merely funny, but it is a coherent exaggeration of the sinister Hollywood producer archetype we’ve seen a thousand times before. Giamatti told GQ in an interview in December 2023 that he enjoyed the chance to do the “crazy physical stuff” that the role of Marty Wolf required. “I’ve always been physically comfortable doing stuff like that in front of people. I mean, there’s obviously an exhibitionist element to actors… he just was letting me do so much ridiculous stuff and I enjoy being big like that. It’s really fun, you know? You don’t get the opportunity so much to just go over the top like that. And [the director, Shawn Levy] knew I could.” Levy was a college friend of Giamatti’s and apparently hounded him to take the part. Honestly, has anyone been a better judge of ability than Shawn Levy in this moment? I say nay. Marty’s personality develops across two acts: his normal state of unprincipled megalomania, unhinged unpleasantness, and petty tyranny at his production company offices and on sets, and a state of frantic, tantruming, vengefulness as Jason turns the tables and begins to ruin his life, in the form of a series of vengeful pranks by Jason, Kaylee, and the small army they have gathered from the pool of his employees and colleagues. Throughout, though, he is a magnetic antagonist, a showstopping villain, combining vocal mayhem and madcap physicality. A perfect example is the film’s perhaps most memorable scene, when the obnoxious Marty wakes up one morning in his ostentatious Los Angeles mansion and dances his way to his pool, grooving along to his favorite song “Hungry Like the Wolf.” He doesn’t realize, though, that Jason and Kaylee have dumped out bottles of blue dye in his pool, poured orange hair dye in his shampoo, and dabbed wet superglue inside his phone earpiece. In the course of a single two-minute scene, we see the extremes of Marty’s existence: a narcissistic tyrant at the height of his power and an angry bully who realizes someone’s getting the better of him. But of course, this is only gets him ready to fight back harder. And boy, does he fight back. Marty and Jason find themselves locked in an epic battle that takes them across the Universal Studios lot. Their story already borrows from different genres (especially heists and westerns), but it also literally takes place on and across the different sets there, from famous movie landmarks like the Bates home from Psycho, to the flash flood set on the studio tour. In developing as a behind-the-scenes look at a major motion picture studio, Big Fat Liar becomes a heady mash-up of Hollywood tales; more than simply a be movie about “movies,” it’s movie about the stories we tell about the movies. Movies and stories and lies are all different versions of the same thing. It’s clear that the liar Marty doesn’t love movies, or, storytelling on the whole. He has a knack for fiction, but he’s in this game for the moolah. Maybe he wasn’t, always. But he is now. We meet Jason, on the other hand, before he parlays his life of lies into something truly disingenuous, like Marty has. And we watch Jason at this pivotal turning point in his emotional journey, realizing that he can transform his ability to tell stories from a strategy for copping-out into a productive creative form. Rather than stay a humble liar, he becomes a writer. Anyway, Big Fat Liar is a film burrowed deep in the annals of millennial cinema, but it deserves a Renaissance of its own—for Giamatti’s inspired performance, yes, but also for the whole damn thing. As Marty Wolf yells to a crowd of potential supporters and financiers during one BS-loaded speech, ““God Bless All of You, God Bless America, and God Bless Big Fat Liar.” Except the difference between me and Marty is that I mean it. And that’s the truth. View the full article

For three months after its launch in May 2023, I.S. Berry’s spy novel was flying under the radar, as most debut novels do. Then a rave review from The New Yorker set off a firestorm of other favorable notices that resulted in numerous publications and National Public Radio naming it one of the best novels of year. In a world where thousands of great books go unnoticed annually, I.S. Berry (her pen name) was the lucky one who was discovered for her talent and story by a publishing and media world that too often looks inward for more of the same, by the same, for its next round of similar enlightenment. Berry’s novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow was also nominated for best debut novel by the Mystery Writers of America, the International Thriller Writers, and Deadly Pleasures quarterly magazine, yet it was still not a bestseller. But at Bouchercon, the massive mystery/crime fiction convention held in San Diego in 2023, Berry’s novel sold out quickly. Her publisher, Atria (a Simon & Schuster imprint), noticed. Publishing is so arbitrary at times that publishing experts are often caught off guard. But what you can expect once they realize they have a winner, they go all in. Expect a major marketing push for the paperback release of The Peacock and the Sparrow. A book that reeks of bestseller status, it just may find its way to the top soon. The Peacock and the Sparrow has been described as nuanced, realistic, and filled with twists and turns as it races to its conclusion. It’s based on the real-world dynamics of the Arab Spring. Berry knows of what she writes because she lived the life of a spy. And yet it wasn’t until her life as a case officer for the CIA had come to an end that she finally came up with the idea for the novel. “It’s not a typical thriller novel. It doesn’t fit in a category,” she says. “It’s literary, and as much a human, character-driven story as a traditional espionage story. I also wanted to portray the unvarnished, dark, gritty side of spying, which most spy novels don’t…My book doesn’t glorify the agency at all…I tried to make Bahrain a character. I think it’s full-bodied and immersive in the time and place. I tried to make every detail authentic. Every detail in there is real, from the cocktails at Trader Vic’s to the way spies conduct dead drops to the expat villas.” For a long time, she didn’t live the routine life of a spy. She didn’t schmooze potential contacts at embassy parties or get many chances to take them out for drinks at lunchtime. Instead, she became a counter-terrorism case officer during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a case officer, her mission was to recruit sources, but she was stationed in the green zone in Baghdad, protected from her potential sources by walls and surrounded by the U.S. military. And she admits she was traumatized by the daily shelling and mortar fire that landed near her inside and outside the massive compound on a near-daily basis. She often relied on walk-ins (to the zone) to become her latest assets but would sometimes venture into the red zone in an armored vehicle to pick up sources. Not exactly the romantic life for a young, single case officer. There was nothing glamorous about it and she captures that feeling in The Peacock and the Sparrow. Berry was assigned to track down Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who was responsible for numerous suicide bombings and beheadings of Americans and other hostages. He was killed by U.S. bombs dropped on a safe house in 2006, several months after Berry left Iraq. The exact circumstances of his death are still murky, Berry says. She doesn’t know the particulars and if she did, she couldn’t talk about it. It is this uncertainty, which is pervasive in the spy game, that makes The Peacock and the Sparrow so compelling. One source helped her track down an alleged terrorist target believed to be involved in a Baghdad attack. He was detained but never confessed. Today, she can’t say for sure if he’s guilty. She still wonders if they got the wrong guy. “It is something that has haunted me,” she says. “It’s still a weight on me.” It is yet another example of the ambiguity of the spy game. “The truth is elusive. You never know and you have to make peace with the unanswered questions.” Berry was beguiled by foreign affairs while studying abroad at the London School of Economics. “I thought I’d be a civil rights lawyer, but I fell in love with the great beyond and wanted to explore.” After graduation, she shoved everything she owned into a suitcase and moved to Prague where she lived in a small flat above the famed Roxy night club while making a sparse living at an online English-speaking newspaper. “I wanted to experience the world.” It was there that she made her first attempt at a novel, but she readily admits that at that time, she had no experience and nothing to say. She then she moved to Cambridge, England and worked for the U.S Department of Defense as a Balkans intelligence analyst. Having lived in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, she was already well-versed in transitional countries and “I loved intelligence. I loved being in the thick of foreign affairs.” While on one of her frequent trips to Bosnia, someone told her the CIA needed more women case officers (spies) and suggested she apply. She did. It took so long that she attended law school at the University of Virginia while waiting for the CIA to examine her application and run their background check. She focused on national security and international law. After graduation, she joined and later headed to the Middle East. Years later after leaving the CIA, Berry returned to the U.S., got married, and practiced national security law until her son was born in 2010. She moved to Bahrain in early 2012 where her husband worked as a civilian for the Department of Defense as the Arab Spring was bubbling to the fore. Most Americans focused their attention on the events in Egypt, but Bahrain was a hotbed of protest against its autocratic government. It was also the battleground for a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Berry was entranced by the politics. “It was so fascinating. We were living in it,” she says. Following their two-year stint, her family moved back to Virginia, but the ghosts of espionage were still imbedded in her soul. Her son was now in preschool, so she had some free time and decided to again try writing a novel. This time, she had extensive exposure to the world and had lots to say. One of her struggles has been dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after first coming home from Iraq. “Your brain learns to live with this fear, trauma, and uncertainty…I really don’t know of anyone (who’s experienced war) who doesn’t deal with PTSD…We’re just not programed as humans to deal with it.” She used her own time in war and everything else she experienced as a spy to mold her novel. Particularly the unanswered questions. She wanted to leave the reader feeling haunted, wondering what was unseen and what the story was behind the story to convey a visceral sense of espionage. “Initially, I didn’t have a firm idea of what I wanted to write,” she says. She started with what she calls, “a spy-flavored thriller, but not a spy novel. I looked back and the espionage scenes had an authenticity that the rest of the book didn’t.” She began rewriting. It took five years. Three years in, she said, “For a moment, I hated the story. I think every writer reaches that point. But I worked through it because fundamentally I believed in my book. You just have those moments of doubt.” Later, she notes, “I didn’t realize until the end how much of my own experience was in there.” Critics have spoken of the realism in her writing. “One review I saw described my book as ‘equal parts literature, noir, and thriller.’” Her novel focuses on Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, who is stationed in Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia for his final tour. He’s ready to call it quits when he starts to uncover Iranian support for the insurgency against the monarchy. Then he meets and falls for Almaisa, a beautiful and enigmatic artist. This enabled him to experience a part of Bahrain most expats never do. When a trusted informant becomes embroiled in a murder, Collins finds himself caught in the crosswinds of a revolution. Drawing on all his skills as a spymaster, he sets out to learn the truth behind the Arab Spring, win Almaisa’s love, and uncover where Bahrain’s secrets end, and America’s begin. Berry was now learning to become a writer. “I’d always wanted to write a novel. I didn’t think it was a practical profession.” It was a lonely task she couldn’t fully share with others, not even her husband. Because she is former CIA, every manuscript she writes about spies has to be preapproved by the agency before she can share it with anyone. For that reason, she hadn’t gotten to know any writers to ask for help about the publishing business. So, ever the novice, she read what she could and queried about 15 agents. The response was immediate. Several expressed interest. “I didn’t understand how audacious that was at the time. I think if I had known I would have been a lot more intimidated and not as bold. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” She chose David McCormick because he represented a wide range of authors, and her book, as he pointed out, wasn’t a “genre” book. “He really loved my manuscript and seemed to really believe in me…Along the way there are people who really believe in you and that’s what I felt with him.” Especially, she says, because “my book is kind of a slow burn, not a shoot ‘em up novel.” “When my agent was pitching to publishers, I suggested he submit to Peter Borland, who had edited Joseph Kanon, bestselling author of The Berlin Exchange. Peter ended up being the one. And my first blurb ended up coming from Kanon.” When her book launched on May 30, 2023, she faced what most debut novelists endure. Silence. “I was so new to this I wasn’t part of the writers’ community. I thought it would get reviewed more. I had no reviews at first. It felt a little bit like shouting in an empty room.” Publishers Weekly did give it a starred review, but others like Kirkus ignored it. “That was eye opening for me. And then I hustled to get events. I joined social media and got involved in the author community. I was blown away by how supportive other authors were.” Her colleagues at the CIA embraced her as well. “Since my book was published, I’ve met with a lot of former case officers and even spoken to the CIA’s creative writing group, ‘Invisible Ink.’” It was the first time she’d set foot in the CIA’s Langley headquarters in 15 years. “There are a fair number inside that world who want to write books,” she says. But her watershed moment came after The New Yorker stumbled upon her book and later named it a best book of the year. That attracted other reviewers, even NPR. “Having the cache of The New Yorker really helped,” she says. Since then, she has gotten a hoard of invitations from book clubs, including men’s book clubs. For a writer who had to wait so long to become part of the authors and readers community, it appears the neighborhood has finally opened its arms to her. “Spying was definitely not like this,” she says. ___________________________________ The Peacock and the Sparrow ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 3 years to write, 2 years edit, CIA approval a few months Decided to write a novel: First attempt in Prague, years later after her CIA and Bahrain tours. Experience: CIA Case officer (spy who recruits human sources for information) Agents Contacted: About 15 agents Agent Rejections: 10-11 First Novel Agent: David McCormick First Novel Editor: Peter Borland First Novel Publisher: Atria (Simon and Schuster) Inspiration: The texture of the world. What lies beneath the scenes. Secrets intrigue me. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Website: https://isberry.net Advice to Writers: Don’t be afraid to find a distinctive voice. Pick a story you love because writing is like a long-term relationship. There are moments you will hate your story. Read everything to find out what speaks to you and what doesn’t. Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, Mary Kubica, and Hank Phillippi Ryan. View the full article

During my career as an investigative reporter – and as the wife of an expert in the field of computer-assisted investigative reporting – I have experienced situations that could be distressing if you didn’t realize this is all great material for writing mysteries! The first occurred early in my career when I was assigned to write a feature on a man who was a “shoo-in” as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. We will call him Mr. M. He was a familiar figure in the city and state – a young, handsome multi-millionaire respected not only for his business acumen but because he was ballyhooed as “the most eligible bachelor” in town. I was tickled to be covering such a neat guy. Our first interview went well though I did note that he wore lifts in his shoes. Guess he wanted to be taller? That night I was at a dinner party where I mentioned to a woman friend that I was working on an article about Mr. M. “Really,” she said with an odd expression, “I know him. I used to babysit for him. I suggest you check with this reporter in my hometown for background on Mr. M.” So I called the newspaper in that city, connected with an award-winning investigative reporter and when I told him whom I was profiling and why (i.e. “he’s also the most eligible bachelor in town….”) – the reporter paused, then said, “That’s interesting because he has a wife and three children down here.” Our newspaper broke that story. Mr. M lost the election. No U.S. Senate. One week later, he called me at my office shouting, “I’m suing you for defamation.” “Try,” I said, “and I’ll sue you for libel.” Of course, I had no idea if I could or not. A few weeks later, I was in a small private plane, sitting near the pilot, as I was being flown to a political conference I had to cover when the pilot said he had seen my stories on Mr. M. “Something you should know,” said the pilot, “is that Mr. M. keeps his private plane next to mine and I know he does not have it inspected as he should. That plane is going to crash one of these days….” Sure enough, a couple months later Mr. M and five other people died when his plane crashed during a flight to Las Vegas. Lesson learned: Never trust a person who wears lifts. And learn to spot those people who think they can get away with anything. Until they can’t. Great Material. * My next experience occurred ten years later. My second husband, B, also an investigative reporter, was testing the use of database technology – this was in the early eighties before the Internet was so easy to use – and he had decided to explore what was behind a series of small mentions of accidental deaths in our area. We lived near a large East Coast city, which was surrounded by small towns, each of which had their own police force. B had been keeping track of different death notices that had appeared as “agate” in the major city’s newspaper. “Agate” referred to a brief graph in tiny type stating the date, sex and cause of a victim’s death. B also knew that the different police departments did not, generally, communicate with one another. Again, this was before our major, amazing national databases in use today. On his own, B reached out to the police departments for more details and then he got started building his own database. I will never forget it as I found him in our den, in the dark, on a hot summer night, inputting the following details: Each of nine (!) victims was female, black and between eighteen and thirty years of age Each victim was known to the police as having worked as an “escort” or prostitute Each victim’s body had been found near an electrical transformer Each victim’s cause of death had been listed as “undetermined” but when an autopsy was finally done, each one had been strangled And so it was that hot summer night that B and I looked at each other in amazement: this was the work of a serial killer! Likely an employee of the local electric company. What was needed next was to find someone who might have known all the women. And with that information, the various police departments chose to work together. They soon discovered an engineer at the electric company who moonlighted as a “pastor” focused on saving women’s souls. It didn’t take long to determine he had known each of the murdered women. He got life in prison. B, meanwhile, went on to become an expert in the field of computer-assisted reporting. Lesson learned by me: Keep an eye on the details such as locations, odd coincidences and don’t make early assumptions based on race, education or sex. Look for the obscure, the unexpected – and take notes! That’s when you’ll discover Great Material. ** Even when you are not working as a reporter, challenging events can occur: happy, sad or perfectly awful. Again, you can choose how to deal with such moments. The following happened shortly after B and I had moved to a new suburb out east and I had just enrolled my son in the nearby middle school. It was early on a snowy January morning and I was driving him to his first day of school. A neighbor had told me of a shortcut to the school so I was driving a road that ran alongside the high school playing fields when we passed a small sedan that had crashed into a telephone pole. No one was around but that didn’t worry me – I grew up in Wisconsin where drunk drivers often abused telephone poles. I kept going. After dropping my son off, I returned the same way only to see police officers and men in trench coats gathered around the wrecked sedan. Once home, I called B at the newspaper and told him, “There might be an accident…” at such and such a location. An hour later, he called back quite upset saying, “that was a murder scene. I wish you had told me!” (Translation: he could have broken the story and gotten a raise.) Turns out there was a dead woman in the car. Had I stopped on my way to the school, I would have found her naked, wearing only panties in the below-zero weather. When the police, two men, first arrived, they reported “an accident.” But minutes later, when they were joined by a female officer, she took one look at the victim and said, “This is no accident. No woman, drunk or depressed, goes driving in weather like this wearing only panties! This is murder.” At first, the woman’s husband, an OB-GYN at the local hospital, tried to say she had been drinking, they had fought and she had driven off angry. Not true. And this is where the story gets kind of awful. They’d had a fight, all right, and he beat her to death with a statue of the Virgin Mary, dumped her body out their bedroom window onto the driveway — only to realize he better do something to hide his actions. When the autopsy report showed she had died of blunt trauma to the head, he was arrested and convicted of homicide. But that’s not the end of the story. Years later, I was in Wisconsin and giving a library talk about “things you cannot make up” when a woman in the audience raised her hand. “I was on that jury,” she said. “And you won’t believe what happened next. The husband got out on appeal, applied to a hospital in another city and was hired as the head of their OB-GYN unit. They never checked his credentials. They hired a murderer!” Lesson learned: Some stories you can’t make up. Again, Great Material. *** Finally, on a lighter note, B covered one investigation where he had to interview a forensic pathologist. The source turned out to be a hefty woman wearing scrubs who invited him into her autopsy room. They weren’t alone. Along with the deceased, she had two massive Great Danes she allowed to roam freely. Lesson utilized: That experience prompted me to conjure up the coroner in my series who is a retired bartender, appointed to his position by his brother-in-law, the Mayor of Loon Lake, and who shows up for official duties “overserved.” Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up. How to find your Great Material? When writing mysteries don’t hesitate to draw from real life: the unexpected, the amusing, or the horrifying. It is all Great Material. **** View the full article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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