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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
Forums
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete in today's market. Just beware because we do have a sense of humor.
I've Just Landed So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts - NWOE Novel Writing Guide
Crucial Self-editing Techniques - No Hostages- 48
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George, "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, and "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many horrid and writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom in the novel writing universe. All topics are unlocked and open for comment.
Margaret Atwood Said What?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups- 24
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of informative, entertaining, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on Youtube. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Members of the Algonkian Critics Film Board (ACFB) include Kara Bosshardt, Richard Hacker, Joseph Hall, Elise Kipness, Michael Neff, and Audrey Woods.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?- 92
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read a few fascinating articles, learn something useful, and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side.
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. If you're in the early or middle stages of novel writing, you'll get a lot from this. We cannot thank her enough for this collection of literary dissection.
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2024
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New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
- New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
- New York Write to Pitch Conference Reviews
For New York Write to Pitch or Algonkian attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Assignments include conflict levels, antagonist and protagonist sketches, plot lines, setting, and story premise. Publishers use this forum to obtain information before and after the conference event, therefore, writers should edit as necessary. Included are NY conference reviews, narrative critique sub-forums, and most importantly, the pre-event Novel Development Sitemap.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Writer Conferences nurture intimate, carefully managed environments conducive to practicing the skills and learning the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive commercial or literary novel. Learn more below.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
Algonkian Conferences - Ugly Reviews
Algonkian's Eight Prior Steps to Query
Why do Passionate Writers Fail?- 243
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Algonkian Novel Development and Writing Program
This novel development and writing program conducted online here at AAC was brainstormed by the faculty of Algonkian Writer Conferences and later tested by NYC publishing professionals for practical and time-sensitive utilization by genre writers (SF/F, YA, Mystery, Thriller, Historical, etc.) as well as upmarket literary writers. More Information
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Forum Statistics
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Call for Entries: Unicorn Mech Suit Flash Fiction Contest
Greetings all sci-fi and fantasy fans, Unicorn Mech Suit is now having our first short story contest. The winner will be published right here on UMS, and the top ten entries will receive personalized feedback. Authors will retain all rights. All entries should be between 500-1500 words and be broadly considered either science fiction or fantasy. (Horror will also be considered if it has speculative elements.) Please send entries to info@oliviafrias.com along with the best way to contact you. Please Note: This contest is unpaid, but there is also no fee to enter. The deadline is August 8th at 12pm pacific time! The winner will be announced in early September. So get writing. -
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Abir Mukherjee on Writing a Conspiracy Thriller “From a Position of Anger”
In the immortal words of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “And now for something completely different…” For Abir Mukherjee – the author of the award-winning, immensely popular procedural series that takes place in post-World War One Calcutta featuring Captain Sam Wyndham, a former detective from Scotland Yard with a taste for opiates, and Surendranath Banerjee, an Oxbridge-educated sergeant and first Indian member of the city’s police department’s criminal investigation department – this means a change of venue to North America, a change of century to the 21st, and a change of genre to a thriller. But, while these elements may be different, what drives Mukherjee’s fiction remains consistent: a desire to stretch his writer’s chops and a desire to “write something punchy, up to the minute, and dealing with the issues that we face today.” Nancie Clare In your recent interview with Publisher’s Weekly, you described yourself as a “wee boy from Hamilton.” And the funny thing is, I was discussing your books with Denise Mina and she used exactly the same words, “Oh, he’s just a wee boy from Hamilton!” Abir Mukherjee Denise Mina is my hero. I think she is amazing. And I say this because whenever I say nice things about her, she gets embarrassed and that’s half the fun. In my opinion, she’s the best writer of crime fiction in the world. Nancie Clare I’m right there with you. Abir Mukherjee Yeah. Have you read The Second Murderer, her take on Raymond Chandler? Nancie Clare Yes! I did an interview with her for Crimereads.com about it. Abir Mukherjee This is sacrilegious, but I think she’s done Philip Marlowe better than Chandler! Quite often you read books written in the style of other authors, and very quickly it degenerates into their own style. What she’s managed to pull off there is Raymond Chandler for the 21st century. The way she’s managed to capture his voice and inject her own thoughts and humor is just amazing. It is just a tour de force, that book. Nancie Clare Let’s talk about Hunted. You’re a successful author with a much-loved series set in Colonial India in the early part of the 20th century. How did it feel moving not just to the 21st century, but to North America? Abir Mukherjee It was great, to be honest with you. It was refreshing. I’ve spoken to a number of other authors about this: I think when you’re five, six books into a series, it’s very hard to keep things fresh. I wanted to do something different. I hope—I believe—in each of my books, I pushed myself a wee bit further. I think by the third book in the series, Smoke and Ashes, I had got the basics of writing down to a level that I was comfortable with. I mean, I can’t read the first book. It makes me cringe! With the fourth one, Death in the East, I experimented with two timelines. With The Shadows of Men, the fifth one, it was two narrators. But again, everything was first person. And I was getting to that stage where I was thinking, well, yes, I’m going to write a lot more of these, but I want to challenge myself. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Nancie, the world seems to be going to hell in a handcar over the last couple of years or last decade. Nancie Clare Umm, yes. I live in America, remember. Abir Mukherjee Yes, you do. And well, I mean, anything you can do, we can do worse. We are confident. Nancie Clare I’m not so sure about that, but please don’t try! Abir Mukherjee Well, yes, it’s a fair point. All of my writing comes from a position of anger. I write about things that are worrying me or are upsetting me but make them allegorical. When you’re writing stuff set a hundred years ago, it must be allegory. And sometimes, well, I don’t want to write allegory. I want to write something punchy, up to the minute, and dealing with the issues that we face today. It just felt right to me. And as for why America: you sneeze, and we catch a cold. America’s issues, America’s decisions affect the world. America has always been a fascinating place to me. I’ve always loved this sort of strange amalgam of different things, these idiosyncrasies, these things that are almost contradictory. I mentioned in the book that I’ve never been anywhere where people are so polite and so nice and tell you to have a nice day. And at the same time, if you look like me they’ll probably shoot you if you park in the wrong driveway. That sort of dual identity of being really, really nice, but being really, really scared of things they don’t understand is something I don’t understand. And I wanted to explore that. I wanted to explore this issue of hope because [the world] still looks to America. The American dream is one thing that I wanted to look at because it is a great ideal, but does it hold anymore? It doesn’t really hold for blue-collar Americans. And yet that American dream is still so powerful that people line up to enter the country, whether it’s people with visas from India or people from South or Central America trying to cross the southern border. People from around the world still believe in the American dream in a way that I think Americans don’t. That really fascinated me. I wanted to look at what happens when the certainties of your past, the things that you’ve grown up with, when those certainties no longer hold. What does that do to people? And I think a lot of the anger, a lot of the issues that we are dealing with, with populism—not just in America, but in the West—is about people who are brought up with intrinsic promises that have been cast aside. What does that do to people? And I really wanted to explore those ideas while killing people, obviously, which is very important in crime fiction. Nancie Clare: Right? Because of course it is a thriller. I have a craft question: The Wyndham-Banerjee books are procedurals, and Hunted is very much a thriller. Was it a difficult transition? Abir Mukherjee: Absolutely. I think the reason there’s been two-and-a-half, three years between my last book and this one is down to getting a handle on what makes a thriller. I had two or three attempts to get that element right, because thrillers are a different game completely from writing a procedural or a historical crime novel like the Wyndham-Banerjee series. And I’m an accountant by training, so thrills don’t come naturally to me. It was a battle. You know what really helped? I read The Accomplice by Steve Cavanagh. And it was amazing. Every chapter or two it felt like you were being hit in the face with a frying pan. It was that dialing it up to eleven. That’s what I took away from it. Like, my first reaction might be: that’s pushing it too far, that’s going too far, that’s not acceptable. Whereas I learned from Steve that readers give writers license if they take readers along for the ride. If we buy into the characters in the story, we will go along with the tension. In Hunted, at the beginning, there is a chapter where a bomb goes off in this mall, and one of the characters, FBI Special Agent Shreya Mistry, is investigating. In the first draft she investigated, and she walked back out. After having read Steve’s books, I thought, why doesn’t the mall fall on her head? And that’s what I did. I collapsed the mall on top of her. That was pushing it up to eleven. And having done that throughout the book, it made such a difference. It was about giving myself the confidence to be a bit braver and just dial things up. And when I got that mindset, everything seemed to work better. Much of that goes down to Steve, and I’ve told him as much several times, he’s probably sick of me telling everybody that I learned how to write a thriller after reading his books. But there you are. Nancie Clare In this thriller you have a story that jumps from the UK to British Columbia and then to the west coast of the United States, south to Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, and then back across the United States by cars, buses, and airplanes told from the point of view of three characters and the whole story takes place in a week and a day. I guess this is another craft question: Did you have to plot this on a board with sticky notes or cards? Abir Mukherjee The short answer to that is yes, I had huge sheets of A-3 paper [approximately 11.75” X 16.5”] and I plotted it out on those. I have to say though, it changed a lot. It was always going to be that chase across America because as I say, one of the things I wanted to do in this book was look at America and take the temperature of America, especially those parts that are in the middle—the people that essentially decide elections now. That’s where I wanted to write about. It was a big, big job to plan. But to be honest with you, it was the other part of that question, the three different narrators [that was really challenging]. There are seven characters, and the story is told from the points of view of three of them. It was that process which proved much trickier to get right. I mean, a plot is a plot. You can plot it out, it’s there. That’s your structure. You can stick to it to make that into a novel. To make this into a story, it’s all about the characters. The first time I wrote it, I had six points of view, which was ridiculous looking back and it didn’t work. So, I changed it to three characters, and that took time; each of those characters took a rewrite in itself. The story is told from the point of view of British Bangladeshi Sajid Khan, a Muslim, who’s looking for his daughter in the US; FBI Special Agent Sherya Mistry, a woman of South Asian descent who’s Hindu; and Greg Flynn, a white American military veteran in his twenties. And each are very different characters. And getting the voices, getting inside their heads was an exercise in itself. The easiest one for me was Sajid, because his is probably closest to my experience. The next one I think was Greg. Greg, I could understand and make him real. The toughest one was Sherya, the Indian American FBI agent. That was probably the hardest character to get right and make authentic. I just hope I’ve done a good enough job. I mean that’s for you and for the readers to say, but that to me was the real challenge in this novel. Writing a thriller and also getting those three characters right. Nancie Clare Well, I can say that you did get them right as far as I’m concerned. Abir Mukherjee [Laughs] You’ve got to say that, Nancie, don’t you? Nancie Clare [Laughs} Yeah, I do! In Hunted, the idea of conspiracy and its partner, manipulation, are key elements. Are conspiracies orchestrated? Are they organic? Or is some diabolical person or organization adopting a conspiracy and using it in a nefarious way? Can you talk about how a conspiracy acts in the manipulation of the characters in Hunted? Abir Mukherjee I think conspiracy and domestic manipulation are big threats in Hunted. I think a lot of the time these things start off with idiots in chat rooms. But very quickly those conspiracies can be weaponized. And once the conspiracy gets rolling is where I think a lot of these external actors can and do get involved. Western countries— democracies—are particularly susceptible because we have open societies and we have left too many people behind. There are enemies of democracy, enemies of a certain way of life who will try to take advantage of our openness. When it comes to the nature of conspiracy itself, I don’t tend to believe in them. I tend to believe in the idiocy of people more than I do in the old grand overarching plan. I also don’t believe in the smartness of people. I think people get things wrong and conflated and it’s magnified by different idiots along the chain, but then other people can manipulate that. We see that in domestic politics. I mean the whole Q-Anon thing started off on 4-Chan, and just snowballed to take in a lot of people around America. And that to me is the worrying thing. It’s less how things start; it’s how they’re manipulated and who manipulates them. That to me is the bigger risk in terms of this book. Yes, there is a conspiracy, but one thing I am not sure about is if there are any bad guys in this book. Nancie Clare Yeah, I think there are bad guys in your book. Abir Mukherjee If you look at, of course they’re doing bad things, but in their heads they are the noble people. And I think this is often the case with conspiracies, right? The people that are subject to the conspiracy feel they’re doing the right thing. And that’s really interesting to me. It’s the people who call themselves patriots that I’m most scared of. The ones who wrap themselves in the flag or claim to have some sort of monopoly on patriotism, not just in America, but across the world. Here in Britain we’re seeing it. We are having politicians saying, “I want my country back.” I wonder when somebody says “wanting their country back” that it’s a coded message that people who look like me have robbed them of their birthright, which is nothing of the sort. It’s not the people arriving on dinghies who are robbing these people of their birthright. It’s the people that run countries. It’s the global elite. It’s the people who can move a factory from Ohio to Beijing to save one cent on a widget and destroy a community in the process. It’s the ones that control everything that have taken the country, not the poor. And that to me is fascinating. We’ve punched down, we always punch down because it’s easier to understand and it’s easier to manipulate. And that’s one of the biggest things that make me angry. Why is it that we always attack the wrong target? The people that are coming here for a better life, whether they’re coming with degrees or they’re coming with the skills of their own hands, they’re not the threat. They’re not the ones that have destroyed your communities. They’re not the ones that addicted your population to opiates. And yet these are the people that are the easy target. It’s easy to point at the alien and say, “you are responsible for why my life has gone to shit.” And yet it’s not. It’s the people who dress better than us and fly above our heads that are the ones causing the problems. Sorry, I’ve gone off on a rant! Nancie Clare That actually leads to my next question. In Shadows of Men, which is the most recent book in your series, your story is about mightier powers manipulating the little guy. I see similar themes of manipulation and getting disadvantaged people to do the dirty work in Hunted. Abir Mukherjee Don’t you see that today? Subconsciously, I keep coming back to this because it is the thing that is probably my greatest fear right now. It’s the manipulation of the powerless by the powerful just so that the powerful can maintain their own position and it’s getting worse. Nancie Clare You and I are talking the week before Easter. I love Easter eggs in books and all dedicated fans of crime fiction love to find them. I think I found one: Luca Vesta? Abir Mukherjee I have two. Luca Vesta and Mike Craven, who is Mike Raven in the book. Nancie Clare Didn’t catch that one. Thank you. Nancie Clare I understand that you’re writing another Wyndham-Banerjee book. Do you think that your series and other series by such writers as Vaseem Khan, Sujata Massey, Nev March and Harini Nagendra, among others, have opened a window into the British Raj in India? The idea of colonialism? Abir Mukherjee I hope it has. I mean, look, the issue about colonialism, and let’s take the British time in India until we came along, the story was really only told from the point of view of the colonizer, even when that was the most benign perspective in say, The Far Pavilions. What I’m trying to do is redress that balance. What I won’t do is write from only one side. I don’t think balance means writing purely from an Indian point of view. I mean, I can understand Indian sensibilities, but I’m not a hundred percent Indian in the same way that my Britishness is different from most other people’s Britishness. I sit in the middle, and I can give you a different perspective. I think anyone who is a minority of whatever type will live their life to a degree in stereo. They will see one point of view because that’s the society they live in, but they will have another insight into things from the particular group that they’re part of. I started writing out of anger. I wrote my first Wyndham-Banerjee novel because we have this vision in Britain that the empire was a force for good, and we think it was benign when in so many ways it wasn’t. And all we’re trying to do is provide a bit of perspective. I’m never going to say that one side was all good and one side was all bad. I think with my rants, I do apologize. Nancie Clare Please don’t apologize! Your “rants,”—your word, not mine—are brilliant. But is there any other thing you want to say about Hunted? Your hopes for the book, in addition, of course, to being an entertaining and crackerjack read? Abir Mukherjee Two things: I started writing this before the attack on the U.S. Capitol. All of this is plausible. And some of the reviews have already said that it is chillingly plausible: The other thing that I would love people to take away from this, especially white American readers, is that maybe a slightly different view or an insight into non-white people, non-white Asians. Especially to somebody like Sajid who is a poor Muslim man—a representative of 99.9% of Muslim men in Britain or America—and just a struggling everyman. It’s his color and his religion that make him different. But how is he any different from a blue-collar worker in America who’s just looking after his family and trying to make ends meet? And that’s at heart of the book; very little separates us. We all want the same thing, but we demonize people because we don’t know them. View the full article -
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The Three German Extremist Friends Who Robbed Banks and Murdered Immigrants
One autumn afternoon in the German town of Zwickau, a woman splashed ten liters of gasoline around her apartment, then set it on fire. She had been dreading this day for years, hoping it wouldn’t come to this. But on November 4, 2011, it did, and she needed to act quickly to save her two cats from the flames. Their names were Lilly and Heidi. One was black with white spots on its paws, while the other had gray and black stripes. She scooped them up, put them in their carriers, and walked downstairs to the street. Version 1.0.0 A passing neighbor recognized the woman by her “strikingly long, dark hair.” Everyone seemed to fixate on this feature, perhaps because nothing else about her seemed distinct. She was five foot five, the average height of women in Germany. She was neither heavyset nor slim. Her face was wide, flat, expressionless, with thin lips and hazel eyes. Later, when her face became famous across Germany, there was one trait that nobody seemed to use to describe her. Which was strange because it was the only one that mattered: The woman was white. Four years later, at the trial that would captivate the country, the white woman would claim that she waited to set the fire until the two men renovating the building’s attic left for a break, so they wouldn’t be hurt. That she had tried to warn the older lady who lived downstairs— who looked after Lilly and Heidi when she was away— buzzing and knocking hard on her door, to tell her to run from the flames. Her lawyer would tell a courtroom packed with judges, prosecutors, lawyers, journalists, neo-Nazis, and police that she’d taken great care to save lives the day she set the fire. The lives of other white Germans, and her two precious cats. She wouldn’t have needed to set the fire if only the fifteenth bank robbery had gone as well as the fourteen before it. For over a decade, her two best friends, and sometimes lovers, had been robbing banks at gunpoint in towns across Germany. On their previous heist, the two men— who shared the same first name— had walked in carrying two pistols, a revolver, and a hand grenade, one wearing a vampire mask and the other a ski mask. They walked out with 15,000 euros in cash, making their getaway as they always did— on bicycles. Over the years, they’d stolen hundreds of thousands of deutsche marks and euros, worth nearly a million dollars today. For their fifteenth heist they drove two hours from Zwickau to Eisenach, the birthplace of composer Johann Sebastian Bach and where Martin Luther translated the New Testament from Latin and Greek into German. On November 4, 2011, at 9:15 a.m., they walked in wearing sweatpants and sneakers, one in a gorilla mask, the other in a mask from the movie Scream. They pistol-whipped the bank manager, leaving a wound on his head. They pedaled away with 72,000 euros in a bag. At 9:30 a.m., police issued an alert for officers to be on the lookout for two men on bicycles. Twenty minutes later, a witness told officers he’d seen two men ride bikes into a hardware store parking lot a half mile from the bank. They were in a hurry. They loaded their bikes into a white camper van and drove off. Hours passed without any sign of the culprits, and police theorized they might attempt to drive deeper into Saxony, the eastern German state where other recent bank robberies had taken place. Officers fanned out to patrol the roads leading west toward the city of Chemnitz. But at four minutes past noon, police spotted a white camper van parked on the side of the road a few miles north of the bank. Two officers got out of their vehicle and approached it. Just then, they heard a gunshot, then another. The officers took cover behind a nearby car and a dumpster. Another shot rang out. Then the van went up in flames. The cops radioed firefighters, who rushed to the scene and quickly extinguished the blaze. Carefully, they opened the side door and looked in. Lying on the floor were the bodies of the two bank robbers, each with a bullet through the head. After setting the van on fire, one of them had shot the other, then turned the gun on himself in a sensational murder suicide. Searching through the carnage, a police officer inspected the guns. On the vehicle’s right-hand seat was a Pleter 91 submachine gun and a Czech-made semiautomatic pistol. A black handgun was lying on a small end table between the two seats. But what caught the officer’s eye were the two shiny, brass-colored bullet cartridges. They looked just like the casings of his own, government-issued bullets. Could the bank robbers be police? Investigators had learned little from the series of bank heists across eastern Germany in the preceding years. Two months earlier, police in the town of Gotha described the suspects as “both about 20 years old, slender figures, approx. 180–185 cm, masked, dark brown hair, darker skin tone, German language without an accent.” That last phrase— German-speaking, without an accent— seemed intended to distinguish the men from immigrants or foreigners. The robbers were German, or at least they sounded the part. But the second to last phrase— “ darker skin tone”— seemed to differentiate them from the typical German, by implying they were not white. But the Gotha police got it wrong. That much was evident as officers looked inside the van at the bodies of two men, some of their white skin charred by the fire. When news reports began circulating that two bank robbers had killed themselves in a blaze of fire and gunshots, only one person in all of Germany knew who they were: the white woman with the long dark hair and two cats. Knew that they weren’t just two money-driven men with a death wish. Knew that while robbing banks had been a talent of theirs, it was only a means to a more sinister end: murdering immigrants, to keep Germany white. They weren’t merely bank robbers, the woman knew— they were serial killers, terrorists. She knew this because she was one, too. * * * The three friends were not predestined to become killers. It was the culmination of their decade-long indoctrination into Germany’s far-right world. They didn’t radicalize alone, but as part of a white supremacist community. Its ringleader was a government informant who used taxpayer money to turn disillusioned young Germans into violent political operatives. Some tried to warn the world about what they were up to. One leftist punk began photographing far-right rallies and documenting the white supremacists who attended, unaware that some of them would grow up to be terrorists or that she would one day be called upon to expose them. Before the murders began, a police officer had tried to arrest the trio for their other, foreboding crimes. But he was sidelined by a law enforcement system that cared less about protecting the public than protecting its own. Growing up in eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, far-right youth called themselves National Socialists— Nazis. Like the original Nazis half a century before them, they blamed minorities for their ills. They despised Jews and didn’t consider them to be part of the white race. They derided Blacks. But above all they fixated on immigrants: workingclass men and women and their children, from Turkey, Vietnam, and Greece. Children like Gamze Kubaşık, whose family emigrated from Turkey to Dortmund, where they opened a corner store. Children like Semiya Simşek, whose parents came from Turkey and sold flowers at stands across Bavaria. But to the white woman with long dark hair, and to her two white friends, these immigrants posed an existential threat to the white nation they wanted Germany to be. And so they killed them, or killed their next of kin. One year before the Islamist terror attacks of September 11, 2001, three German terrorists set out to rid their nation of immigrants. Over many years, and in many cities, they shot immigrants where they worked and bombed the neighborhoods where they lived. Shot them in their corner stores, kebab stands, a hardware store. Bombed them in a grocery store, a bar, a barbershop. German authorities didn’t catch on to what they were doing. Blinded by their own prejudice, they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that sixty years after the Holocaust, some white Germans could still be radicalized to the point of carrying out racist mass murder. And so each time an immigrant was killed, officers would lie to the victim’s family, fabricating evidence to feed officers’ fantasies that immigrant crime syndicates were to blame. While police ignored evidence that the killings were being carried out by white Germans, men of Turkish and Greek background continued to be murdered one by one. Thirteen years passed before the trio’s crime spree finally ended. The country’s reckoning Munich courtroom, the city’s largest, renovated just in time to hold Germany’s trial of the century. Each day, former far-right skinheads and former leftist punks filed into the courtroom as witnesses, defendants, lawyers, spectators. Each day, for five years. The truth trickled out slowly. The spy in the cybercafe. Taxpayer funds given to far-right extremists. The intelligence agents who shredded documents in a frenzy. The trial would force Germany to grapple with what drove an ordinary German woman and her ordinary German friends to carry out a serial assassination of innocent people— people selected for the country from which they came, the accent in their voice, the color of their skin. A nation that liked to think it had atoned for its racist past would be forced to admit that violent prejudice was a thing of the present. That sixty years after Hitler’s Nazis led Jews and other minorities to their deaths during the Holocaust, German police were so blinded by bias that they couldn’t recognize the racist violence unfolding around them. The case would compel Germans to acknowledge that terrorism isn’t always Islamist or foreign. More often, it’s homegrown and white. And that in an age of unparalleled mass migration, the targets of white terrorism are increasingly immigrants. This is true not just in Germany, but in Western democracies around the globe. Since 9/11, more people in the United States have been murdered by far-right extremists than by any other kind, including Islamist ones. And it’s getting worse: The year President Donald Trump took office, American white supremacists murdered twice as many people as the year before. Trump’s anti-immigrant, antidemocratic rhetoric inspired white terrorists across the globe. In Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, minutes before a white man shot up a mosque during Friday prayers, he circulated a manifesto that called for the “removal” of nonwhite immigrants from Europe and praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” He wasn’t the first white man to find common purpose in terrorizing immigrants and racial minorities, Muslims, and Jews. And he wouldn’t be the last. Another white terrorist found it at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, slaughtering nine Black worshippers in 2015. Two years later, another found it in a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, where he opened fire just after an imam led the congregation in prayer, killing six people and injuring five. One month after that, another one found it in Olathe, Kansas, where he yelled at two Indian engineers, calling them “terrorists” and “illegal immigrants,” and screamed at them to “get out of my country,” before shooting and killing them. A few months after that, another found it on a train in Portland, Oregon, shouting racist and anti-Muslim slurs at two Black teenagers before stabbing three people, killing two. Yet another white terrorist found it at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, killing eleven Jewish people and injuring six. Another found it as he hunted Mexicans in the aisles of a Walmart in El Paso, killing twenty-three. Another one found it in the Asian American spas and massage parlors of Atlanta, where he killed six Asian American women and injured two others. One month later, another found it at a FedEx in Indianapolis that employed Indian Americans, killing four Sikhs and four others. Another one found it in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, where he entered a grocery store and slaughtered eleven people, almost all of them Black. Another found it in a store in Jacksonville, Florida, where, on the sixtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in August 2023, he ordered white people to leave before killing three Black shoppers in a suicide attack. To stop this carnage, we need to acknowledge who the terrorists really are. Just as in Germany, most terrorists who strike in the United States are homegrown and white. Today, some Germans want to confront their domestic extremists. But many wish to look away. It’s a sentiment shared around the world. No one wants to believe that their neighbors, friends, and fellow citizens may be radicalizing around them, or that white terror is on the rise. They’d like to think it doesn’t happen often, or that it couldn’t happen here. Germany’s failure to recognize its first white terrorist spree of the twenty-first century— much less stop it— is a chilling warning for other nations that are failing to fight extremists at home. Having briefly earned a reputation as a haven for the world’s refugees, Germany is now struggling to protect them from violence by native-born whites. “There are those in the east and the west who want to see Germany as an open society”— one that embraces immigrants, said Heike Kleffner, a German journalist who investigates the far right. But there are other Germans who would like to make Germany white. “This rift is played out in families, in small towns, big cities, villages. It’s a battle about defining this country.” This upheaval is transforming Germany’s politics and calling into question what being German even means. Similar debates are engulfing nations around the world. When three white Germans began their anti-immigrant spree, white terrorism was already a global phenomenon, though few yet knew it by that name. To understand what white terror is, who is spreading it, and how to stop it, we must look to Germany’s east, where three friends from a small town set off to murder immigrants— and the government that was supposed to stop them chose to look away. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Look Away: a true Story of Murder, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, by Jacob Kushner. Published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright 2024. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article -
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My Life and Times with Clive Cussler
Authors tend to be solitary creatures, so the idea of collaborating with one another is a rather odd event. That said, when Clive Cussler called me up some years back and asked if I’d like to work on his Oregon Files series of adventure novels, I said yes even before we discussed salary. Clive liked to say, tongue firmly in cheek, that he made the money while I did the work. But nothing could be further from the truth. Writing and editing are two entirely different disciplines. I know a legendary editor in New York whose only attempt at writing a novel churned out one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And most authors can barely edit themselves, let alone someone else. That said, Clive wore both hats with ease. I read the first books in the series to familiarize myself with characters and plotlines and then handed in an outline with a few sample chapters for our first book, Dark Watch. Clive then invited me to his Arizona home to discuss my work. I’ll never forget what transpired. He told me that he liked what I’d come up with, but the smuggling of nuclear waste as a plot device had been done to death. He told me to come up with something else—and promptly left for a nap, giving me a one-hour deadline. Fortunately, I work well in a state of panic. I worked in a human trafficking angle, and we were off and running. Our system, and the system he employed with all of the other co-authors, was this: once the outline was agreed upon, I would write a third of the book and wait for his feedback. Clive had a great attention to detail and as a writer of complex plots understood that a minor tweak in the beginning of the story had repercussions throughout that had to be considered. He did not ask for structural changes to the plot without giving it a lot of thought, and for that I was always grateful. That isn’t to say he didn’t put his stamp on each page. He knew when I was overwriting a scene, or becoming too enamored of my research, or telling rather than showing, or falling into any of the other traps that befall an author. He loved his fans and took the time to make sure each of the books that bore his name also had his style of writing— his signature adventure plots loaded with intrigue as exciting as we could make it. After writing seven books this way, no matter how smooth the collaboration had been, I grew restless and went back to writing solo novels. It was nice to answer to no one for a change—but like being in the Mafia, I couldn’t really escape. Clive invited me to helm the Isaac Bell series and I turned him down flat. For a day. Then I got the brilliant idea of introducing Isaac Bell into the Raise the Titanic storyline—retconning is the term for it, meaning retroactive continuity of a pre-existing narrative. I pitched the idea of turning a Cussler book on its head with a prelude set in the modern world and the rest in the past. Clive was actually angry that he hadn’t thought of that himself. Working on that book, which was published as The Titanic Secret, was like our first effort all over again. Very soon we were onto another Bell adventure, this time set in Panama at the time of the canal construction. We again upended the Cussler formula and gave the book Agatha Christy-type twists. It was two thirds complete when Clive died rather suddenly. I soon learned that his son, Dirk, would be taking over Clive’s role. I was sure life would be just like before. Oops…. Dirk didn’t like how I’d structured this story and felt that, with Clive not around, deviating from his classic formula wasn’t such a great idea. After cursing Dirk for several days, I reluctantly agreed, and for the first time in my professional career had to rewrite one of my books. To his credit, Dirk understood the ordeal he’d asked me to endure and worked with me closely to minimize how much I’d have to redo. In the end, we put out arguably my best Isaac Bell novel. Since then, collaborating with Dirk has been just about as easy as it had been with Clive. I’m not sure how other co-authorships work, but I know for myself that keeping my association with the Cussler name is as simple as remembering to write the best Cussleresque novels that I can. And so, here we are now with The Heist. *** View the full article -
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Eight of the Greatest Campus Novels Ever Written
To step into a campus novel, like stepping onto a college campus, is to enter a miniature world. It’s a place with a particular geography, made of dorm rooms and classrooms, student centers and dining halls. Time is both fixed and in motion: for students, it’s always moving toward an endpoint, while for professors, time passes, but their students remain young. As a setting for fiction, the campus offers a natural structure and urgency: the arc of the semester, seasons of the academic year. Its insularity can make things seem outsized, dramatic, whether the arcane traditions or the eccentricities of roommates or the absurd inner workings of academia itself. Lately, though, the college campus no longer exists in such a bubble. The anxieties of the real world—politics, social media, the climate crisis, uncertainty about the future—are pressing in. These concerns weigh heavily on the minds of the thoughtful undergraduates in my classes, and were on my own mind while working on Reunion, a novel about three old friends who return to their college campus many years later. The eight novels here include campuses past and present, six colleges and two boarding schools, classics in the genre and recent additions that interrogate the modern college experience or reflect on the past with a knowing eye. Kiley Reid, Come and Get It In the opening scene, Agatha Paul, visiting professor at the University of Arkansas, interviews three students about weddings. The conversation quickly unfolds in other directions, yielding admissions about race and class that are casually startling. Agatha’s research deepens—aided by diligent, hardworking RA Millie, who shares a wall with three clashing roommates—and the result is an unputdownable story as well as an incisive, addictive chronicle of consumer culture and what is taken, bought, and given away. Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year It’s the late nineties, the era of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and Isabel Rosen’s senior year at Wilder College. A student from a working-class family, Isabel has always felt like something of an outsider on her rarefied New England campus. In her final semester, after a sexual assault by a classmate, Isabel is drawn into a consuming, complicated affair with a professor. My Last Innocent Year is not only a beautiful, spot-on depiction of being a young woman in college during a specific moment, but a wise exploration of how such a moment can shape a life. Antonia Angress, Sirens & Muses At the prestigious Wrynn College of Art, four lives are dramatically entwined: scholarship student Louisa, her seductive roommate Karina, visiting professor Robert Berger, and classmate Preston Utley, an Internet agitator. The first half of the novel delves into passions and rivalries in the bubble of art school, then cleverly pivots to life after graduation, the fallout from the 2011 recession and the pressures and anxieties of the art world in New York. It’s a mesmerizing story about art, class, sexuality, ambition—and the writing is exquisite. Sara Novic, True Biz At the River Valley School for the Deaf, new student Charlie is struggling to acclimate to life on campus; unlike most of her classmates, she’s never learned ASL. Headmistress February, a CODA (child of deaf adults), is navigating stresses in her marriage and uncertainties about the school’s future. Austin, a model student, is thrown when his sister is born hearing. The immersive True Biz—“real-talk” in ASL—doesn’t feel like it was written to instruct the reader about the Deaf community, but leaves you feeling enlightened just the same. Sonora Jha. The Laughter It’s uncomfortable to occupy the perspective of Oliver Harding—a tenured white male professor who fetishizes his new colleague, Pakistani law professor Ruhaba Khan—but that’s the point. Harding is puzzled by the changes on the campus (including the call for greater diversity) and in the world, where tensions are rising around the 2016 election and #MeToo. His fixation with Rubaba deepens when her teenage nephew, Adil, arrives to live with her. This shrewd look at modern academia (and modern America) is also a tense page-turner. And the ending is haunting. Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members This blistering academic satire is composed as a series of letters by Jason Fitger, a writing and literature professor at a meh Midwestern college, contending with drastic budget cuts to the English department and his once-promising writing career. He’s routinely called upon to compose letters for students, colleagues, committees—the very relentlessness of these letters a jab at academic culture—to say nothing of their content, which is scathingly funny and wincingly true. (Schumacher’s sequels, The Shakespeare Experiment and The English Experience, are hilarious/painful too.) Donna Tartt, A Secret History Is any list of campus novels complete without Donna Tartt’s iconic A Secret History? This Gothic mystery, set at an elite Vermont college, occupies a singular place in the canon of dark academia. From the prologue, we learn that Richard, while in college, was involved in a murder. His recounting of what happened—beginning with his fixation on a group of fellow students cultishly devoted to their Classics professor—is both a queasy thriller and a chilling exploration of privilege and class. Julia Jonas, Vladimir In this twisty, juicy, darkly funny take on Lolita, the unnamed narrator is a 50-something English professor/writer at a liberal arts college in upstate New York. Her husband (also an English professor/writer) is facing allegations over past relationships with students. Though they happened years ago (and his wife was aware) campus life has changed; students are angry and empowered. On-campus tensions and marital resentments shift into higher gear when a new professor, young experimental novelist Vladimir Valinski, and his wife, a troubled memoirist, arrive in town. Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You The past is not a place that film professor Bodie Kane is keen to revisit, until she accepts a teaching invitation at her alma mater, a New Hampshire boarding school. Back at Granby, teaching a course on podcasting, she confronts not only conflicting versions of her teenage self but the mysterious circumstances around the murder of her roommate, Thalia Keith. This campus novel is both an entertaining whodunit and a no-pulled-punches reckoning with the past. *** View the full article -
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Brandon Sanderson - Tips from a Master, but are they Master Tips?
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Prose Mastery in Six Weeks - the NAPE Drills
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Five Novels to Transport You to Wild Worlds This Summer
On Cumberland Island, Georgia, between the twisted oaks of the maritime forest and the broad, white dunes of the ocean-facing coast, I met a feral horse. He—a stallion straight from the cover of Black Beauty, if a little scragglier—had positioned himself on the narrow causeway that crossed a freshwater pond, and, by his snorting and head tossing and the way he ripped at the earth with his hooves, it was clear that he did not intend to let me cross. The horse moved towards me in a kind of stiff march. My friends scattered. I turned away at an angle (would he charge if I showed my back?) and walked into the woods beside the trail. I tried not to look at the horse. I shed my red jacket (were pissed-off feral stallions like Spanish bulls?). In the scrawny pines, I felt better. I was off the trail, but the stallion was nowhere in sight. I conferred with my friends. I took out my map. We could meet the trail at a different point, but we would have to, eventually, cross the causeway if we wanted to see the dunes. Over my shoulder, there was a crackling of leaves, the sound of wood breaking. “Behind you!” my friend (actually) said. It was the stallion, only yards away. He had followed me into the woods (why hadn’t I heard him sooner?). Again, I cut my eyes from the horse and walked away, deeper into the pines. I tried to stay calm. I imagined the hard crescents of the stallion’s hooves cutting into my back, but they never came. *** While this was (so far) my most hostile encounter with the feral horses of Cumberland Island—the descendants of a population imported from Globe, Arizona by the Carnegies in the 1920s—it was one of many. During my time researching the island’s horses and landscape, tourists would sometimes ask me on the ferry from St. Mary’s, “What are the chances we’ll see a wild horse?” Though the 200-odd feral horses can be viewed reliably on the grounds of the ruined mansion, picking over the few fallow fields of the island, or walking the sand trails in small, somber trains—typically a skinny mare and her foals—there are no “wild” horses on Cumberland Island. Only feral domestic stock left to eke out what living they can on the island, where browse is scarce, freshwater is limited, and their lifespan is less than half of what it might be. (For those interested, recent journalism on the horses’ situation can be found here.) It was my fascination with the horses of Cumberland, with the words “wild” and “feral” and the way they move in our imaginations, and—yes—with the natural beauty and diversity of life on Georgia’s largest barrier island that led me to write my first novel, the coming-of-age thriller, Bomb Island. On my fictionalized version of Cumberland Island, called Bomb Island for the unexploded atomic bomb sunk off its coast, it’s not horses, but the white tiger, Sugar, that stalks people from the cover of the saw palms. First, I wanted to write Jaws, then an artists’ romance, then climate fiction. As it often goes, all of these ideas mixed and folded and accordioned into the novel as it came to be, but it occurs to me now, years later, that the deepest root of the book might be found at the base of that causeway, with that irate dude-horse tearing up the ground, looking like a living specter of comeuppance for his and his forebears’ stranding. Like the characters in Bomb Island, I grew up feeling at home in the woods, hiking and hunting; this was one of many times that I was humbled by the natural world. Like the other authors on this list, I found conflict, catharsis, even pleasure in the risk of the wild. Here are five books that will transport you to wild worlds this summer, from which you may never return: Water Music: A Cape Cod Story, Marcia Peck (2023) Lily Grainger and her family find a new home on the edge of the continent, where she grapples with fragmented family dynamics and new friendships. Set against Massachusetts’ scenic coastline, the novel explores identity, belonging, and redemption. Through Lily’s journey of self-discovery, Peck captures the beauty and complexity of Cape Cod, weaving a tale of love, forgiveness, and the small ways that we hold each other together. Swamplandia, Karen Russel (2011) A haunting, coming-of-age story that centers the Bigtree family’s alligator-wrestling theme park, located on a mangrove island off the coast of Florida. The novel follows the Bigtree children on their quest to save their home and sister—a journey that will take them to the brink of the underworld. Magical realism animates an exploration of family grief and resilience amidst lush, otherworldly landscapes and eccentric characters. Teenager, Bud Smith (2022) In an intimate reflection on adolescence, Teenager follows two lovers as they escape their small New Jersey town for a road trip across the country. Smith navigates the complexities of life in violent transition in prose that is sharp and feeling, rendering a vision of America is raw and unflinching, as likely to kill you as it is to make you whole. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (1993) A chilling suburban drama narrated by a group of boys fascinated by the mysterious deaths of their neighbors, the Lisbon sisters. The Virgin Suicides makes space for itself as a contemporary classic that takes on the difficult territory of abuse, oppression, loss of innocence, and intrigue in a novel that renders profound tragedy with dark humor. Alongside Eugenides’ young characters, readers are compelled to immerse themselves in a mystery hidden in plain sight. Empire of Light, Michael Bible (2018) A hypnotic novel set in the American South that follows the rambling of the hapless Alvis Maloney. In small-town North Carolina, Maloney finds new friends and trouble in a surreal exploration of companionship, belonging, and redemption. Like his teacher, Barry Hannah, Bible’s prose is cutting, bizarre, even feverish. Empire of Light evokes and updates the Southern Gothic tradition in a modern narrative rife with melancholic beauty, wanderlust, and yearning. *** View the full article -
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Why Trains Make the Perfect Thriller and Mystery Setting
The 8:04 is coming down the tracks. Board at your own risk. This is the warning on the cover reveal for my new thriller The Man on the Train. Ever since the original damsel in distress was tied to the railroad tracks and early audiences purportedly fled in terror at the sight of the locomotive roaring into the station in an 1895 silent short by the Lumière brothers, filmmakers and novelists have explored the thrilling possibilities of this singular form of travel. What makes trains so irresistible to suspense auteurs? Because of their confined, claustrophobic interiors that force strangers into intimate proximity with few places to hide and no means of escape? The fact that they’re constantly in motion, hurtling through time and space across borders and treacherous terrain where neither the passengers nor the audience can get off? We hear it before we see it, a shrill, piercing sound that sets our adrenaline pumping, especially when it starts out as a human shriek and morphs into a train whistle in The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 tale of international intrigue. Then suddenly there it is, lumbering into sight. Which means you’ll have to move with lightning speed if you’re the villain preparing to push your unwitting victim onto the tracks. Or it can be a deceptively ordinary arrival, as the Metro North pulls into the Scarsdale station where my married protagonist Guy Kingship waits with his fellow commuters for the doors to open. Then it’s every man and woman for themselves as they race aboard to snag that coveted aisle or window seat. But Guy’s everyday train ride into Manhattan becomes a journey with an unexpected stop in the past he has buried deep when a beautiful woman takes the empty seat next to him. Speaking of seats on trains, in Hitchcock’s 1941 paranoid thriller Suspicion, based on the novel Before the Fact, the heroine (portrayed by Joan Fontaine) is happily ensconced in her first-class compartment when handsome stranger Cary Grant enters and arouses her suspicions by presenting a third-class ticket to the conductor. The Master of Suspense’s love affair with locomotives included 1941’s Shadow of a Doubt, which opens at a train station with Teresa Wright’s character eagerly awaiting the arrival of her favorite uncle and namesake Charlie, portrayed by Joseph Cotten. The action climaxes with the story’s antagonist plunging to his death into the path of an oncoming train. In the 1945 film Spellbound, it’s the layout of the tracks that evokes a plot-advancing flashback in amnesiac Gregory Peck while train-bound with psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman. Our first glimpse of the thief played by Tippi Hedren (and that infamous yellow pocketbook) in 1964’s Marnie is from the back as she walks briskly across the platform to await her train. Cary Grant meets another beautiful woman on a train in the 1959 cross-country thriller North by Northwest, which leaves the after-story to the viewer’s imagination as it concludes with Grant and Eva Marie Saint on a sleeper train about to enter a tunnel. The Lady Vanishes, adapted from the aptly titled novel The Wheel Spins, was Hitch’s only film with the action set almost entirely on a train. This 1938 spy classic, shot on a ninety-foot set in a London film studio, brilliantly captures the sense of confinement ideal for attempting to conceal sinister doings (including a scene in a baggage car) in the story of an elderly woman who disappears aboard a European express where everyone denies having seen her. With a screenplay co-written by Raymond Chandler and based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, the seminal 1951 Strangers on a Train delivers first-class chills. Although little of the film’s action actually takes place on a train, who can forget the fateful in-transit encounter between Farley Granger’s Guy Haines and Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony, the charming psychopath who suggests they swap murders? Nowhere is premeditated evil more on display than during the train sequence in Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, as Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray carry out an ingenious plan for disposing of the body of Stanwyck’s dead husband. What about the trains that bear witness to crimes real or imagined? The recovering alcoholic heroine in Paula Hawkins’s 2015 The Girl on the Train sees something shocking taking place in the backyard of a house she passes on her daily commute to London. Another Lady on the Train was portrayed by musical star Deanne Durbin in the 1945 film about a San Francisco debutante on a New York-bound train who looks up from her book just in time to watch a murder being committed in a nearby building. In Agatha Christie’s 1957 mystery 4:50 from Paddington, Mrs. McGillicuddy is en route to visit her friend Jane Marple when her train passes another train speeding along in the same direction, where a man appears to be strangling his intended victim. Unreliable narrators or eyewitnesses to brutal acts of violence? Trains run by timetable, and this strict adherence to schedules heightens suspense and the feeling of impending danger. The action can turn into a furious race against the clock, which happens in the climactic moments of The Man on the Train when Guy Kingship’s attorney wife Linda rushes to prevent a murder with only minutes to spare. Transcontinental journeys add a sense of the exotic and the unknown. Christie’s 1934 masterpiece Murder on the Orient Express, written during the UK’s Golden Age of Steam Travel and made into two feature films, is the quintessential train tale because all the action takes place on the fabled luxury liner as it wends its way from Istanbul to Paris. In a setting where physical movement is limited, you can’t commit murder and flee the scene unless you want to risk your life jumping off a speeding locomotive. Even if you happen to be seen, your appearance arouses little suspicion because you are not out of place. You are who and where you’re supposed to be: an anonymous passenger on a train. But nothing and no one is what they seem as the Queen of Crime subverts expectations and the train becomes a repository for the characters’ vengeful secrets and a place of sudden, violent death. Now it’s up to Hercule Poirot, confronted with the most challenging case of his career, to use his little grey cells to deduce the killer’s identity. Here are a few more films that feature some form of train in the title: The Sleeping Car Murders, a 1965 Costas Gravas noir film about a woman found strangled in her berth based on Sebastien Japrisot’s novel 10:30 from Marseilles reminiscent of Murder on the Orient Express; the eponymous 1929 film The Flying Scotsman, believed to be the most iconic train in British railway history; Boxcar Bertha (1972), Martin Scorcese’s second feature film; The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the 1974 film about a subway train taken hostage; Bong joon-ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer, based on the 1982 graphic novel about earth’s surviving humans living on an enormous train that circumnavigates their glacial planet. The list goes on. Maybe now you’re starting to get an idea of why trains make such pitch-perfect suspense and mystery settings. As Federico Fellini said: “Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will chose his or her own train.” All aboard! *** View the full article -
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Los Angeles as Setting and Character
Los Angeles is the quintessential city of mystery, and I firmly believe that my decision to live here ultimately led me to write crime fiction. But that journey took decades. I wasn’t one of the starry-eyed optimists who thought of LA as the promised land. When I moved from New York City to Los Angeles 30 years ago, I did so with trepidation. Actually, that’s putting a good face on my true feelings. Though I was originally a transplant from the Midwest to the Big Apple, I’d become one of those New Yorkers with a decidedly jaundiced view of the West Coast. And as a costume designer who made her living in theater, my attitude toward the movie business was equally disdainful. At the time, I thought that making the jump from stage to film was tantamount to “selling out.” But the practical side of my nature told me it would be wise to take a closer look at the more lucrative business of film, and if I was going to do that, I wanted to do it where they invented the industry. In hindsight, I admit that a big part of my prejudice regarding the move stemmed from my fear of the unknown. Plus, I was still quite young, idealistic, and in many ways, naive. Despite my doubts, I moved to Los Angeles in October of 1990, rented a tiny apartment in Silverlake, and bought a used car. And I was lucky enough to land a job in movies within 2 weeks of landing in LA, which sealed the deal for me. I became a reluctant Angeleno and for the next 27 years, I made my living in the film industry. During those years, my relationship with my adopted city went through many phases. I was still living in that little apartment in Silverlake when riots blew up the city that still felt new to me in 1992. I’d been working over on the Sony Studios lot that day, and when the violence erupted, the studio closed early in the afternoon. As I made the 15-mile trip across town via Venice Boulevard, I drove past burning strip malls and cars full of young men who brandished baseball bats at unlucky motorists like me who were just hoping to get home. And I’m very grateful that I did make it safely to my apartment where I holed up for the next 3 days, feeling frightened and heartbroken for the entire city. That’s a piece LA’s history I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, and though I hope we’ll never see that kind of violence again, the problems that sparked the riots have never been fully rooted out. I’ve come to understand that Los Angeles will always have a dark side. It’s inevitable in a city so vast, so populous, and so complex — a sociological stew that makes LA unique. I cherish that diversity, even though I recognize that simmering conflict is a residual element of our blended society. For this diehard LA convert, the benefits of mixing all those rich cultural influences far outweigh any negative issues created by their synergy. Over time, that realization has gradually transformed my relationship with my adopted city. Los Angeles has been such an important part of my life experience and my development as both a human being and an artist that the city and I now belong together in a way I could never have imagined when I moved here. I’ve had the great good fortune to make wonderful life-long friends and enjoyed a long, lucrative career working on the costumes for movies like Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and X-Men Days of Future Past. And when I felt it was time to make yet another major life transition, changing my vocation from working in film to writing mystery fiction, I knew the kaleidoscopic nature of Los Angeles would be my touchstone because my heart will always be at home here. But LA is not only the location for my books; I think of the city as a living, breathing character in my stories. They couldn’t be written about anyplace else in the world. In part that’s because the books are set behind the scenes in the movie business. The film industry and the city of Los Angeles were born together; it’s arguable each made the other’s existence viable — not twins but rather symbiotic partners that supported and cross-pollinated one another until both grew into the giant entities they’ve become. Now you don’t think of one without the other; they’re inseparable in the popular zeitgeist, their combined magic luring dreamers from all over the world. And though it’s certainly possible to be inspired by the sheer scope and magnificence of Los Angeles as a symbol of glamour and excitement — many artists, writers, and filmmakers have ingeniously used those qualities to great effect in their work — I prefer more intimate glimpses into the many hearts and faces that make up this beautiful, troubling, complicated city. Because that immense sprawl, the unending carpet of lights that’s often used as visual shorthand for LA is just a superficial image. It has nothing to do with the true identity of the city, which is actually a patchwork of many different communities. Some are incorporated as separate municipalities, yet they march shoulder to shoulder from the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley to the Pacific Ocean with boundaries that exist only on paper. East LA, El Sereno, Downtown Los Angeles (which also encompasses Little Tokyo and Chinatown), Echo Park, Silverlake, Koreatown, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Venice, and Santa Monica, each community with a distinct personality, some of which have blended over time, settling into various stages of overlapping influences with one another. That’s part of the real magic of Los Angeles — the schizy, unpredictable interplay between those different faces of the city is a continuous source of drama, the heart of any good story and definitely any good mystery. Anyway, that’s how it seems to me. I’m humbled to realize after all these years that my adopted city and my adopted profession are two of the greatest sources of inspiration for my writing. I’ve always been an avid reader. From childhood I dreamed of being a writer, and I’ve written for my own creative satisfaction throughout my life. But it wasn’t until I’d been in LA and working on movies for a number of years that I became a real fan of mystery fiction. And that happened almost by accident. I discovered that one of the few ways I could disengage my brain from the workday of a busy film was to read a good murder mystery at bedtime. Eventually (after reading several hundred in that genre) I started to imagine writing murder mystery stories of my own. So it was the combination of the years I’ve spent living in LA and learning to appreciate all the nuances of the city together with the variety of (sometimes jaw-dropping) experiences I’ve had working on movies that finally led me to write crime fiction. Turns out, a big movie in production is the perfect setting for a murder mystery because a movie company is its own unique community — a microcosm of the larger society that spawned it — but with its own set of relationships and always plenty of drama happening behind the scenes. Final Cut, the first book in my Hollywood Mystery series featuring movie key costumer Joey Jessop as the main character, was inspired by situations I encountered on one film in particular that I won’t name here. I didn’t stumble over the body of a fellow crew member on the set as Joey did, but many of the other incidents that appear in the book parallel actual events. Star Struck, Hollywood Mystery Book #2 was based in part on my experiences within the film world, but the incident that triggers the mystery, a fatal traffic accident near the movie set where Joey and her colleagues are working, was inspired by a startling event I witnessed in downtown Los Angeles. I watched in horror as a wild-eyed girl dashed barefoot through traffic across one of the wide north-south avenues. Fortunately, that girl made it to the opposite side of the street without being injured. But I’ll never forget her death-defying sprint or the panic I felt until she leaped safely onto the sidewalk without breaking stride. No one appeared to be chasing her, and I’ve always wondered what made her run. It’s a mystery that’s stayed with me, a seed of an idea that grew into a story. For me, that kind of capriciousness is a treasure that makes Los Angeles a Pandora’s box of imagination, a source of both great misfortune and hope — an endless well of creative inspiration for nearly any story about any sort of person who might be living or traveling through this iconic crossroads of the world. *** View the full article -
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The Damsel in the Mirror: Thrillers Where the Heroine Saves Herself
Genre fiction is my jam, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes my favorite books tick. Growing up, I read a lot of macho thrillers: spies and submarines, combatants and operatives. These battles were mostly fought by well-trained experts. It’s fun to learn to pilot a submarine or stop a terrorist plot in Times Square. But the recent wave of heroine-centric thrillers is exciting in a whole new way. Many of these new titles are shelved as “domestic suspense,” aka “ordinary woman with a big, scary problem.” In these books, the heroine has to save herself. And she’s usually unprepared for the challenge ahead. On the one hand, there aren’t any Bourne-like superpowers to admire. But on the flip side, these novels ask a different question—what if it’s you in the hot seat? How fast can a nice girl from the suburbs find her dark side if the situation calls for extraordinary measures? It turns out that watching an amateur get up to speed is just as exciting as looking over the shoulder of a trained professional. There’s so much more at stake. That’s the zeitgeist I gave to The Five Year Lie. When her dead boyfriend suddenly sends her a confounding text, single mom Ariel Cafferty has a deep dark problem. The more questions she asks, the scarier it gets. Before I even wrote the prologue, I was inspired by these other domestic thrillers by female authors: The Last Flight by Julie Clark This inventive story actually has two heroines trying to save themselves via a fateful ticket swap—and identity swap—at the airport. Their stories unfold via two competing timelines and through absolutely flawless writing. I couldn’t put it down. With My Little Eye by Joshilyn Jackson The heroine of this thriller is an actress who’s being stalked by a shadowy figure who seems to know her awfully well. The police don’t seem to be doing much about it, which leaves her fighting for her own safety, and questioning every interaction with the men in her life. The writing is exquisite, and you’ll keep turning the pages, trying to figure out which of Meribel’s male acquaintances can be trusted. And which one can’t… On a Quiet Street by Seraphina Nova Glass The medley of women at the center of this drama are so well drawn that you’ll be hooked from chapter one. One woman believes her husband is cheating on her. And her neighbor, who’s trying and failing to recover from her own tragedy, offers up her services as an amateur sleuth. What could go wrong? A lot, as it turns out. This book’s power is in the way you’re rooting for everyone, even when you’re not sure they deserve it. And you won’t see the ending coming. The First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston This is one of those rare story concepts where you don’t quite know what’s going on, but you don’t mind all that much. The protagonist, Evie Porter, tells you right off the bat that she’s a con artist, willfully enmeshing her life with a certain Ryan Summer on orders from her shadowy boss. But things get wild all too soon, and you’ll be turning pages at warp speed to see if Evie can make it out of this mess alive. Girl Forgotten by Karin Slaughter This pick is cheating a little because Andrea Oliver, the heroine, is a US Marshall. But it’s literally her first day on the job! This setup proves to be brilliant and often hilarious. Thrown into the deep end of a big case, Andrea has to set aside her inexperience as well as her imposter syndrome to find the killer before he finds her. *** View the full article
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