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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
Forums
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete in today's market. Just beware because we do have a sense of humor.
I've Just Landed So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts - NWOE Novel Writing Guide
Crucial Self-editing Techniques - No Hostages- 47
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George, "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass, and "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many horrid and writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom in the novel writing universe. All topics are unlocked and open for comment.
Margaret Atwood Said What?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups- 24
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of informative, entertaining, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on Youtube. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Members of the Algonkian Critics Film Board (ACFB) include Kara Bosshardt, Richard Hacker, Joseph Hall, Elise Kipness, Michael Neff, and Audrey Woods.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?- 91
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read a few fascinating articles, learn something useful, and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side.
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. If you're in the early or middle stages of novel writing, you'll get a lot from this. We cannot thank her enough for this collection of literary dissection.
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2024
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New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
- New York Write to Pitch "First Pages" - 2022, 2023, 2024
- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
- New York Write to Pitch Conference Reviews
For New York Write to Pitch or Algonkian attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Assignments include conflict levels, antagonist and protagonist sketches, plot lines, setting, and story premise. Publishers use this forum to obtain information before and after the conference event, therefore, writers should edit as necessary. Included are NY conference reviews, narrative critique sub-forums, and most importantly, the pre-event Novel Development Sitemap.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Writer Conferences nurture intimate, carefully managed environments conducive to practicing the skills and learning the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive commercial or literary novel. Learn more below.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
Algonkian Conferences - Ugly Reviews
Algonkian's Eight Prior Steps to Query
Why do Passionate Writers Fail?- 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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Total Topics12.8k
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AAC Activity Items
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Exploring Diverse Representation of Women in Historical Mysteries
It’s no secret I love historical mysteries. I spent my childhood reading Nancy Drew, The Famous Five and Secret Seven, progressing to Agatha Christie in my teenage and adult years. I rejoiced when the genre moved away from bumbling women who solved mysteries purely by luck to strong, interesting and diverse characters solving crimes through pluck, grit and intelligence in a variety of settings, with a motley crew of supporting characters. In the real world during these time periods, women would have been confined to strictly domestic roles, but in the realm of historical fiction, they emerge as powerful figures, breaking free from patriarchal constraints and asserting their agency in male-dominated spaces. While the upper class and titled gentry still reign supreme (pun intended) within the historical mystery genre, there are plenty of unique and interesting settings and characters to keep the most mystery addicted reader engaged. In my new release, The Mayfair Dagger, Albertine is unusual in that she was raised by a scientifically minded father who prided himself on educating Albertine and her brother as equals, however upon his death, due to the inheritance laws of the time, she finds her utterly untrustworthy cousin named as her ‘guardian’. So, she does what any self respecting woman would do – she steals a dogcart and travels to London with her friend-cum-maid and sets herself up as a lady detective hoping to earn her own money, and gaining control over her life, with hilarious results (none of them money making results, much to her chagrin). Female detectives in historical mysteries highlight the resilience, intelligence, and resourcefulness of women in the face of adversity. These strong and unique women serve as inspiring role models for readers, as they often fight against wider social injustices and help shape readers’ understanding of historical events and women’s roles throughout history, as well as supporting readers to develop empathy and understanding for people from different backgrounds. Take Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series – Charlotte Holmes ruins herself (scandalous!) to remove herself from the oppressive upper class society she lives in. Pretending to be a man ensures she can earn money as a detective and is able to dedicate herself to solving the most puzzling of crimes. The greatest riddle for her though, is emotion. Described by Thomas as “on the very high-functioning end of the autism spectrum” we have front row seats to Charlotte’s internal dialogue as she struggles to understand her friends and family, and show love in a manner that is understood and received by the ‘Neurotypicals’ in her life. And who isn’t a sucker for the ol’ dressed as a man going adventuring trope?! Laura Joh Rowland’s Victorian Mystery series, beginning with The Ripper’s Shadow, is another outstanding example. Set in Victorian England, this series follows Sarah Bain, a photographer of risqué images of, ahem, ladies of the night, she hunts for Jack the Ripper with a diverse bunch of friends including a street urchin, a gay aristocrat, a Jewish butcher and his wife. Where does one find friends like this, one asks oneself? I’d sign up immediately! The Harlem Renaissance Mystery Series by Nekesa Afia follows Louise Lloyd, a Black journalist in the 1920s Harlem, as she becomes embroiled in murder investigations while navigating the vibrant cultural scene of the Harlem Renaissance. Think shimmery gowns, dancing, bootleg alcohol and a serial killer hunting young girls…ok, ok, you got me. Nekesa Afia’s own promotional copy beats anything I could write: “if you want a jazz age murder mystery starring a tiny, tired lesbian, look no further than DEAD DEAD GIRLS.” The recently published The Mayor of Maxwell Street by Avery Cunningham is a delicious addition to the historical mystery genre. Wealthy (albeit newly minted, but one can’t have it all) debutante Nelly Sawyer works secretly undercover as an investigative journalist, who becomes embroiled in a hunt for, you guessed it, the missing mayor. Cunningham does a magnificent job at placing us in 1920’s Prohibition-era Chicago, and the cast of characters include a speakeasy manager, not one but two love interests for Nelly and ALL the fashion. Sujata Massey writes historical mysteries set in Asia, with her most recent – The Mistress of Bhatia House – gives us India in 1922. Featuring an amateur detective in the form of Bombay’s only female solicitor, Perveen Mistry, grapples with class divisions, sexism, and complex family dynamics. Massey shows beautifully what a complicated country India was at that time, colonised by the British as it was and does an excellent job of defining the social issues in an entertaining and intriguing way. These characters, among many others, represent the diverse and dynamic portrayal of women in historical mysteries, where strong, dynamic protagonists challenge convention and shape the genre. From Victorian England to 1920s Harlem and beyond, these characters defy societal norms, navigate complex social landscapes, and pursue justice with unwavering determination. Through their stories, readers gain insight into the resilience, intelligence, and resourcefulness of women throughout history, while also confronting important social issues and expanding their understanding of the world. As we immerse ourselves in the rich tapestry of historical mysteries, we celebrate the diversity of women’s experiences and the enduring legacy of their courage and strength. Now, pour me a gin darling, I’ve got some books to read! *** View the full article -
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The Backlist: C.J. Tudor on the Wild, Inventive Noirs of Michael Marshall Smith
I love writers who mix genres. It’s like an athlete who plays sports and somehow, improbably, manages to be good at all of them. C.J. Tudor’s novels cross boundaries between mystery, horror, and thriller, managing to bring out the best in each of them while creating something wholly new. Her newest novel, The Gathering, delves into the aftermath of a grisly murder that may have been committed by an isolated community of vampires in rural Alaska. As one online review put it, “You never know what you’re going to find in a book from C.J. Tudor—other than a great read!” Recently we sat down to talk about another genre-crosser, Michael Marshall Smith’s 1996 novel Spares. Why did you choose Spares by Michael Marshall Smith? Well, it’s one of my favorite books. I love Michael Marshall Smith. He’s one of my top favorite authors, along with Stephen King. I picked up Only Forward first, and I absolutely loved it. It was completely different from anything I’d read before in the way it mashed up genres. It was crazy and inventive, and I fell in love with his writing. After that I was waiting for another book of his to come out, and then I saw Spares in an airport book shop. I loved it right away. It’s sci-fi, it’s noir, it’s a mystery. But I love most about it is the way Smith writes about the human condition. It’s very poignant and darkly funny at the same time. The novel is set in a futuristic world, and the main character is a guy called Jack Randall, a washed-up cop and former soldier. Early on in the book, you find out that in this world, if you’re very rich, you can have a clone made of yourself. Then if anything bad happens to you, you can get a spare body part from this clone, essentially. The clones are kept in these places called farms, but it’s quite a horrific environment. They’re not educated or even taught to talk or walk. They’re living meat. Jack Randall becomes a caretaker at one of these farms, which are basically automated and run by robots, but he’s there to make sure everything runs smoothly. He sees guys come in the middle of the night, and they’ll take a clone away that will later come back minus a body part, and he decides he wants to help. He starts to teach the clones some things, but of course the more human they become, the more they realize what’s happening to them. Eventually he goes on the run with some of the clones, and then the book takes a turn and becomes more of a noirish thriller. The clones are kidnapped and he has to chase them down, and then he ends up in this place called the Gap where there’s a war being fought. It sounds kind of crazy, but he takes all these elements and makes them come together. It just works for me, because I love authors who take risks with genres. You can read it as a thriller, or sci fi, or a sort of social commentary. It’s just a great book. I’ve definitely never read anything like it. I wanted to ask you more about the narrator. When we first meet him, he’s addicted to a designer drug and kind of a mess, but later he redeems himself. Why is he an especially good guide to this world? I think as readers, we quite like reading about flawed characters. We’re all familiar with this character of a cop who has a bit of a drink or a drug problem and a tragic past, but it works so well in this novel. Jack is a fairly unsympathetic character to start with. He doesn’t want to help the spares; he wants to be left alone to stagnate in his self-pity. Then they kind of bring him back to humanity, so to speak. His voice is very darkly comic, and the dialogue is great—Smith is really good at writing black humor. So I think we kind of warm to this character as things go on, even though he does some bad stuff. That’s a great point. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that Jack fits into that ex-cop archetype, even though he’s in this really strange world. Exactly. All writers use tropes, but it’s all about how you play with it. You could give half a dozen writers the same setup and the same characters, but they’ll each take them in a completely different direction. That’s what’s so interesting about writing fiction. I’d never heard of this novel before you chose it, but the concept immediately reminded me of a book I love, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Then when I was Googling the book, I found a Reddit thread that said it had a lot in common with Michael Bay’s film The Island. Do you think Spares could have been an influence on either of those works, or are writers just naturally intrigued by these questions about the ethical uses of scientific discovery? (Spares was published in 1996; The Island and the novel Never Let Me Go came out in the same year, 2005.) I can’t say much about the novel’s influence, but I think it’s funny that you’ll often find that books that come out within a few years of each other will have similar subjects. Cloning was talked about quite a bit in the Nineties, so it was definitely in the air, but again, writers will approach it in different ways. It makes sense that writers wondering where cloning might go would arrive at the idea of human clones. Where there’s science and innovation, there will often be a dark side. We’ve talked a little about the mixing of genres and why that’s appealing to you. At the same time, the publishing world often wants writers to pick a genre and stick with it. Is it hard to market a book that mixes genres? I think it’s getting easier. It’s nice to be able to put the book in a certain place, but I think that increasingly, people are mixing things up a bit. My books can be defined as horror or crime or thriller, because what matters to me is telling a great story. I read all kinds of genres, and I think it was Michael Marshall Smith who made me realize that you didn’t have to restrict yourself in terms of genres. You didn’t have to confine yourself to writing a particular type of fiction. And that has been one of the biggest inspirations and biggest influences on my writing. That’s really great. Do you think UK audiences are more friendly to mixing genres? I think we’ve seen quite a few successful books come out in the UK lately that have been doing that. The current number one hardback here is The Last Murder at the End of the World by my friend Stuart Turton, which has done quite well in the US as well, and he really mashes things up. His first novel was described as an Agatha Christie mystery mixed with Quantum Leap, with time travel and body swapping. The new one is an apocalyptic murder mystery among the last one hundred or so people left in the world. It’s so fun, because the great thing about murder mysteries is you can set them anywhere. You can make them historical, you can set them in the future. Certainly in the UK, readers are really up for that. And I think in general, readers’ tastes are wider than we sometimes give them credit for. In my opinion, horror and crime work especially well together. Some people call The Silence of the Lambs a crime novel or thriller, but of course it’s quite horrific, whereas I’ve read lots of books classed as horror or supernatural that are much more psychological. There’s a lot of crossover. We’ve talked a lot about the mixing of genres, but is there anything else you’ve taken from this novel that you might use in your own work? Well, I’ve never written sci fi, but I love futuristic stuff, and I have some ideas for stories in a futuristic setting. Every book for me has to be different. I’m always like, what can I do this new and exciting to me? Smith does that, and his books have been such a big inspiration for me. Without his books, and Stephen King’s, I probably wouldn’t have started writing what I write. View the full article -
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How a Murder Trial Exposed a Small Town’s Growing Division
Perched on a stool at the end of the bar of the Elks Club lodge 656, Gary Webb answered his black Nokia flip phone like a celebrity fielding live calls at a telethon fundraiser. After so many decades as a farmer, political agitator, activist, competitive fisherman, football coach, school board member, and historical preservationist, Webb, 69, was a well-established connector, the hub at the center of a giant wheel of people. That was part of why he’d finish one call, clap the phone closed, and it’d start ringing again. The other part was my fault, since before I’d made that reporting trip out to Missouri in August of 2013, I’d told him I’d like to meet anyone he thought I should talk to about the murder. He was, after all, the person who’d introduced me to the case—in a sense, it was only because of him I’d gotten involved at all. Broad in the shoulders with a snug short-sleeved button-down of checkered reds, Webb wore white New Balance sneakers with thick rubber soles flecked in mud, clean white gym socks bunched at his ankles, and pleated, baggy khaki shorts. The bartender came over with my beer and Webb sipped from his Styrofoam cup while he worked the phone. As we left, I thanked him for his offer to arrange interviews. “At your disposal,” he said, climbing into the driver’s side of his Chevy red pickup. “Now let’s go get it.” Like so many of the other 10,000 residents who lived around Chillicothe, a farming town in northwest Missouri, Webb was a native to the area. And like most everyone else in Chillicothe over the past three decades, he had developed rather strong feelings about the murder investigation and subsequent courtroom battles that followed that one horrible night in November, 1990, when Cathy Robertson, a mother of five, had been shot and killed in her home. The town was thrown into turmoil by the shooting, Webb said, suffering the deep fear and surreal shock of a mother slain while she slept down the hallway from her small children. But that fear would soon give way to intense disagreement between two opposing camps, divided on the guilt or innocence of a young Chillicothe man. A teenager at the time of the shooting, Mark Woodworth would eventually be tried and convicted for the killing. “A raw deal,” Webb said. “But there were sides even before there had been sides to take,” he explained. It would take me several years to fully appreciate what Webb had meant that day. We kept the truck windows down while Webb sped around Livingston County’s long, solitary gravel roads, plumes of dust rising behind us, in search of those associates of his who he thought would be better to approach about the sensitive topic in person. On the porch of a general store, then in a kitchen fragrant with a roast in the oven, then outside a farmstead drinking sweet tea, I encountered what would become the running theme while I was in Missouri — everyone had a different interpretation of the case. My own sense of the case would change, too, as I acquainted myself more fully with the police investigation, the legal files, and the full range of grievances. Both advocates for Mark’s innocence and those convinced of his guilt laid out disparate criticisms and accusations of wrongdoing, cleaved together by a contradictory explanation for the same circumstances. What was unusual about these allegations however was that it wasn’t always one side speaking ill of the other. In fact, I’d often hear ambivalence towards the opposing faction on the grounds that those other folks, as far as it went, were incidental victims themselves, unaware that their belief in the innocence or guilt of this young man was not a conclusion of their own but the result of deceptions from the defense team or the state prosecutors, or the court system, or the squad of law enforcement agents that hadn’t been forthcoming with the whole damning truth. Still, others, either by what they said or in simply telling me the story of their own lives, echoed Webb’s idea—that the division around Woodworth’s guilt or innocence didn’t really begin with the case itself, or fall exclusively within the jurisdiction of this community. Rather, the night of the shooting and subsequent legal action were but two dots on the crowded timeline of recent historical events that had upended life for the farming families of not only Missouri but across the Middle West. These were, in their own way, examples of larger malignant forces that had preyed, pushed, and ultimately undermined small farming towns trying to earn their daily bread. Singular as the violence of the murder had been, and as disruptive as the criminal trials would become, they were but pieces of the decade’s legacy—the long, grinding, bankrupting bad times known as the 1980s farming crisis. To be sure, much of this wasn’t so clear to me by the time I left Webb and everyone else I’d met on that initial trip through Missouri and Illinois. I came back home jumbled and disorganized, my notes in total disarray. It seemed like too much material and yet, as I began to sift through it all, I suspected that I had missed something. There were sources or documents I didn’t have but which would explain how these stacks of papers were all related. I’d spend another year fumbling in the dark until I squared up to the possibility I wasn’t going to find a coherent story to tell. I finally packed it up and put it all away. After three years, I’d decided it was time to give up the ghost for good and clear out my apartment’s closet—the only closet, shared by my patient, accommodating girlfriend—crowded with the several boxes of files that I had shipped to myself from Missouri. Looking through everything one last time, I came across a reminder of what had sent me down this path in the first place: a DVD of a little-seen documentary featuring Gary Webb and his long quest to make hand fishing legal throughout the United States. It was Webb I’d originally wanted to write about — this pivotal figure in the niche community of so-called noodlers, third and fourth generation men and women who’d been taught the tactics from their parents and grandparents in Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and other states where Webb had traveled as a grass roots advocate. All across the South and Midwest, Webb defended this homespun technique of dangling one’s fingers underwater to catch, knuckles over lip, the chomping 80 pound catfish protecting their underwater nest eggs from the intrusive digits. I had approached Webb, the co-founder of the group Noodlers Anonymous, in the early summer of 2013. With the memory of the 2009 Great Recession still lingering and the opioid epidemic ravaging rural communities in earnest, I first rang his flip phone because I was curious to know if the years of widespread social unraveling—the sky rocketing unemployment, the drug overdoses, the weariness amid so many deaths of despair—had bestowed his tradition with something particularly valuable. Webb’s answer was both yes and no—the sport proved to be a reliable release valve during the dark times, and made for a cheap meal at the jubilant fish fries that followed the successful evasion of fish and game wardens on the prowl. But Webb’s interest seemed unchanged by this long recent spell of upheaval. He was animated principally by the prospect of defeating an ambiguous them, which was comprised of the affluent boat fisherman and politically connected hunters who’d lobbied the game wardens and agriculture department officials to keep noodling off limits. It was only a glimmer of a breakthrough, but thinking of Webb while I stood over the boxes that I was getting ready to throw out, I caught sight of something I hadn’t noticed in the divide of the two sides around the murder case. Webb’s desire to make handfishing legal was as true as it was felt, just as the people of Chillicothe had chosen their sides with moral conviction. Their opponents, however, weren’t necessarily each other. They had their own version of Webb’s them—the judges, state officials, and attorneys with power and ulterior motives that had quite fairly earned their derision. These had been after all the primary figures who either allowed or participated in the corruption, political malfeasance, and manipulation that had ravaged the town for almost a decade during the 1980s crisis. Indeed, both sides had amongst them residents with brutal memories of lean years and plenty of frustration and resentment stored up, and for very good reasons. But fighting against these figures and the large, systemic forces unravelling American farming communities like their own could feel overwhelming, if not impossible. In picking a side in Mark’s case, I realized, some had found a durable vessel into which they could now pour their anger. Looking at the files pulled from my closet for the first time in several years, I saw the Livingston County residents in a different light, enough to get a rough sense of what now might be possible to say about them. After another year of reporting and more weeks back in Missouri, I filled eight new banker boxes with legal documents, police files, archival material, and personal records from those involved in the case. This second tranche included new reporting on the Chillicothe Sheriff’s office’s ongoing investigation into the murder, as well as material related to the protracted civil lawsuits that began in 2014, after the previous year’s controversial Missouri Supreme Court decision, and would only end, bitterly, in 2023. Though the division around the murder remains alive in Chillicothe to this day—as does the sheriff’s ongoing investigation into the case—I believed I had enough already for the book now being published. If Gary Webb were still here to read it, I hope he might agree this was the right story to go chasing after in the backcountry of Livingston County. *** View the full article -
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The Golden Age of Australian Crime and Mystery TV Continues
In the two years that have passed since I did my first round-up of Australian crime and mystery dramas, our “Golden Age” of Antipodean streaming options has only grown more gilded. To date, at least two dozen more top-tier Aussie (and Kiwi) series have made their way to North American streaming services, including cringe rom-com Colin from Accounts (Paramount+), cringe apocalypse comedy Class of ‘07 (Prime Video), and cringe probate law comedy Fisk (Netflix). Also, the Cringe Comedy King of them all: Taskmaster, both Australia and NZ editions. But of course it hasn’t just been cringe comedies the Antipodeans have been sending north these past two years! They’ve also — as you’ll see with the inclusion of Deadloch and Far North below below — sent us some prime examples of cringe crime drama(dies), too. Okay but for real, all (cringe) jokes aside, the volume of exceptional Australian and Kiwi crime and mystery dramas that have popped up across every North American streaming service since the last CrimeReads list was published underscores just how rich the mystery tradition is on the other side of the equator. Not only is the storytelling strong across the board, but that storytelling is supported by stunning cinematography and remarkable casts. This last is particularly exciting, as several of the series — like Black Snow, which drew from the local South Sea Islander community it shot in to cast its core characters — feature whole slates of new faces. All of which is to say, what follows here is just a snapshot of the great Antipodean crime TV that’s currently streaming for North American audiences. Some of it is funny; much of it is challenging. All of it is solid. A note about our organizing strategy: While the last list dropped in alphabetical order, this one is chronological by the story’s primary setting, starting in 1855 and running all the way up to 2023. The Artful Dodger (Hulu / Disney+) The Artful Dodger | Official Trailer | Hulu The Artful Dodger feels like the result of a dare: A period piece that’s also a medical drama that’s also a heist show that’s also a raucous indictment of Victorian classism that’s also a star-crossed romance that’s also a spinoff of a Charles Dickens novel. Sure! In slightly more detail (though I’m not sure it will make this show’s whole deal any clearer), The Artful Dodger tells the story of Jack Dawkins, AKA Oliver Twist’s infamous Artful Dodger, who has escaped the cells of Newgate and absconded to Australia, where he’s come away from his time aboard a navy ship something of a surgical savant. When the series opens, it’s 1855, and Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) is employing those surgical skills as entertainment for the toffs in the theater of Port Victory, where by way of compensation he’s given room and board and not a scrap of salary more. With no surgical unionist movement in sight, Dawkins is obliged to spend his off-time hustling at the local poker tables to turn his meager theater tips into something a bit more substantive. Five minutes into the pilot, he’s in hock to the local poker boss (Tim Minchin) for more money than he’s seen in his lifetime; ten minutes in, his old London gang boss Fagin (David Thewlis) has washed ashore, obsequious and scheming in equal measure. It won’t be a surprise that this unfortunate combination spirals into Dawkins having to shrug on his old Dodger persona to pull off a number of increasingly daring crimes. What might be, though, is that in between his pre-ether surgeries and post-London heists, Dawkins also manages to get romantically entangled with the Governor’s eldest daughter, Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), whose sense of justice and mind for medicine is more than a match for his own. As weird an “adaptation” as this show is, Dawkins’ wild Australian tale is so compelling that it doesn’t matter that Oliver Twist himself is left behind in England, two oceans and a lifetime away — romantic, class-conscious, and squelchingly visceral, The Artful Dodger is banger. Boy Swallows Universe (Netflix) Boy Swallows Universe | Official Trailer | Netflix Based on Trent Dalton’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, the limited series Boy Swallows Universe is another exercise in Australian TV going just absolutely full tilt in layering together genres and narrative modes that really have no right to work en masse, but still somehow do. In this case, those layers are 1) violent drug-running crime thriller, 2) wrenching family melodrama, 3) gonzo journalism joint, and 4) guileless (often animated!) coming-of-age story, all of which come together to tell the tale of future crime reporter Eli Bell (Felix Cameron / Zac Burgess) and his artistic, selectively mute brother Gus (Lee Tiger Halley) as they barely survive their tumultuous pre-teen and teen years in 1980s Brisbane. In early episodes of the series, the boys and their mom, Frances (Phoebe Tonkin), are living with their retired drug dealer stepdad, Lyle (Travis Fimmel), a firecracker of a father figure who really wants to do right by them all — and especially Frances, who’s a recovered addict — but who finds himself falling back into old drug dealing patterns long before the first episode is out. By the end of the series, adult(ish) Eli and his crime reporter colleague/crush, Caitlyn (Sophie Wilde), are traipsing the darkest hollows of Brisbane on the hunt for the story behind the psychopathic drug lord who’s haunted the Bell family for years. And in between, the Bell family laughs and loves and goofs off and hugs, and Gus beatifically pens smoky messages from the future with his finger in midair, and draws charmingly innocent illustrations about the Bell family’s fortunes that keep coming true. It’s a weird mix, tonally! But back here in the States, Tarell Alvin McCraney pulled a similar trick with his exceptional OWN (now MAX) series David Makes Man, which featured a similarly charming and emotionally full-up central teen boy character facing similarly harrowing domestic circumstances. So clearly this kind of tonal tension is something audiences are ready to bear! Still, as charming as Eli is at every age — and as hopeful a note as the series really does end on — I do want to stress that this series is not for the faint of heart. The first episode features a graphic animal (lab rat) cruelty, and the final set piece takes place in a blood-spattered mad scientist’s lair that would give the best Fright Fest you can think of a run for its money. (Lyle, spoiler alert, fares very poorly in this regard.) But if you can swallow your bile for those parts of Eli’s story, Boy Swallows Universe is worth a look. Mystery Road: Origin (Acorn TV) Acorn TV Original | Mystery Road: Origin | Official Trailer Prequel stories can be hit or miss, but the 1999-set Mystery Road: Origin, which tells the story of Mystery Road’s Detective Jay Swan back in the days when he had only just earned his badge, connects so squarely, the ball sails past the horizon. Starring Mark Coles Smith in the role originated by Aaron Pedersen, Origin posts up with Jay as he returns to his tiny, dusty hometown of Jardine, a fictional gold mining town in Western Australia that is divided along generational lines of race and wealth — that is to say, a place where the white vs. Indigenous tension that has long defined Swan’s character can stretch taut. Profiled as a criminal his first night in town, Jay finds his homecoming fairly brittle. And that’s before he reconnects with his alcoholic rodeo champ father (Kelton Pell), his vagabond brother Sputty (Clarence Ryan), his take-no-shit first love Mary (Tuuli Narkle), or his wealthy white mine-owning childhood pals Geraldine (Caroline Brazier) and Patrick (Daniel Henshall), who on the one hand really do seem to love and support Jay as an individual, but who also live in a house where the “art” on their mantle is a wooden tree adorned with slavery-era neck chains. (“Well, people pay good money for real history,” Geraldine bristles when Jay says something mildly critical of it, “so.”) The mystery that follows Jay’s homecoming is classic Mystery Road — thorny in social implications, spare in dialogue, and, thanks to Tyson Perkins’ blistering cinematography, often astonishing simply to look at. For longtime fans, some key personal details from Jay’s history feel retconned, but not so egregiously that it should pull you out of the story. Because what does remain the same is Jay’s laconic doggedness in pursuit of justice, and the series’ commitment to laying bare Australia’s colonial sins. May we get another season soon. Black Snow (Sundance Now) A Sundance Now Original | Black Snow | Official Trailer [HD] Another entry on this list featuring Travis Fimmel in a lead role, Black Snow follows cold case Detective James Cormack as he travels to a small town in North Queensland in to investigate the unsolved murder of Isabel Baker (Talijah Blackman-Corowa), a popular high school senior from a South Sea Islander community who, alongside a real Breakfast Club hodge-podge of fellow detention kids, had put together a time capsule for the graduating class of 1994 that, when it’s finally unearthed twenty-five years later, turns out to contain a bloody clue to what happened to her the night she was killed. Much like fellow “sunshine noir” series Mystery Road did before it, the story Black Snow proceeds to tell is one of deep-seated racism, colonial violence, and patriarchal oppression. Only here, that story sits within the context of industrial sugar cane operations and the immiserating labor, health, and social conditions that surround them. What happened to Isabel in 1994 — and, not incidentally, a handful of trafficked young Pacific Islander workers — is directly tied not just to the historic sins of Australia’s colonial past, but also to the very much still living sins of its modern day economic and cultural engines. Cormack, of course, eventually solves Isabel’s case (the genre formula at work!), but it’s hard to call the emotional fallout of the conclusion “satisfying.” That said, the newcomer performances at the heart of Isabel’s story — not just Blackman-Corowa as Isabel, but also Molly Fatnowna as the young version of her little sister, Hazel, and Eden Cassady as grown-up Hazel’s daughter, Kalana — are gripping, as is Fimmel’s uncompromising intensity in Cormack’s drive to give other families the peace he can’t secure for himself. That’s right — Cormack is also embroiled in a personal cold case, his being the decades-old disappearance of his younger brother from their abusive childhood home. And while a few dominoes from that story fall here in Black Snow’s first season, there are plenty of questions still left to unravel in Season 2, now filming in Queensland. Safe Home (Hulu) Safe Home | Official Trailer | Hulu Possibly the most harrowing entry on this list (and that’s saying a lot, given the two Fimmel joints blurbed above), the modern day family violence thriller Safe Home is also at least blessedly brief. Starring Aisha Dee as Phoebe Rook, a trained journalist and communications professional who is, when we meet her, in the process of moving on from a PR gig at a fancy progressive law firm to become the first ever communications officer for an overworked family violence legal clinic, Safe Home aims to give its audience an unflinching look at the utter banality of family* violence. (*As the clinic’s staff didactically exposits in the first episode, the choice of “family” as a qualifier here is a critical and intentional one, as “domestic” carries with it the albatross weight of having been too easily dismissed by law enforcement and media for too long. “Okay, so, family, got it,” says Phoebe in Episode 1, lesson received.) Across its four hour-long episode, the series follows both Phoebe’s work at the underfunded clinic and the specific stories of abused women from all walks of life, a spectrum which includes a seemingly comfortable white grandma whose life on a horse farm looks idyllic to her small-town neighbors; an immigrant whose limited English gives her husband and in-laws total control over her life; and a young queer retail employee whose co-worker boyfriend indulges not just in physical abuse, but also revenge porn. More to the point, the spectrum also includes someone within Phoebe’s immediate social circle — someone whose abuse, we are teased when the first episode opens, Phoebe is so long blind to, that it ends up resulting in their murder. The mystery of who’s been murdered (and who by) drives the framing tension of Safe Home, and the answer, when it’s revealed, is conclusively distressing. But what the series is even more interested in is the everyday tension that pervades so many family violence victims’ everyday lives, and which those of us lucky enough not to have (yet) been touched by it directly can’t even sense. That’s a story that doesn’t have an ending. Deadloch (Prime Video) Deadloch | Red Band Trailer | Prime Video If not the funniest series on this specific list, the Tasmania-set Deadloch is by far the most replete with full-frontal male nudity. Well, it’s likely the leader of full-frontal female nudity, too — but once you get to the punchline at the end of the investigation, it’ll be clear that it’s the male nudity that matters. But let’s back up. Deadloch is a Broadchurch-esque “odd couple” detective series that is both a send-up of the overly serious small-town-serial-killer genre and one of the best examples of that niche to date. It stars Kate Box as Deadloch Sr. Sergeant Dulcie Collins, a buttoned-up, ex-detective lesbian with a free-spirited big animal vet wife, and Madeleine Sami as Detective Eddie Redcliffe, a hot hetero mess of a detective sent over from mainland Australia to “assist” on the serial killer situation suddenly sweeping the hyper-progressive burg. It also effectively (and affectionately) takes the absolute piss out of overly earnest progressive “wokeness,” while simultaneously illustrating the very real threat of men’s rights activists and self-styled “male allies” alike. For anyone who bristles at rhetorical incompetence, Eddie’s investigation-destroying brashness for the first half of the season can be a hurdle too high, but for those willing to stick that one rough spot out, the relationship that she and Dulcie eventually build — and the confidence that their leadership inspires in their young forensically minded colleague, Abby Matsuda (Nina Oyama) — is one of the best that new 2023 detective dramas had to offer. And given where the first season ends, that relationship is only just beginning… Far North (AMC Plus) Far North – 2023 – Three (NZ) Series Trailer The sole Kiwi offering on this particular list, Far North stars Temuera Morrison (Boba Fett himself!), Robyn Malcolm, Villa Junior Lemanu, Maaka Pohatu, John-Paul Foliaki, Albert Mateni, Fay Tofilau, and Mosa Alipate Latailakepa on the Aotearoa side of things, and Xiao Hu, Xana Tang, Fei Li, Dennis Zhang, Nikita Tu-Bryant and Louise Jiang on the Chinese side. Partly based on a true story — “partly” here meaning, “whole exchanges lifted in their entirety from the 2016 court transcripts” — Far North follows, in parallel, 1) the comically inept exploits of an Australian-Tongan “smuggling” “gang” looking to turn Big Time with an incoming shipment of Chinese meth, 2) the less comedic exploits of the all-female crew of forced-labor Chinese smugglers failing to bring that shipment in, and 3) a retired Māori mechanic (Morrison) and his aqua aerobics-instructor wife (Malcolm). With a cast this sprawling, cultural references this specific, and criminal acts this inept, Far North aims for (and occasionally hits) the Snatch register. Where it falls short of that mark is in its momentum — it takes a long time to get going, and loses narrative steam every time the focus shifts back to the immiserated Chinese smuggling crew. When it does get going, though, it’s a ride! Stick with this one; truth is stranger than fiction. View the full article -
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The State of the Crime Novel, Part 2: The Future of Crime Writing
This is part two of our annual roundtable discussion ahead of the Edgar Awards, in which we discuss major issues (and minor peeves) in crime writing. Thanks so much to all the nominees who contributed to the discussion! __________________________________ What do you think is the most important issue facing crime writers today? __________________________________ Jess Lourey (nominated for Best Paperback Original – The Taken Ones): Inclusivity in our genre, in my opinion, is the most important issue facing crime writers today. Thanks to the hard work of Crime Writers of Color, Sisters in Crime, and others, our field is more diverse than it’s ever been, but there’s still important stories that aren’t being told, or aren’t reaching the audience they deserve. This issue affects all crime writers because all our boats rise together. Susan Isaacs (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Bad, Bad Seymour Brown): Not getting distracted. A crime writer has to create the world they want, and then populate it with characters who feel alive. Of course there’s the crime. It has to be depicted in such a compelling way that the reader can’t resist sticking with the investigation from start to finish. But even with a room of one’s own, it’s tough for a crime writer to stay focused. We all know that the Internet is both blessing and curse. Dare to look up a synonym for fire online (because all that comes to mind in that moment is conflagration, which would suck). And when your conscious mind next checks in on your progress, it discovers you’ve been listening to a podcast by the members of the Nissequogue, Long Island volunteer fire department. I’ve gotten so tripped up by rabbit holes when researching the forensic science available to solve crimes that I’ve wasted words, passion, and time coercing my narrator to natter on about trace evidence analysis of explosives. Paragraphs. Pages. All because I felt like a pro after an hour of skimming erudite papers and watching a YouTube video. And after I reread and rewrote it? One sentence remained. It’s not only websites that distract us. It’s politics on social media (watchable on any cellphone) that stimulates us to the point where we believe we’re pundits and must expound. Or the need to display our alleged “real lives,” except even when we’re working, we document our doings for the world: our messy desk, pics of Fluff the cat watching us work. If your goal is to invent a world, you have to live in it, not observe your creation from the outside. Even entering that world of your characters has become more challenging because of how we’re hooked by some enthralling narrative that seizes our inner lives: from video games to instantly downloadable books to streaming adaptations of… other authors’ crime writing. It’s a fight to leave a compelling story for one that’s unfinished. James Lee Burke (nominated for Best Novel – Flags on the Bayou): I think what we call crime stories today, at least the good ones, replaced the books about the Depression Era. Steinbeck and Dos Passos come to mind. The big crime to them was injustice. That’s what I try to show in my work. I.S. Berry (nominated for Best First Novel – The Peacock and the Sparrow): Freedom of speech (and I think this applies to all writers, crime or other). Increasingly, I think people seek to silence voices and subjects to which they object—whether through overt bans or, more insidiously, through pressure, marginalization, or personal attacks against authors. Uncivil discourse surrounding books is growing. Authors should be able to write honestly, authentically, and in an unvarnished and unorthodox way. Books are like frogs in our ecosystem, a bellwether for the health of our society. Sean McCluskey (nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award – “The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): The devaluing of writing into content, something that can be squirted out by an algorithm. As artificial intelligence improves, will it be capable of cranking out something that can hold a reader’s interest? Surprise them, delight them, make them glad they picked it up? I like to think that’ll remain the province of the human mind. Mary Winters (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Murder in Postscript): One important issue facing crime writers today is pay. According to a 2023 survey from The Authors Guild, full-time “mystery, thriller, and suspense authors had a book income median of $10,000, with their combined median book and author-related income totaling $15,010.” Like so many other artists, writers are not compensated as they should be. It’s a privilege to write, and a blessing for so many, but it should also be a viable profession that provides benefits and a livable wage. Scott Von Doviak (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Lowdown Road): I’m guessing many of the nominees will mention AI, and rightly so, as it’s probably the biggest issue facing writers of all kinds at the moment. So I’ll leave that one to someone smarter and better informed than me. Another big one is the increasing scarcity of outlets for our work and the promotion of same. A publisher like Polis folding is a massive loss to the crime writing community, and with Twitter a shadow of its former self, it’s even harder to hawk our wares. (I know TikTok works for some, but come on, I went to high school in the ‘80s.) “Everything’s important, everything’s on the table, and everything’s fair game.” –Tracy Clark Katherine Hall Page (2024 Grand Master): This is a hard one. Staying relevant without tripping over current cliches or losing one’s own style to catch the next Girl-On-A-Train trend are important issues we face. The Importance of Being Honest sums it up. However, the most crucial issue is simply the ongoing state of the publishing world. It’s a landscape that has changed at warp speed since my first book was published in 1989 by SMP, a family publishing house. The absorption of it and similar houses into what are now essentially five publishers with the former houses now imprints makes it more difficult for crime writers to stay published and get published. The days of the slush pile and over the transom discoveries unagented are long gone. To an extent, this means small independent presses and self-publishing, which is good news, boding well for diversity on many levels. It’s possible to become a published crime writer, but it’s more daunting than ever and acknowledging it, trying to change it is the challenge we face. And then there’s AI… Ken Jaworowski (nominated for Best First Novel – Small Town Sins): I think readers are starving for good books, and I believe that there are more terrific writers out there than ever. Yet with the decline of newspaper book reviews for general audiences, it can be tough to introduce titles to the public. Social media can help, of course. But I’d love to find a way to make it easier to alert the casual reader to new works. Tracy Clark (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Hide): I don’t think there is a “most important” issue. Every issue out there is important. We’re writing about society and its ills. We’re writing about the human condition. Everything’s important, everything’s on the table, and everything’s fair game. William Kent Krueger (nominated for Best Novel – The River We Remember): At the heart of so many stories in our genre is the idea that, in the end, justice prevails. But as a reality, the goal of justice for all seems more distant than ever. If crime fiction is a reflection of society, and I believe it is, for me the greatest challenge is to offer stories of hope in a world where hope seems more and more to be slipping away. __________________________________ What is the future of crime writing, in your opinion? __________________________________ Mary Winters: The future of crime writing is bright. Writers continue to diversify the genre, bringing their unique experiences to the field. The changing landscape makes me feel hopeful for new authors and books. AF Carter (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Boomtown): Let me put this another way. What is the future of commercial fiction? Fewer people read today, compared, for instance, to the time, not all that long ago, when every little store contained a revolving wire rack holding mass market paperbacks. The decline was inevitable, probably, given the ever-diversifying entertainment options out there. The good news is that storytelling is as natural to human beings as breath and heartbeat. Storytelling will continue on in some form. The bigger question is whether or not human beings will produce the stories. Software like Sudowrite already exist, and while they cannot yet produce a readable novel, AI is still in its infancy. My sense is that novelists themselves will be eliminated as computer-written novels become viable. After all, why pay an advance and royalties when the work can be produced by a salaried editor in a few weeks? No sub-rights to share with authors, either. Jennifer J. Chow (nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Memorial Award – Hot Pot Murder): The future of crime writing is bright. People will always be curious, and I believe crime fiction plays on that desire to unveil secrets, explore mysteries, and to, ultimately, understand one another better. Katherine Hall Page: When I think about the future of crime writing I look to the past and P.D. James’ response to a question asking about the appeal of crime fiction: “These novels are always popular in ages of great anxiety. It’s a very reassuring form. It affirms the hope that we live in a rational and beneficent universe.” Writers like Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, and Mickey Spillane offered distraction from the Great Depression, World Wars, and political upheaval. The appeal continues—all too relevant— in the present. The future promises even greater anxieties, and we will need crime writing all the more. The traditional mystery with redemptive goodness triumphing over evil; Noir presenting chaotic warnings; and true crime with vicarious escape—we’ll take our picks! Sean McCluskey: Hopefully, me! But failing that, shorter, more serialized works written by people instead of programming. I anticipate more diversity, with stories of cultures, places, and people that aren’t traditionally heard from. And I think there’ll be a continued drift away from traditional mystery stories (focus on who committed the crime and how) into thriller territory (emphasis on why they did it). All of this will happen, I believe, alongside the continued expansion of self-publishing. Samantha Jayne Allen (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Hard Rain): Hopefully, more diversity—of characters and their creators, of structures and the types of stories being told. Not underestimating longtime fans of our genre, who I think desire to read what’s yet unfamiliar in addition to old favorites. As you mentioned, the mixing of genres is becoming more popular, and as crime fiction becomes a larger umbrella, conversely, I think, readers might also burrow into their own niches a bit. Kind of like streaming now, there could be something written specifically for every taste, overall more choices. William Kent Krueger: No end in sight, as far as I can tell. There are wonderful new voices coming onto the scene every year. Lots of reasons to celebrate. __________________________________ If you could get rid of any trope in the genre, what would it be, and why? __________________________________ Tracy Clark: The hard-drinking PI with a whiskey bottle in his bottom drawer can go, as far as I’m concerned. Seen it. Done it. Time to move on. Rob Osler (nominated for Best Short Story – “Miss Direction,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): I would relax the constraining expectation that a cozy should entail a cottage business, take place in a small town, involve a pet, and completely avoid contentious social issues. Note that I said relax, not eliminate. Readers benefit by having broad choices; there’s room for both traditional and progressive works. A more inclusive cozy world only invigorates the subgenre. Sean McCluskey: It’s been decried by many people more eloquent than I am, but I’d be happy to see the end of the ‘woman as victim to motivate/justify a man’s righteous revenge’ bit. Whatever shock value it once had is long gone, and there are so many more interesting ways to kick off a good vengeance spree. Ken Jaworowski: The long-winded, implausible denouement, when at the end of a story, a Snidely-Whiplash type character pulls a gun and announces to the hero: ‘I am the killer! Don’t you remember, back at the very beginning, when I said…etc. etc. etc.” That is often the sign of lazy writing, and when it happens, my eyes seem to roll into the back of my head. William Kent Krueger: Although I try to steer clear of them, I have nothing against tropes, in general. In some ways, they meet readers’ expectations of the genre. But if you put a gun to my head (a cliché, which is, I suppose, another form of trope) and I had to choose one it would be the scene at the end of a mystery when our detective hero explains all the clues that point to the killer, a whole set of circumstances that only someone with the brain of an astrophysicist would have been able to make sense of. Lina Chern (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Play the Fool): I wouldn’t get rid of any tropes. I like tropes! All stories rely on certain basic conventions of storytelling—like agreements between readers and writers regarding what makes a story work—and I often find that the line between acceptable familiarity and “trope” or “cliché” is thin and subjective. To me, good writing is all in the execution, and some of my biggest thrills as a reader come when a writer executes a done-to-death trope in a way that makes it new and fresh. Scott Von Doviak: I’m not sure this counts as a trope, but my biggest pet peeve in crime fiction is the word “upmarket.” When I was on the agent search, this buzzword was everywhere—“we’re looking for upmarket crime fiction”—and I’m still not sure exactly what they mean. To me it suggests respectability and tastefulness—something you can read on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard without being embarrassed. Certainly there’s an audience for that, but is it the only audience? “Keep crime fiction disreputable,” that’s my campaign slogan. Call my stuff pulp, you won’t hurt my feelings. __________________________________ What are your thoughts about cross-genre writing? __________________________________ Scott Von Doviak: The more the merrier, although I’m not sure agents and publishers agree. I’ve met with resistance just from mashing up subgenres that fall under the crime fiction umbrella. One rejection that stuck with me (not in a good way) was from an agent who felt a particular manuscript was too hardboiled to be a whodunnit and too cozy to be a thriller. “You have to pick a shelf,” as if most bookstores actually have different shelves for each of these things, when mostly they’re shoved together under “Mystery/Crime.” Personally, I doubt most readers need things so neatly categorized, but maybe that’s why I never went into marketing. Carol Goodman (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – The Bones of the Story): I’ve always loved cross-genre fiction and think that it only strengthens and invigorates the field. Mystery is a wide, capacious tent generous enough, despite a little bickering, to shelter the hardboiled and the cozy; the contemporary and the historical, the realist and the fantastic. I’ve particularly enjoyed Stephen King’s horror-inflected forays into the detective novel, Zakiya Dalila Harris’s potent mix of horror, suspense, and social satire; Anthony Horowitz’s injection of golden age tropes into contemporary who-dunits; and Simone St. James’s haunted thrillers. A.F. Carter: Consumers have a right to be entertained by whatever entertains them. As for authors? If you don’t put fannies in the seats, you won’t be writing long. It works or it doesn’t. Jennifer J. Chow: Creativity should be allowed to flow, and I think extending boundaries is a way to stretch artistic muscles. William Kent Krueger: One of the things I love most about the crime genre is that it can embrace any interest that a reader or writer might have. If you love history, there are historical mysteries. If you’ve got a profound sense of humor, there are funny mysteries. Love philosophy? It’s easy to find mysteries that delve into all kinds of philosophical conundrums. So, why not throw a vampire or werewolf into the mix? There’s a reason crime novels are called popular fiction. They offer something to appeal to everyone. As both a writer and a reader, I appreciate the egalitarian nature of our genre. I.S. Berry: I love cross-genre work! More than ever, I think traditional category descriptions are too limiting and don’t do writing justice. When you look back, so many great books could fit into multiple genres. Is John Fowle’s The Collector a thriller or literature? Before I was published, I didn’t even know what all the labels meant. One reviewer called my book “equal parts noir, thriller, and literature”—and I’m delighted with that description! Sean McCluskey: I love anything that sparks creativity in writers, and inspires readers who love particular genres but don’t have experience with others to try new things. And I think one of the best things about crime is that it just goes great with anything, like chocolate and/or peanut butter. Also Scotch. April Henry (nominated for Best Young Adult – Girl Forgotten): I think crime fiction has always cross-pollinated with other genres, and has long had room for humor, or romance, or settings like outer space or historical times. Mysteries can be solved by cats or have a supernatural element. More recently, I’m seeing a mix of horror and crime fiction. I love it all. Patricia Johns (nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Memorial Award – Murder of an Amish Bridegroom): As a romance writer who has moved into crime fiction, I love this! Romance looks at the human experience of falling in love, and crime fiction looks at the human experience of death, and pushes the envelope further to include murder. It’s the same source of passionate emotions driving people to find a partner to care for, or on the other end of the spectrum, to lash out and kill someone. Those deep boiling emotions drive us, and I believe that being able to write compelling romance really does help to write compelling murder, too! Sometimes I joke that in romance I get to marry them off, and in crime fiction I get to kill them off. But there is something very satisfying about exploring both the bright side and the dark side of the human experience. Claire Swinarski (nominated for Best Juvenile – What Happened to Rachel Riley?): I think the melding of genres is a great way to get people interested in mysteries who otherwise might not be. My favorite books don’t fit neatly in one category; they’re a blend of romance and mystery and literary fiction and drama. There are no rules anymore–it’s a great time to be a writer because there’s so much creative play and experimentation! Jennifer Cody Epstein (nominated for Best Novel – The Madwomen of Paris): I tend to think that crossovers of any sort can strengthen, enrich, and add dimension to writing, in much the same way that open dialogue can enrich and enhance conversation and understanding. It’s something I’ve always been interested in; in fact, my first novel centered on an early 20th-century artist who drew criticism as well as acclaim for blending Chinese and Western painting techniques. And as a writer I’ve always been intrigued by the way elements like truth and fiction, past and present, and prose and poetry can speak to one another within my novels. The Madwomen of Paris was very much an experiment along those lines, combining a variety of different genres—historical, mystery, Brontëan Gothic, true crime—in a way that I hoped would speak to modern-day questions like sexual assault and medical exploitation. Jess Lourey: Mystery writer Matthew Clemens once said, “There are only two genres: good books and bad books. Everything else is marketing.” The more we feel free to cross into what’s been historically considered another genre to write the best story we can, the better the books will be. Personally, I love reading crime fiction threaded with romance, or horror, or in a fantastical setting and hope to see more of it. __________________________________ Do crime writers have a responsibility to engage with social criticism? __________________________________ William Kent Krueger: A responsibility? I don’t believe so. But many of us do choose to use our work as vehicles for pointing out the iniquities or injustices in our society. And I believe that our stories have the profound possibility of making readers aware of and sensitive to social problems in a way that straight forward reportage cannot. A good story goes for the heart, not the head. And it’s only in the heart where a story finds a lasting home. Tracy Clark: Crime writers are pretty attuned to the world around them. The world is their landscape. Crime fiction is nothing more than society in microcosm. Good v. evil. Humanity/inhumanity. It’s just a big old morality play with good guys and bad guys battling it out. Crime fiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Writers need to see the world as it is, and then figure out what they think about it. Sarah Stewart Taylor (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – A Stolen Child): This is such a complex subject. One part of my author brain says that when you sit down at your desk for the day, your primary responsibility has to be to the writing, to the story. Good writing, by every definition that I subscribe to, is informed by what is true, by the actual experiences and feelings of people like the ones you’re writing about. Characters need to feel wholly and messily human. They can’t be symbols or mouthpieces. But I think that crime writers do have a unique responsibility to look unflinchingly at systemic injustice and inequality. Writing about crime can confer a narrative advantage; crime stories provoke a visceral response that draws readers in and gives our genre its appeal and staying power. Along with that advantage, I think we have a responsibility to re-examine who we cast as heroes and villains in the stories we tell and to be clear-eyed about the inequities in our justice system, about poverty and racism and homophobia and misogyny. I just do. Carol Goodman: I think that’s each writer’s choice, but it’s hard to imagine how not to comment on society while writing crime fiction. Whenever we write about crime, we’re writing about social ills, taboos, and marginalized people. I am continuously inspired and provoked by what’s happening in our world and I use writing to process the chaos. I want my readers to recognize the world they live in and to perhaps see it anew when they put the book down. Jennifer J. Chow: Writers absorb their surroundings, so real-world issues will organically appear in our work when we craft authentic characters. I believe crime writers have a unique position in opening up dialogue about social issues because we often explore underlying primal human emotions that can lead to merriment…or murder. Linda Castillo (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – An Evil Heart): A fiction writer has one job and that is to entertain the reader. Do some readers read crime fiction with an eye toward real-world issues or social criticism? Perhaps. But I think it’s more likely that readers read fiction to escape and enjoy a fictional world that will entertain and delight. Give your readers what they want. Stay true to your story. Stay true to your characters. And you will stay true to your readers. Yvonne Woon (nominated for Best Young Adult – My Flawless Life): I write novels for young adults, so I’m biased, as I believe that writing for young, malleable minds comes with many layers of responsibility. When we have the attention of developing minds, we have to be mindful of what our stories are telling them. This especially goes for stories about crime, which are, in essence, about what’s right and what’s wrong, and how and why people do bad things. What complicates crime writing is that our idea of what’s right vs. wrong is constantly changing – many behaviors that are unacceptable today were socially accepted just ten or twenty years ago, and if you look historically, the difference is even more pronounced. Many actions that are now considered crimes weren’t treated as such just a handful of decades ago (domestic violence, sexual assault, and police brutality, to name a few). So while I don’t think crime writers have a duty to directly address real-world issues, I do think it’s impossible to write a story that feels true and urgent without thinking about the story existing within the moral context of the world today. Rob Osler: All authors are interested in writing authentic characters. Unless the story features a recluse, the protagonist exists in society—and no society is perfect. Whether the story’s hero is gay or straight, a POC or white, rural or urban, poor or wealthy, identity and social status shape a character’s world and struggles. It’s hard to keep it real and completely avoid social issues. That said, genre then influences how deeply a reader might expect an author to delve into such matters. If the story is a political thriller, social issues would seem unavoidable, but with a cozy, a lighter touch would be expected. A.F. Carter: I’m going to stick out my neck and say no. The first duty of an entertainer is to entertain, and it’s quite possible to please a large audience without touching up controversial issues. There’s also the well-worn mandate: show, don’t tell. I want my own books to reflect social issues and they do, but I wouldn’t impose social relevance on others, nor is social relevance especially prominent in my own reading. I would add this, however, for beginning writers. The novel you begin tomorrow, will see the better part of two years before it’s published. Today’s hot topic may well be yesterday’s news two years down the line. Better to allow your characters to embody the issues without resorting to windy polemics. Sean McCluskey: As a federal employee, I obviously eschew any responsibility whatsoever! But I think a writer’s greatest duty is to tell a compelling story, whether it speaks to contemporary issues or not. A writer’s message, like a writer’s unique voice, will come through naturally. I think the crime fiction writer need to be aware of the criticism that address the genre (gratuitous violence, sexual assault as a plot device, etc.) without limiting their work out of fear that they’ll offend. I.S. Berry: Writers should absolutely tackle real-world issues. People are looking to make sense of our world, and I think artists of all stripes have a unique ability to help them do that. Especially in this time of TikTok, clickbait, and social media, I think writers can provide a more thoughtful, nuanced, deeper lens on issues. That said, there are a lot of current topics that seem to flicker through the literary ethos, and I’m wary of becoming too wedded to these: as a writer, I search for what’s timeless; I want my book to retain its resonance and engage readers twenty years from now. View the full article -
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The Rare Entertainments of E.C.R. Lorac’s Death of an Author
Death of an Author is a rare example of a novel by E. C. R. Lorac (the principal pen name of Carol Rivett) that does not feature her popular and long-serving series detective Inspector Macdonald. The story is so entertaining, however, that we don’t miss him, especially given that Lorac introduces an appealing and capable pair of substitute investigators in Chief Inspector Warner of the CID and Inspector Bond. The novel, originally published in 1935, boasts an unorthodox and well-crafted plot, but is particularly strong in its depiction of the literary world of the mid-1930s. This is a subject which evidently fascinated Lorac, and she returned to it more than once in subsequent novels, including These Names Make Clues, which has been republished as a British Library Crime Classic. Here, the opening scenes are especially pleasing and one can almost taste the relish with which she wrote them. The story opens with an encounter between Andrew Marriott, a publisher, and his star author Michael Ashe, whose successes have made him a celebrity. They have a wonderful exchange in which Ashe threatens to write a crime novel, only for Marriott to respond: “Crime stories are a legitimate branch of fiction, but they’re mere ephemerals—selling like hot cakes today, and gone tomorrow.” This view was widely held at the time, not least by many of those who wrote detective fiction. Among Lorac’s contemporaries, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis (whose mysteries were published under the name Nicholas Blake) and the broadcaster and priest Ronald Knox, undoubtedly regarded their whodunits as ephemeral, although Day-Lewis soon came to appreciate—and exploit—the literary potential of the genre. Even Agatha Christie gave spoilers about the solutions to four of her early mysteries in Cards on the Table, an Hercule Poirot novel of 1936, which suggests that she thought they had passed their sell-by date. Today, such modesty seems wholly misplaced. Everything I’ve learned while researching Lorac over the years leads me to the conclusion that she had a stout belief in the value of her work, although no doubt she would have been not only thrilled but also amazed by the sales figures (and positive reviews) her books have achieved as a result of appearing in the Crime Classics series. The conversation between Marriott and Ashe turns to a novel written by another of Marriott’s authors. The book in question is The Charterhouse Case by Vivian Lestrange. As Ashe says, Lestrange has “achieved the impossible—or at least, the improbable—by writing a crime story that is in the rank of first rate novels. His writing, his characterisation, and his situations all disarm criticism.” Lestrange, it seems, is a recluse who refuses to have his photograph taken for publicity purposes and about whom nothing is known. Marriott and Ashe debate whether a book of such quality could really be the work of a newcomer and also the extent to which the authenticity of the prison life background of the story is such that it must be based on real life experience rather than simply meticulous research. Marriott concedes that: “to do them justice, some of the ‘thriller merchants’ take an infinite amount of trouble to get their facts vetted. The standard is going up steadily…” Ashe persuades his publisher to arrange a dinner party at which he can meet the mysterious Lestrange. But a shock is in store. We are told that Lestrange is actually a young woman. Marriott regards her as “the coolest creature I ever met in my life!” What follows is interesting and relevant to the storyline, and it also gives us an intriguing insight into Lorac’s attitude towards the treatment of female writers by reviewers and the publishing industry generally. On first meeting the young woman, Marriott said, “I have been flattering myself for years that I could tell a man’s writing from a woman’s…” Her response is blunt: “I get so sick of that theory. The minute a reviewer learns from some gossip that so and so is a woman, he promptly writes ‘there is a touch of femininity about the writings of X.Y.Z. Her descriptions are above criticism, but her dialogue betrays her sex.’ It’s all my eye and Betty Martin!” When Ashe—accompanied by Marriott and his colleague Bailley—meets the young woman, he is thunderstruck. She is scathing: “What but male conceit formulated that judgment of yours that no woman could have written a book which you admired? Is your estimate of all women the same?” She also makes a forceful case for equal treatment: “You envisage women still as the sheltered, emotional playthings of men. The woman of today is beginning to see through the fraud… We are still handicapped by the habit of thought of centuries, still too prone to acknowledge the unique splendour of the gifted male—but your ‘weaker vessel’ theory—I deride it!” Three months after that dinner party, however, a woman walks into Hampstead Police Station to announce that she is afraid that something has happened to Vivian Lestrange. The author is missing from home and so is the housekeeper. The elaborate mystery which gradually unfolds tests the detective skills of Warner and Bond, but they rise to the challenge. To say much more without giving too many spoilers is almost impossible, but although this has until now been a vanishingly rare book, most people lucky enough to read it in modern times have been greatly impressed. Warner (who hates the idea of hanging and favours abolition: hardly a conventional view for policemen of his era) and Bond are a likeable duo. One minor mystery is why Lorac abandoned them after this novel. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that this was the last novel of hers published by Sampson Low. She moved to the more prestigious Collins Crime Club imprint, and it may well be that, since Macdonald was already a well-established series character, the publishers were keen for the author to make the most of him. Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958), generally known as Carol Rivett, published her first detective novel in 1931. There can be little doubt—as the discussion in this book makes clear—that she adopted the ambiguous writing name of E. C. R. Lorac because of a suspicion of prejudice against female authors. She was so successful in hiding her identity that, many years later, the crime novelist and critic Harry Keating wrote of his astonishment at discovering, eventually, that she was a woman. She wasn’t alone in fearing prejudice. In The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, I’ve discussed other female authors who masqueraded as men, notably Elizabeth Mackintosh (who was better known as Josephine Tey but whose first detective novel appeared under the name Gordon Daviot) and Lucy Malleson (who wrote most of her mysteries under the name Anthony Gilbert). Even Agatha Christie toyed, briefly, with the idea of adopting a masculine pseudonym. By 1936, however, Carol Rivett was confident enough to create a new literary identity using her own first name, and so was born Carol Carnac. One of the Carnac titles, Crossed Skis, has been reprinted as a British Library Crime Classic. How it must have amused her to put these words in Warner’s mouth: “If I petitioned Parliament, do you think I could get an enactment that no man writes under any name but his own, and his finger-prints be registered on the title page?” When Bond points out that some writers produce different kinds of work under a host of different names, Warner groans: “Hardened offenders…recidivists, I call ’em.” Late in life Carol Rivett used a further pen name, Mary Le Bourne, when writing Two-Way Murder. That book, however, did not find its way into print for more than sixty years prior to first publication in the Crime Classics series under the E. C. R. Lorac pen name. That is yet another good example of the strange and unpredictable nature of the author’s life, a subject right at the heart of this lively novel. _______________ From Martin Edwards’ introduction to E.C.R. Lorac’s DEATH OF AN AUTHOR. Copyright ©2024 by Edwards. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, POISONED PEN PRESS. All rights reserved. View the full article -
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The Exploits and Exploitation of Indian Street Magic, Jadoo
From ancient times, India has had a rich tradition of magic, active and thriving even today. Lord Indra, Hindu God of the heavens, who wields the power to control thunder and lightning, is also believed to be the world’s first master magician. His biggest magical creation is the Indrajala, or maya, the web of illusion in which our lives are embedded. The Atharva Veda, one of India’s oldest and most influential sacred texts, is rich with descriptions of magical rituals, incantations, charms and spells. Seals from the Indus Valley site in Harappa, dating to the Bronze Age, show evidence of shamans wearing horns. In colonial India, jadoo, magic, was intertwined with street theatre and animal acts – performed on the humblest of streets, and the grandest of stages. In his 1863 book Mumbaiche Varnan (The Story of Bombay) writer Govind Narayan provides a fascinating eyewitness account of the city’s streets, filled with snake charmers, rope dancers, magicians, conjurers, tumblers, monkey and bear handlers, and acrobats performing somersaults on horses. Videshi or foreign visitors were fascinated by what they saw, bringing Indian jadoo tricks to world wide attention. Especially popular were the famous Indian rope trick (featuring a rope which, thrown into the air, immediately became rigid like a ladder – after which the magician’s assistant, usually a small boy, climbed up the rope and disappeared into thin air) and the mango seed trick (where the magician planted a mango seed in a pot, watered it, covered the pot with a cloth – and whisked it away to reveal a small tree, laden with fruit). As John Zubrzycki describes in his book Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and Jinns, Western magicians developed a love and hate relationship with the Indian world of jadoo. Alfred Silvester, a British magician who moved to the USA in the mid-19th century, called himself the ‘Fakir of Oolu’, dressing up in flowing robes, turban on his head, to perform his signature trick, of floating in mid-air, apparently unsupported. In a strange turn of events that speaks to the increasingly globalized world of the 19th century, Silvester and his family then embarked on a round-the-world trip in 1878, taking his bowdlerized version of Indian magic back to India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and then to Africa, where they performed to packed houses in Mauritius and the African Cape. Magicians like Howard Thurston and Harry Houdini, perhaps the best known American magicians of their times, further exploited the obsession of the west with the oriental, battling each other for their share of the spotlight. They travelled to India to learn local jadoo, and then took it back to the USA, adapting what they had learnt and using it as a centrepiece in their acts. Often, it was a direct, even brazen theft of ideas. Harry Houdini capitalized on the American audience’s fascination with the exotic Orient, dressing up as a flute-playing Indian fakir in blackface and white robes at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. Thurston paid Indian street magicians to perform in his hotel room, keenly watching them, dissecting how they did it, and then building on it for the stage. At the same time, he openly sneered at the street fakirs whose ideas he stole. Writing about Indian magic tricks in an April 1927 issue of Popular Mechanics, he dismissed their work as of ‘crude construction,’ ‘far inferior’ to the work of American magicians like himself. Silvester, Thurston, Houdini and dozens of other American, British and Australian magicians sought to assert the superiority of Western modernity and rational science over what they termed Oriental superstition – while at the same time amassing vast collections of books on Indian traditions of spiritualism, witchcraft and tantric magic, eagerly studying them to pick up hints that they could use to devise new routines. Of course this was only in keeping with established colonial traditions of appropriating the knowledge of the colonized, using it to their own benefit while simultaneously deriding its foundations – in fact performing another, highly perfected sleight of hand. At the same time, Indian magicians began to become increasingly connected to the global world of magic, through exposure to journals and magazines, and international societies of magic. By the late 19th and early 20th century, it was becoming increasingly common to find Indian magicians in England and the USA, wearing coats and top hats. Perhaps the oldest of Indian magicians to visit Europe was the south Indian juggler Ramo Samee, who performed in Europe from 1810-1844, also doing a tour of the USA. Sadly, Ramo Samee died in poverty, but over a century later, Bengali magician PC Sorcar found far greater success, calling himself not just India’s, but the World’s Greatest Magician. Sorcar is still remembered for a very famous BBC program he did in 1956, where he sawed a woman assistant in half. He intentionally made it seem that the trick failed, leading to a ghastly accident. The audience panicked, and the BBC had to issue a clarification in the newspapers to let people know that his assistant was fine – it was just a trick, and a very successful one at that. This performance catapulted Sorcar to international fame. A Nest of Vipers, my latest book – the third in The Bangalore Detectives Club series – is set in 1923, in colonial India. The book begins at the time of the visit of Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII, one of the shortest reigning monarchs in British history) to several parts of India. Edward expected to be greeted by cheering crowds – instead, he was met by rioting crowds, violence on the streets, and increasingly strident calls for the British to depart from India. I seek to explore how the world of jadoo interfaced with the growing calls for Indian nationalism during this period, by creating a fictional master magician Das. A nationalist at heart, Das refuses to use the term magic – he calls himself a jadoogar, proudly claiming his heritage. At the opening of the book, Das disappears in front of large crowds while performing a magical act – and does not reappear, as he was supposed to. His son turns to Kaveri, begging her to help him. Is Das alive or dead? Was his disappearance planned and staged – or has he been abducted, perhaps even killed? When Mrs. Kaveri Murthy, now firmly established as Bangalore’s leading woman detective, begins to investigate – she discovers a world of smoke and mirrors. Nothing is as it seems, and every lead she finds seems connected to the Prince’s upcoming visit to Bangalore. In this, Kaveri’s deadliest case yet, the character of Das was inspired by PC Sircar. Sircar passed away in 1971, the year before I was born. Yet I often watched his performances, routinely telecast on Indian television when I was a child. Despite the bad quality of the recording, and the limitations of the black and white television set on which we viewed his magic acts, he was mesmerizing. I also vividly remember his beautiful assistant, who acted as a live prop. Did she have magical abilities of her own? We, the viewers, never found out. By including a note about Das’s wife’s death, which takes place a few years before the opening of the book, I also examine the roles that women magicians were allowed to engage in at the time – apart from being sawn in two at the end of each performance and then put back together again. 1920s colonial India is a fascinating period to write about, but also deeply disturbing. My parents were born in colonial India, and many of my older relatives took part in the freedom struggle. I use the medium of the book to explore my own discomfort with the manner in which Indian traditions and local knowledge systems were being exoticized and exploited for commercial benefit by western magicians – while mocking and deriding their ideas. Sadly, intellectual theft continues to be common today, with indigenous communities often at the receiving end of exploitation. The world of mystery fiction, especially historical mystery, offers rich possibilities to examine the antecedents of many of these issues. I have enjoyed delving into the world of Indian jadoo, and I hope my readers do as well! *** View the full article -
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The Search for George Mallory
They fanned out across the slope, taking their time to survey the terrain. The wind was no longer so ferocious, but it was still cold and gusty. Back home, the experts referred to this as a natural ‘terrace’, but it was far from flat – a thirty-degree slope with steep cliffs at the bottom, the terrain a mixture of scree-covered rock and patches of snow. Just one slip could send you tumbling down the mountain, to be smashed to pieces on the glaciers below. They were at 27,000 feet on the North Face of Everest, the lower edge of the ‘death zone’. Five American climbers and mountain guides: average age thirty-two, two previous summiters, all eager and willing. At Base Camp, 10,000 feet below – near the tip of the Rongbuk glacier – other members of their team were attempting to follow the action through a powerful telescope. It was 1 May 1999, day one of their search for Everest’s Holy Grail: a camera that had gone missing seventy-five years earlier when George Mallory made his final, fateful attempt on Everest. No one expected to find anything straight away – it was all about assessing the lie of the land, getting used to the oxygen sets and radios, figuring out how to work together as a team for a mission that was expected to take a week. And then, fifteen minutes in, Jake Norton, the youngest climber on the team, spotted something: a blue oxygen cylinder, much bigger and heavier than their own, possibly a remnant of a Chinese camp set up in 1975. If it was, they were in the right area, so they carried on going, spreading out until eventually they were so far apart they needed their radios to communicate. Each of the climbers had been given a small, spiral-bound notepad with instructions on how and where to look, but the search zone was vast – the size of about twelve American football fields – so they followed their hunches and intuition. If a body had fallen from a ridge high above, where would it have landed? Were there any obvious funnels or collection points? Then at 11.00 a.m., about half an hour in, Conrad Anker spotted the first corpse, a twisted set of badly dislocated limbs wrapped in a washed-out purple suit. One arm stuck out rigidly, almost as if it were waving. Getting closer, he realized that the ravens had been there first, pecking off much of the skin from the dead climber’s face. It was a gruesome sight, but it wasn’t what he was looking for, the corpse clearly too recent. ‘What are you doing way out there?’ one of his teammates crackled over the radio. ‘We need to be more systematic.’ Anker ignored him and carried on going westwards. This was sacred ground, the North Face of Everest – mountaineering’s most elevated and celebrated peak. All around were features named by previous expeditions; it was a privilege just to be here, heading for the Great Couloir that Edward Norton had attempted in 1924 and Reinhold Messner had conquered in 1980. Then Anker saw a second body, this time in a blue-grey suit; again it was a confusion of broken limbs, the torso facing downhill. But like the first, the clothing was too modern for the expedition they were interested in. So Anker moved on, keeping a wary eye on the line of cliffs below until he stopped to take off his crampons. They weren’t much help on steep downward-facing slabs covered in unstable scree. A few minutes later, he spotted a piece of fabric fluttering in the wind and began climbing upwards to investigate. Blue and yellow, it too was probably modern but he needed to get closer to check. And then he noticed it: a patch of white. Not snow, not rock; something that didn’t quite fit. He moved closer and was stopped in his tracks. It was the powerful shoulders of a climber, his arms stretched upwards as if to arrest a fall, his partly clothed body seemingly fused into Everest itself. Moments later, Conrad Anker took out his radio and called his teammates, but it was another twenty minutes before they all assembled, staring down at the mummified but clearly defined body. No one could quite take it in. On the first day of their search, Anker had discovered something totally remarkable, the solution to a mystery which had gripped the climbing world for the last seventy-five years. He’d found the remains of one of the great heroes of twentieth-century exploration: George Herbert Leigh Mallory. In the now almost a century since he disappeared into the clouds with his young partner Andrew Irvine, George Mallory has become a legendary figure. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay may have been the first men to reach the summit of Everest, but their expedition has never quite roused the same devotion in Europe and America. Mallory has inspired biographies, epic poems, documentaries, works of fiction as well as works of fact, and countless magazine articles and other commentaries. His answer to the question ‘Why climb Everest?’ – ‘Because it’s there’ – is probably the most famous quotation in the history of exploration, on a par with Henry Morton Stanley’s ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’ and Neil Armstrong’s ‘A small step for Man’. Everything about Mallory, from his looks to his skill with words to his athletic abilities, made him the ideal, quintessentially English hero. Even his name seemed to imply his destiny: George the dragon-slayer; Mallory an imperfect echo of Thomas Malory, the great chronicler of Arthurian legends. It’s no wonder that his friend Geoffrey Winthrop Young dubbed him ‘Galahad’, after the legendary knight. In general, most biographers and commentators have been very positive about him: he’s portrayed as a Romantic hero, the incarnation of adventure, an idealist and a visionary. The only real exception to this hagiographic tendency comes in Walt Unsworth’s monumental history, Everest, in which he described Mallory as someone ‘who had greatness thrust upon him. The pity of it was that he had so little actual talent.’ I suspect that Unsworth was being deliberately provocative, but a century after Mallory’s disappearance how should we assess him? Was he the ‘greatest antagonist that Everest has had – or is likely to have’, as Edward Norton dubbed him in the official account of the 1924 expedition, or was he ‘a very good stout-hearted baby’, as Tom Longstaff, his teammate on a previous Everest expedition, memorably described him in a private letter? Is there any fresh evidence that might help answer this question? The unexpected truth is that over the last decades a surprising amount of new material has become available – Mallory’s letters to his penfriend Marjorie Holmes, John Noel’s private archive, George Finch’s papers, an enormous number of documents from the Mount Everest Foundation archive that have now been scanned and digitized – that enables Mallory’s story to be told more fully. The picture that emerges is complex and nuanced: a fascinating individual, loved by his friends and family; idealistic, chaotic, narcissistic, generous, impulsive, indecisive, driven by the demons of risk and ambition, and continually reassessed and reappropriated by successive generations of climbers and adventurers of all kinds. This book is not an attempt to tell the complete story of Mallory’s life. Rather, the aim is to do two things: first, to look in detail at the events of 1923 and 1924 and understand the forces that drove Mallory and the third British Everest expedition, and second, to separate the man from the mythology that grew up after his disappearance and which continues to evolve, especially after his body was discovered in 1999. It begins though, not on the slopes of the world’s highest mountain, but on a small spit of rock by the seaside… ___________________________________ Excerpted from Fallen: George Mallory and the Tragic 1924 Everest Expedition, by Mick Conefrey. Copyright 2024. Published by Pegasus books. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article -
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The State of the Crime Novel, Part 1: Writing Life
Once again, the Edgar Awards are upon us, and once again, I’ve had the privilege of asking dozens of great writers to contribute to our annual roundtable discussion on the state of the genre. This year’s roundtable, like in previous years, is divided into two parts: the first, running today, is focused on craft advice and the writing life, while the second, running tomorrow, will address issues in the genre and the future of crime writing. Thanks so much to the more than 30 nominees who sent in thoughtful, fascinating, and often hilarious responses. The award ceremony is this Wednesday night, and you’ll be able to follow along on social media as winners are announced or take a look at CrimeReads first thing on Thursday morning. __________________________________ What is your advice for writers who are just starting out? And what’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever gotten? __________________________________ William Kent Krueger (nominated for Best Novel – The River We Remember): First piece of advice: Write every day, and write because you love it, not because you hope you’ll get rich and famous from the effort. Second piece of advice: Marry someone with a good job. The best piece of advice given to me when I was about to become a published author was to get to know the booksellers. If the booksellers like you and appreciate your work, they’ll sell you like crazy and spread the word. I found this to be true. Susan Isaacs (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Bad, Bad Seymour Brown): Writing may be an art. It is certainly a craft. But also it’s a job. You have to put in regular hours and go to work whether you feel like it or not. You already may be working one job and even have another as parent or caregiver, so how can you possibly do it? By figuring out a schedule that’s doable, albeit hard. Three nights a week for three hours, or even two. Every Saturday or Sunday. Whatever. Yes, it will take longer, but it will get done if you stick to your schedule. You have to work and not get sidetracked reading How to Write Fiction That’s Fabulous and Will Make You Megabucks during your writing hours. That time is for writing your own book. The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever gotten, I gave to myself. One day I was musing on how interesting it was that speaking aloud converted swarming thoughts into coherent ideas: like with talk therapy, or the Catholic sacrament of confession. So I turned to some dialogue that didn’t feel natural the way I’d written it. I spoke it out loud, which actually was beyond hard. I was embarrassed, even though there was no one in the house but me and the dog, and the latter was not at all judgmental. The technique worked for me. I have also used talking to interrogate a character: “Why are you doing that?” I ask aloud. Not rude, not amiable. Just a matter-of-fact question. Answered that way too. Okay, your character may hesitate or mutter I don’t know. Be patient, then ask again. Listen, this is as awkward for them as it is for you. But trust me, they’ll talk. April Henry (nominated for Best Young Adult – Girl Forgotten): When you start out, there is almost always a lot of rejection. But the only person who can say you can’t do something is you, when you give up. When I was a teenager who loved to write, I decided that there was no way someone like me, a poor girl from a logging town, could be a writer. But that decision meant I never would be a writer, because I stopped writing. I finally came to my senses in my early 30s. The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever gotten is: “You can always edit crap. You can’t edit nothing.” Tracy Clark (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Hide): Learn the craft. You have to know the rules to break the rules. Take your writing seriously. Commit to it. Once you have the foundation set, then you can really let yourself fly. Go for it! Yvonne Woon (nominated for Best Young Adult – My Flawless Life): Be fueled by rejection. It isn’t enough to grow a thick skin, you have to convert rejection into motivation. So much of my writing when I first started out was not good, and plenty of people told me so (via workshop critiques, magazine rejections, fellowship rejections, acquisition rejections, negative reviews). Though they were painful to receive, they were also helpful, and in most cases, right. At the time, I’d read somewhere about writers taping their rejections to the wall, so that’s what I did, too, and every day I looked at those rejections and said, “I’ll show you what I can do,” and tried to get better. In terms of craft, I’ve received a lot of incredible advice, but the ones I use the most are: -Your character has to want something in every scene. -End each scene with the start of a new action. -So much of writing is endurance and practice. No work can get done until you put your butt in the chair. Robert Morgan (nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe): My advice to young writers is one word: persistence. I’ve taught writing for fifty years, and many of those who seemed more talented have not gone on to become writers, while some who appeared less gifted at first have succeeded. Everyone has some writing ability, but it’s those with fire in the belly, relentless, who reach the goal. This is true of all the arts, whether country music, acting, or film directing. The best advice ever given to me about novel writing came from my friend Alison Lurie: if you have living characters, find a passive gear and let them take over. Rob Osler (nominated for Best Short Story – “Miss Direction,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): Imagine a clock that measures time in months, not minutes or hours, and reset your expectations accordingly. Jennifer J. Chow (nominated for the Lillian Jackson Braun Memorial Award – Hot Pot Murder): I’d find community even while pre-published. The writing journey can be bumpy, and it’s essential to have support along the way. The best piece of advice I’ve ever received? Compare yourself with yourself. Think about your personal goals from several years ago to better perceive your current achievements. Samantha Jayne Allen (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Hard Rain): Life is long and you never know what might change. And also, life is short, so be present knowing that the writing and the joy you experience in the act of creation are kind of the whole point. The best advice I’ve ever gotten was from my former professor, Tom Grimes, whose feedback on a workshop submission once was just two words: “keep going.” Finishing my novel’s first draft and worrying about the rest later was the message, but I think “keep going” applies to the writing life generally, to the importance of having faith in yourself. Lina Chern (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Play the Fool): This advice is not just for new writers, but for any writers, and especially for myself, because I forget: Have fun. Writing, while often difficult and frustrating, should be fun. Very few of us will get rich and famous doing it, so if you’re not having fun, why do it at all? We all go through periods where, for whatever reason, the writing doesn’t come easily. Work out a set of tools for those times, that make you reconnect with the fun. The tools will vary writer to writer. For me, it often works to step back from whatever stage of the process I’m mired in and doodle some longhand notes about the story —almost like a journal. Often, that’s enough to make me excited again about what I’m trying to do, or show me a new way to do it. Other tools could be taking a walk, or changing your work location, or leaving a particularly difficult passage alone and working on a different one. Find whatever works for you, and do it until the fun comes back. It always does! Sarah Stewart Taylor (nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award – A Stolen Child): The longer I write, the less I feel equipped to give advice! There is no one right way to accomplish the nearly impossible task of writing and revising a novel—90,000 words or more containing a whole universe of people and places and things! Just think of it!—and finding the process that works for you takes time and a lot of trial and error. I’m skeptical of anyone who claims to have a surefire “Ten Steps to Finishing your Novel” formula, but I do love talking to other writers about their approaches. Hearing that a friend uses index cards to keep track of scenes or that a writer I admire doesn’t allow herself to edit anything until her first draft is done helps me see my own process in a different way. So here’s a piece of advice: be in community with other writers in order to learn. And, also, writer friends will save your soul and your sanity. No one else truly understands what it’s like. Make some writer friends! I also feel passionately that writers must be readers. Really study the novels you love, figure out why they work and why they work for you. The best piece of advice I ever got was from my amazing editor, Kelley Ragland. Years ago she told me that the only parts of this whole thing the writer really has control over are whether they write another book and the quality of that book. It’s such good advice. If you want to write for a long time, you always have to put the work in progress first and use it as the lodestar as all the other parts of the business swirl around you. “Imagine a clock that measures time in months, not minutes or hours, and reset your expectations accordingly.” –Rob Osler Mary Winters (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Murder in Postscript): It isn’t a piece of writing advice, per se, but guidance a history professor gave me long ago. He said don’t be afraid of something because it’s hard. I’ve found it to be true with writing. Whether it’s a short story that touches a memory or a novel that includes a complicated plot or daunting research, I’ve gained the most satisfaction from projects that require the most from me. I.S. Berry (nominated for Best First Novel – The Peacock and the Sparrow): Pick a story you love, that you can live with through the ups and downs (of which there’ll be many). A story’s like a relationship: some days, you can’t stand it, you’ll fight with it, so pick a partner you’ll still love in the morning. Find your readers. Don’t set a goal of selling as many books as humanly possible (though, of course, that’s always nice); try to get your book into the hands of readers who will love it, with whom it will resonate. It’s a rare book that appeals to everyone, and when you find the readership that clicks, you’ve hit the jackpot. Jennifer Cody Epstein (nominated for Best Novel – The Madwomen of Paris): I know a lot of writers swear by routine—”write every day!” “Hit that daily word count!” Those are certainly great habits to form. But in practice they aren’t always attainable, and for me they can actually increase the psychic burden of producing (which is already pretty damn heavy) by making me feel “behind” in a project before I’ve even started working on it. My advice is instead to take a longer view. Allow yourself to try and fail to write sometimes, and to recognize that chopping out 500 words can be more valuable than writing 1000. Recognize that sometimes mulling and stewing and brainstorming and scrawling notes and spewing seemingly nonsensical voice-memos is also a valuable, even essential, part of the long-term process of The Work. And in terms of writing advice, one of my MFA mentors told me that nothing you cut from a piece should ever be seen as wasted words. Your work will always be stronger for having written that bit, reconsidered it, and taken it out. Also, don’t feel compelled to delete anything forever—you can murder your darlings, sure. But you can also keep them in a file for inspiration and repurposing later on. That’s always felt strangely comforting to me as a writer. Claire Swinarski (nominated for Best Juvenile – What Happened to Rachel Riley?): Quantity, quantity, quantity. New writers need to write a lot in order to really find their voice and break out of just trying to copy what other writers before them have done. The only way to improve your writing is to practice consistently and learn what works for you and what doesn’t. The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever gotten is to focus on really small assignments. Sitting down and thinking “today, I’m going to write a book” is ridiculously intimidating. Reframing it as “today, I’m going to describe this character’s kitchen” or “today, I’m going to tackle this specific conversation between these two characters” is so much more doable, and totally transformed my writing process. Ritu Mukerji (nominated for Best First Novel – Murder by Degrees): My advice to new writers: read the depth and breadth of this wonderful genre. There is such creativity and diversity in narrative, plot, character. It is the best education. And the best writing advice I received was to write at the same time every day, so that your mind would become conditioned to working at a specific time, no matter what. The consistency created creative momentum. Linda Castillo (nominated for Best Short Story – “Hallowed Ground”): It’s almost a cliché to tell a writer who is starting out to not give up, but that is always my best advice. Writing is hard. While writing a novel is a long and arduous journey, the writing business is even more difficult. When times are tough, when the writing isn’t going well and everyone and their dog is rejecting you, it is our love for our story that gets us to our laptop every day. Writing is our escape. It is our refuge. Sometimes it is our revenge—and that’s okay as long as you get it done. The best piece of advice I ever received is this: When the writing is going poorly or you are stuck, allow yourself to write badly. Get the words on paper even if they suck. You can always edit later. Anastasia Hastings (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – Of Manners and Murder): It’s a tough business, and you have to be tough, too. Getting published can take a very long time and usually, the road to publication is lined with rejection. Keep trying, keep plugging away. Don’t give up. Sean McCluskey (nominated for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award – “The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine): Obviously, write. It’s easy to wander down the rabbit hole of taking courses, reading how-to books, and watching author interviews, and that all feels like you’re doing something productive. In reasonable doses, it is productive. But none of it’s a substitute for writing and rewriting. Speaking of rewriting, I think that’s where the important work gets done. I compare writing a first draft to cutting down a tree–just get the damn thing on the ground! But then you have to saw it into planks, carve them into pieces, and assemble the wood into the furniture you want. Then sanding, varnishing, polishing, and more woodworking metaphors than I have the knowledge to deliver. As for the mechanics of storytelling, I was once told to keep asking or implying questions with your writing, and promising your reader that they’ll get the answers if they just keep reading. That teacher told me every word, every line, every paragraph, and every page has only one job: make the reader want to read the next one. Because if they stop caring about what happens next, they put the book down and it never, ever does. Ken Jaworowski (nominated for Best First Novel – Small Town Sins): When I wrote for the theater, I’d sometimes sit among the audience to make sure my script was engaging them. Yet when I’d write an (ultimately unpublished) novel, I’d sometimes turn self-indulgent and forget all about my audience. Then one day I read a quote from Scott Smith, the author of “A Simple Plan.” He said: “I was fearful of boring the reader, so whenever it became a question of exploring some moral dimension or driving the plot on, I went with the latter.” That made everything click. Whether I was writing for the theater, or for a novel reader, or for anyone, the end result should always be the same: Never forget that you and your audience are a team. Patricia Johns (nominated for the Lillian Jackson Braun Memorial Award – Murder of an Amish Bridegroom): Don’t give up! That is my best advice I can give to anyone. If you keep writing, keep submitting and keep trying, you will eventually find a way. Too many writers give up because it’s hard, and rejection hurts. But if you keep trying, you’ll become a stronger writer, too. So keep at it, and never look at the odds. __________________________________ What is your favorite method for writing? __________________________________ Jennifer Cody Epstein: OMG—computer. Hands down! I’m a relentless re-editor (and also can’t even read my own handwriting), so it just makes the most sense. Scott Von Doviak (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Lowdown Road): I’m a pen and pad guy all the way. It seems like most of my friends in the field have a routine of getting up at five in the morning, pouring a cup of coffee, and putting on some ambient music or just opting for dead silence as they sit at the laptop and get to work. And that’s great if it works for them! But I’m a Happy Hour writer. Give me a dive bar, a great jukebox, a cold beer, and life happening around me. That’s where my first drafts come together. I can fix the mistakes at the laptop later, but I thrive on that initial burst of energy. Tracy Clark: Laptop. Laptop. Laptop. I’ve got to feel the keys under my fingers. Pens and pencils are way too quiet. April Henry: I write in Scrivener on a Mac, but the key part of my writing is that I write on a LifeSpan treadmill desk. I bought it 10 years ago and it is one of my favorite purchases ever. My posture is better, I feel I think more clearly, and after I got it, I lost weight without even trying. Claire Swinarski: I’m a classic Microsoft Word girl, but I am fairly consistent with writing in order. I don’t like to skip around throughout the timeline while writing. I’ve found it helps me understand where things are slow-moving or lacking—if I’m dreading writing a scene because it feels boring, it’s almost certainly going to read boring, so how can I eliminate it? I typically know the main events throughout a book before starting, but I don’t really dive into a book until I have the perfect first chapter crafted. “The story began in my head, traveled through my heart, down my arm and hand, and flowed from the pen onto the page.”–William Kent Krueger William Kent Krueger: I wrote my first nine novels longhand. It was part of the magic. The story began in my head, traveled through my heart, down my arm and hand, and flowed from the pen onto the page. But writing longhand requires that, at some point, you must transcribe the work into a word processing system of some kind, which takes time. I was behind deadline on my tenth novel, and I thought if I could write directly to my computer and skip the transcribing step, maybe I could turn the manuscript in on time. Giving up the magic of longhand was a scary proposition. But it worked. Now I write on a laptop. Yvonne Woon: I start every project by plotting and brain dumping ideas into a notebook. I only plot in long hand and am particular about my notebooks. They can’t be fancy or expensive or I’ll feel I have to “save them” for better thoughts. Can’t be too big or I can’t carry them around with me. I like medium-sized, clearance-section notebooks at Target that are meant for teenagers. In those notebooks I map out my characters and form a “blob plot” of a book, which usually has 5-6 events that I want to book to cover and gives me a loose understanding of what the book will look like. Then I figure out what has to happen in chapters 1-3. Once I have a general idea, I move to my laptop and start writing. My computer situation is very basic. Microsoft word. Kitchen table, sometimes the bed. I can write basically anywhere as long as I have earplugs. Samantha Jayne Allen: Ideally, on my laptop, at my desk, with a journal beside me for handwritten notes and stray thoughts. Since having my daughter, who’s now two, I’ve had to be more flexible—I’ve written whole chapters in the notes app on my phone while holding her during her nap. I think not being so tied to a certain way of getting the words down has been good for me. It’s refreshing to change up your method sometimes, like the equivalent of going for a walk or cleaning the kitchen when you’re stuck with a plot problem. Ritu Mukerji: I am a perennial fan of Google docs for writing the manuscript, certainly for anything longer than a page or two. But given that I spend a lot of time thinking about the 19th century, I often resort to pen and notebook, especially when I feel stuck. Writing longhand is a great way to work through knotty problems. Robert Morgan: I usually write first drafts in a spiral notebook, in my odd combination of printing and long-hand. There is a kind of intimacy with the page and the physical world while putting down words with a pen, slow and deliberate. Writing is a kind of acting, and that physicality is useful to me. For the second draft I go to the laptop, revising as I proceed. For additions I follow the same process. Katherine Hall Page (2024 Grand Master): I wrote the first book, The Body in the Belfry (1989) on an Underwood typewriter and graduated to an IBM Selectric for the next two before acquiring a Mac. I still use Apples, but throughout I’ve also stuck to pad-and-pencil—more specifically, Clairefontaine graph paper (to keep my writing legible) notebooks. I start by listing the cast of characters, new and old, with reminders of age, distinguishing features, then as I write I make a timeline, list each chapter’s first and last lines, brief notes on what happens in each chapter as I write, and notes on the research, the fun part. So distracting a rabbit hole, it’s hard to get back to actual writing my own book. Since there are original recipes at the end of each book, drafts of these go in the notebooks as well. At the start of each day, I rewrite what I have written the day before. At the end of a chapter, I print it out and rewrite using a pencil, transfer the changes to the computer and keep going until eventually the book is finished. I write a synopsis at the start to go over with my editor, but this skeleton of the book often changes. I always know who gets it and who did it. Ken Jaworowski: You can write anywhere, anytime, and I do. Sometimes I’ll sit at my laptop and write for an hour. Then I’ll go to the post office and think of a fresh idea, so I’ll use the recording app on my cell phone to speak into. Later, at the library, I’ll recall something I wanted to add to a chapter, and I’ll email myself. Even if you think of a single good line of dialogue while eating at a fast-food restaurant, that’s writing, and that’s a little victory. Lina Chern: I have specific methods of writing for specific parts of my writing process. When I’m brainstorming or trying to tell myself the story or just generally trying to make something out of nothing, I have to write longhand. Something about the sensation of pen-to-paper, and the overall slower speed allows me to disappear into the story and tap into that subconscious space where the good stuff lives. This part of the process is where the biggest and most satisfying surprises come, and the part I often return to when I’m stuck or need a jolt of fun to keep myself motivated. Revisions I do digitally, because during that part of the process my brain wants to work more quickly and consciously. I.S. Berry: I type everything on the computer. Haven’t done longhand since before the internet. But I print everything when I edit. Maybe because I grew up without computers, words just read differently to me on a physical page than a screen. Sentences have a different cadence, and I catch errors and syntax problems in hard copy that I wouldn’t catch digitally. Carol Goodman (nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award – The Bones of the Story): I write my first drafts long-hand in composition notebooks and then type up, chapter by chapter, on my laptop, editing as I go along. Writing by hand lets me feel freer and more experimental in the first draft because I know I’ll be cleaning things up later. It also keeps me away from the internet while I’m writing. Sean McCluskey: I can’t imagine writing longhand. When it came to teaching penmanship, the nuns certainly failed me (though I don’t doubt they did their damnedest). For me it’s all laptop, all day. Although, oddly, it’s rarely on my lap. __________________________________ What is the key to crafting compelling characters? __________________________________ I.S. Berry: Complexity. For characters to be full-bodied, I think they need to be morally murky, or at least variegated; to make decisions and take actions that aren’t obvious, that make readers think. When I write, I create a backstory for each character—even if it never shows up on the page—to make them more three-dimensional and inform the character’s decisions. Sean McCluskey: I try to stop worrying about whether the character is likable, or even relatable, and focus on whether or not they’re interesting. Is this someone I want to watch doing things, good or bad? Do I want to spend time in this character’s head, even if it’s an ugly and scary place? ” The key, I think, is to go small, not big. Go inner, not outer. You want to build your book people from the inside out.” –Tracy Clark Tracy Clark: The key, I think, is to go small, not big. Go inner, not outer. You want to build your book people from the inside out. You’re tapping into emotions and inner thoughts. You’re grabbing onto a character’s flaws and struggles, their hurdles and challenges. You give them weight and a pebble in their shoe and then put them into a situation and see how they’ll handle it. Series give you more room to explore a character’s arc. You follow your characters’ drama from book to book to see how they change and adapt … or don’t. Samantha Jayne Allen: One way to do this is to make your characters feel real: give them a rich inner life, a lived-in voice. But most of all, a compelling character is a character that wants or needs something. To solve the case, get paid, avenge their best friend’s murder, etc. The reader should understand the character’s desires or even share them—the reader is then rooting for them to get what they want (or that they don’t!) and is thus invested in the story’s outcome. I think with a series you simply have more room to play, and for loose ends, whereas in a standalone the arc is somewhat completed at the end of the novel. A lot of series novels have multiple arcs for their main characters: one for each book, another that is overarching and that is possibly not resolved for many books, and at which point the series might end. William Kent Krueger: A good story isn’t so much about what happens, but more about who it happens to. I believe compelling characters are those that feel most real to us, those who are deeply flawed, as we all are. It seems to me that characters who, despite their flaws, struggle to follow some moral compass tend to have a greater hold on our hearts, to stay with us longer. Of course, in a series, there’s so much more space to explore all the niches of a protagonist’s psyche, so much more time for a character to grow. On the other hand, a dynamic character in a standalone can, like a branding iron, leave a deep and abiding impression on a reader. One and done can be a tremendously effective approach. AF Carter (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Boomtown): I really don’t `craft’ my characters. I begin with a rather vague impression of their various attributes, including gender, job, marital status, children, education etc. Then, ever the optimist, I start clicking away at my keyboard and hope for the best. I can be more specific with regard to the second question, about series vs. standalones. Once past the first volume of a series, there’s no winging it. Recurring characters are already defined and editors have long memories. You have to go with the ones who brung ya. This commonly leads to a complication as the volumes add up. You can’t assume the reader of any particular book, has read the others. Thus, you’re more or less required to deliver some backstory for each recurring character and that can slow the pace, sometimes drastically. I deal with this in the Delia Mariola series I’m currently writing, by creating a pair of “vice-protagonists”. These are characters who get a lot of space, though not so much as Delia. At the end of the novel, they move on. Perhaps they leave town to begin again somewhere else, or are arrested, or even killed. Fresh characters offer fresh perspectives, and keep the author (and, hopefully, the reader) involved. You don’t know what they’re going to do next, because you’ve never encountered them before. Again, this is as important to this author as it might be to readers. Ritu Mukerji: I think a series is the perfect vehicle for character development–I always thought of Murder by Degrees as the start of a series. For my main character, Dr. Lydia Weston, I created an extensive backstory. I included little details: what did she like to wear, eat, read. And then the larger theme of how her past experiences and childhood shaped her. As I wrote the book, it helped me anticipate how she would behave in certain situations. Equally important is the villains–thinking through their character and motivation is so vital to understand what would drive them to commit a horrific crime. Anastasia Hastings: Lots more latitude in a series, lots more time to have a character grow and change. Stand alone? You’ve got maybe 100,000 to make a character come alive for readers. In a series that might go on for 10 or 12 or more books, there are many more words to work with. What is the key? So many answers to that one! If I had to choose one, I’d say voice, that special something in the writing that reveals character. It’s all about word choice, the cadence of their dialogue, the way their internal monologue is written. When it’s done well, characters fly off the page! Rob Osler: With a short story nominated and as a writer of a novel series, I’ll come at this from a short story versus long perspective. In a short story, there’s practically no time for a protagonist’s personal growth. It’s all a writer can do to create a compelling character, set up the crime, introduce the suspects and resolve the mystery within a short word count. However, at the other end of the spectrum, with a series, the author has a long runway for character evolution. Whatever personal improvement and enlightenment the hero achieves in a particular book can’t be 100 percent. Instead, the character is on a long journey toward self-betterment and understanding throughout many installments. Sarah Stewart Taylor: When I taught creative writing, I would have my students do an exercise where they had to pick one of their close friends and write about the first time they met them. What were the writer’s first impressions of the friend? What was their initial dynamic with the friend? Then I would have them write a couple of scenes set in subsequent years showing how their impressions changed as they got to know the person better. Were their initial impressions correct? What did they learn that deepened their understanding of their friend? Showing that kind of evolution in perception and in the dynamic between two people is one of my favorite things about characterization. There is such pleasure in developing that evolution over the course of multiple series installments. A character can be one thing in one book and something else entirely in another. Standalones can show significant character development and satisfying arcs as well, of course, but I love the way a series can represent all the eras and stages in a human life. It’s so satisfying to me. Linda Castillo: A writer must possess intimate knowledge of his character. He must know his character’s deepest, darkest fears, his opinions—flawed or imperfect or not—and he must understand what drives his character forward. The human psyche is infinite, which gives a writer much fodder. Use it. When writing a long running series, character growth is a key element. It’s vital to maintain that growth to keep the series fresh. Each book in a series contains a character arc and for a long running series that arc is expansive. One last personal note: I love writing imperfect characters. They are interesting and unpredictable and can be such fun. That said, there are certain lines that should not be crossed. Know what those lines are because they could edge a highly-flawed sympathetic character into irredeemable territory. __________________________________ How do you balance between educating and entertaining when it comes to nonfiction? __________________________________ Robert Morgan: This is one of the most difficult questions to answer about writing literary biography. A good biography requires a lot of research, but if the biography relies mostly on facts and interpretations others have already made familiar, the work will be neither educational nor entertaining. The narrative must have fresh facts and new interpretations. Lyton Strachey once observed that ignorance could be an important asset to a historian. An author who knows everything already will not understand what a reader needs to know to appreciate the unfolding story. A good biography will communicate the excitement of discovery and new understanding, and readers will be entertained. If the biographer feels no thrill of insight and interpretation, the reader will not either. Steven Powell (nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy): Entertaining is rather easy in James Ellroy’s case: his life is so dramatic! Applying the facts to the narrative of Ellroy’s life in a clear and concise manner does the work for you. There’s no need to sensationalize. In fact, a few of Ellroy’s claims seemed questionable, and scrutinizing them with all the available evidence makes for fascinating reading. Additionally, when you have a charismatic, larger-than-life subject such as James Ellroy it’s gripping to hear the testimony of the people who have known him. I spoke to over eighty friends, colleagues and partners of Ellroy and it was important to me to include their voices, as they gave a portrait of Ellroy very different to the Demon Dog persona he has worked so hard to cultivate. __________________________________ What is a moment that sticks out in your research journey? Was there a particularly odd factoid or archive you’d like to highlight? __________________________________ Steven Powell: I discovered the identity of Jean Ellroy’s first husband, which even James Ellroy didn’t know. James only knew of him as ‘the Spalding Man’ and thought he was the heir to the Spalding Sporting Goods fortune. He was, in fact, Easton Ewing Spaulding, a real estate heir. Ellroy had misspelled his name by a single letter and, consequently, was never able to track him down. Solving this mystery helped me to earn Ellroy’s trust and persuaded him to cooperate on the biography. I also think, in the long-term, that the more mysteries we can solve about Jean Ellroy’s life the closer we will get to solving her murder. Robert Morgan: When I was examining the Poe material at the Enoch Pratt Memorial Library in Baltimore I got to hold letters written by Elmira Royster Shelton, Poe’s first and last fiancee, to his aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, just before and after Poe’s death in 1849. Looking at the fine handwriting, the sophisticated phrasing, the kindness, I understood, as I had not before, the depth of the bond between Edgar and Elmira, her importance as muse and inspiration for “The Raven.” Another discovery, as I re-read “The Gold-Bug,” was that Poe had placed the landscape and flora around Charlottesville, Virginia, on the swampy coast of South Carolina, combining two places in the South he knew well. More significant was my discovery that Poe was a poet of the natural world as well as of horror and crime. In “The Domain of Arnheim” and several other stories he celebrates the splendor and mystery of forests and streams, adding to the astonishing range of his achievement. Even more important, I found that Dr. Snodgrass’s account of finding Poe near death in a tavern in Baltimore was part of his temperance lectures. Snodgrass used Poe’s death as a warning against the evils of alcohol. Poe had taken a pledge to never drink again, and others who saw Poe in those last days made no mentions of alcohol. Poe more likely died of tuberculosis of the brain. One clue to Snodgrass’s bias was his statement that Poe was wearing cheap clothes when found. Though dirty, Poe’s coat and pants were made of alpaca and cashmere. View the full article -
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Crime Novels with a Sense of Place and Manners
Write what you know, they say. A tall order if you’re writing about a serial killer. Most serial killers don’t take the time to sit down and write crime fiction—harder to plot a crime than simply do it, I would think, particularly once you’ve figured it out and are on a roll—but there’s a thought: a serial killer who writes crime novels. Otherwise, you do your research for that part of it. There are writers who have a great idea, a plot, a construct with a shocking twist, and set it in a generic landscape anywhere. But for me, the most satisfying crime fiction are stories that spring from a particular place and the people who live there; a place and manners the author knows well; stories that could not happen anywhere else. What I know, in recent years, is the life of a single parent in small town Maine. Being a parent is the sum of all my fears now: that something could happen to my child. Particularly as that child enters the teen years, if he or she has trouble in school and out of school, and you don’t always know where he or she is. And in Maine: Stephen King country; a beautiful rural state of forests and bogs and a rocky coast, full of dark promise. Here are some novels whose crimes and mysteries grow out of place and manners: Jane Harper; The Dry, etc; Tana French; In the Woods, etc Both of theses authors are excellent, well known, and in similar ways have staked out their turf. Jane Harper’s novels are set in Australia, beginning with The Dry, three of them featuring her detective Aaron Falk, others are stand-alone mysteries. Usually involving cold cases—not always murders, sometimes deaths resulting from tragic relationships—Harper’s slow-burn but cinematically rendered stories unwrap layers of Australian communities, family secrets, broken friendships that are defined by landscapes both beautiful and harsh. Tana French’s stories are set in Ireland. Like Harper, she has a series of novels, The Dublin Murder Squad, beginning with her debut, In The Woods, that feature returning detective characters, with revolving points of view, and stand-alone novels with new characters. Like Harper, her stories are slow-burners: an inciting incident draws the reader in, and the long, deliberate development of her plots is sustained by the convincing details of place, characters, and the quality of French’s writing. Louise Welsh; The Cutting Room Less well known, more striking in location and character, is Scottish writer Louise Welsh’s debut novel The Cutting Room. Her protagonist is the grim, saturnine auctioneer, Rilke, who finds snuff porn photographs among the property of a dead man, and sets out to learn the story behind the photos. The photos are almost a MacGuffin for Welsh to take us through Rilke’s world of vividly described alcoholic auctioneers and gay sex hookups in a dismal, gothic Glasgow. Welsh’s writing, characters, and setting of place transcend genre writing into literary fiction. She has authored six crime novels, including most recently a sequel to The Cutting Room, The Second Cut, where we meet Rilke, still alive, 20 years on. Georges Simenon; , Maigret; Dirty Snow, and the romans durs The fantastically prolific—over 400 novels—Belgian writer Georges Simenon was most famous for his French police detective Jules Maigret, for whom he wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories—almost double the appearances of Hercule Poirot. Maigret’s world is smoggy, tobacco-filled early to mid-20th century Paris. But Simenon’s greater literary reputation is based on what he called his romans durs—‘hard novels’— “psychological thrillers exploring the darkest corners of the human mind, prostitution, police corruption… the hope of escape represented by railway stations… events which Simenon had experienced and were fictionalized to a criminal or psychological extreme.” Booker Prize-winner John Banville, who writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, praised Simenon’s novels for their psychological insights and vivid evocation of time and place. W. Somerset Maugham; The Letter While not known as a crime writer, during most of his lifetime Maugham was the most famous author in the world. His commercial success so undermined the critical reception of his work that he himself described his position in the literary world as being “in the very first row of the second-raters.” Depending on who’s counting, between 60 and 90 of his novels, plays, and short stories have been adapted to film and TV. One of the most famous of these is his short story, The Letter, the barely fictionalized account of the 1911 murder of a British planter in Malaya by his lover, the wife of another British plantation owner. Its strength is not the nature of the killing but the shame and duplicity and the world of its characters. The Letter became a play, and was filmed twice, best in 1940, starring Bette Davis. The real life murder is also the subject of a 2023 novel, The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng, featuring Somerset Maugham as a character. I found it a tepid dilution of Maugham’s original short story, lacking the perfectly drawn time, place, and characters that Maugham knew best. Edward St Aubyn; The Patrick Melrose books The five short ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, At Last—by British novelist Edward St Aubyn, are not crime books per se. They are accounts of the emotional and pedophiliac abuse received by St Aubyn’s thinly veiled autobiographical character Patrick Melrose during his childhood at the hands of his parents, dysfunctional British aristocrats, and Patrick’s later adult life. The first book describes Patrick’s rape as a child by his own father at the family’s beautiful chateau in the south of France. Subsequent books deal with Patrick’s life as a drug addict, his father’s funeral, his own attempts at marriage. They are as dark as human familial relations can be, and frequently hysterically funny. St Aubyn is a great prose stylist. His humor is a way to deal with unspeakable abuse and horror. He’s not laughing at his protagonist, with the glee sometimes shown by Stephen King and other authors toward their miscreant creations, St Aubyn is using humor with compassion, as a way to assimilate, for protagonist and reader, the unspeakable. It’s a writing lesson for the ages. HBO made a successful adaptation of the five books, called Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. My point here is, again, place and manners. The Melrose books are a trip, a literary benchmark of human misbehavior; guaranteed—trigger warning—to offend every sensibility. *** View the full article -
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Mark Woodworth: How a Missouri Teenager Ended up in Prison for a Shocking Murder in a Small Town
There was no good reason for Bob Ramsey, a veteran St. Louis defense attorney, to take on Mark Woodworth as a client. At first glance, Woodworth couldn’t appear more guilty. He’d already been convicted, not once but twice, of the same murder—once in 1995, and then again in 1999 after a retrial, when the judge, throwing the book at him, had sent Woodworth back to Missouri state prison with four life sentences. The evidence against Mark looked damning. The victim had been Mark’s neighbor Cathy Robertson, a forty-one-year-old mother of five. At the crime scene, investigators had found Mark’s fingerprint on a box of bullets, the same type of bullets police suspected the shooter had used. Moreover, police had confiscated a Ruger pistol from Mark’s father and passed it along to a ballistics examiner. The examiner fired a test bullet from the Ruger, looked at the bullet under a microscope, and then matched it to a remnant of one of the six bullets used in the shooting. Mark, who was sixteen at the time of the murder but was certified as an adult by the state of Missouri at trial, had target-practiced with a nearly identical Ruger pistol weeks before Cathy was killed. Neither did it help his cause that the Robertsons lived across the street from the Woodworths and that Mark slept alone in a bedroom in the basement, next to a door he could sneak out of without anyone knowing he was gone. During a polygraph, Mark responded to the suggestion that he’d been the killer and could now face the death penalty by telling the detective matter-of-factly, “We all have to die sometime.” At his first trial, when Mark was brought up to the witness stand to proclaim his innocence, he had not been a convincing advocate for his own cause. He did not passionately reject the prosecutor’s suggestion that he had been the gunman. Quite the opposite, in fact; he wasn’t showing much emotion at all. Pale, short, thin, with a spread of acne on his cheeks and narrow, dark brown eyes that tended to gaze off into the distance, Mark had the type of sullen disposition that, as the Missouri state prosecutors suggested in their closing remarks, was not unlike all the American teenage boys with brains soaked by action movies and bloody video games who kept making the nightly news for brutal acts of senseless violence in the 1990s. In both trials, jurors learned Mark had almost no social existence to speak of. He was hardly interested in girls, didn’t go to parties, and had but one friend. Academics never being his strong suit, he’d dropped out of high school and spent much of his time by himself on his family’s farm. To put it simply, Mark fit the profile of what had become a prominent if menacing figure in the national imagination—a loner with a gun looking to make a name for himself. For a small-town jury, there was perhaps nothing more emblematic of the ongoing American crisis of violence than the young American male with a dead stare and something toxic boiling in his blood. In the cities, the bloodshed had become a bleak if almost rudimentary occurrence. But now the violence crept into their rural outpost, knocking on their door. By the time Mark was back in his prison uniform at the Crossroads Correctional Center after his failed appeal, the Woodworths had already churned through four lawyers. Now that Mark was facing four life sentences, they had little hope of finding a decent attorney willing to keep fighting. It was during this period of despair that Dale Whiteside, a friend and state representative born and raised in Chillicothe, the small northwestern Missouri town where the Woodworths and Robertsons lived, told Mark’s parents about an unusual lawyer named Bob Ramsey. A middle-aged attorney who had bounced around law firms in St. Louis, Ramsey had a habit of taking on down-and-out clients. This wasn’t great for his bottom line, but something about their plight would speak to Ramsey’s sense of injustice; he’d spent years toiling on these special projects, trying to prove to himself and the courts that his client had gotten a raw deal. Whiteside had come to know Ramsey through a shared hatred of domestic abuse. One of Whiteside’s pet issues in his capacity as a representative was working to free Missouri women who’d been imprisoned after killing their abusive husbands or boyfriends. With frustrating frequency, judges in Missouri rejected the argument that women who’d spent months or years being punched, kicked, slapped, or otherwise physically tormented by their abusive significant others were acting in self-defense when they killed the men who hurt them. Ramsey had taken on a few of these women as clients, one of whom he hoped to free by winning her clemency from the governor. As determined as he was persistent, even when the chances of a successful outcome were slim, he’d set off on a three-day walk along a 130-mile route from St. Louis to the capitol building in Jefferson City to drum up publicity for his client. Though his cross-state pilgrimage was a bust, the effort convinced Whiteside of Ramsey’s extraordinary commitment to his clients. It was then that Whiteside called Ramsey to ask if he would represent the son of a family from his hometown of Chillicothe, a young man who Whiteside believed had been set up as the killer. Whiteside, however, struggled to instill the same belief about Woodworth’s innocence in Ramsey, who was more than a little dubious. The Woodworths were good people in need of someone who could help them, Whiteside told Ramsey, all but begging him to just give the case a look. At least meet with Mark in prison before you say no, Whiteside pleaded. This wasn’t a good time for Ramsey to take on more long-shot cases. He and his wife, a trauma nurse, were raising two teenage children in their modest suburban home outside St. Louis, and expensive college tuitions were on the horizon. But Ramsey agreed to give Mark a chance. * As he sat across from Mark under the sterile fluorescents of the Crossroads Correctional visiting room, with guards watching closely, it had taken Ramsey all of about ten minutes to intuit that Mark was not a killer. The possibility then that Mark was an innocent young man spending his life in prison ignited a deep sense of injustice in Ramsey. “How could you know that?” I asked Ramsey. We were in his office in a small brick building along a strip of fast-food restaurants and office parks that sprawled east from St. Louis over the border into Illinois. “You haven’t met him yet?” Ramsey asked. I hadn’t. It was August 2013, and after landing in St. Louis, I’d picked up my rental from Hertz and stopped by Ramsey’s place before making the four-hour drive west. I’d heard about the case from a source on an unrelated assignment earlier in the year and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Despite the rap on Mark as an outcast turned stone- cold gunman, he didn’t have any history of violence, and as the local who tipped me off to the case explained, those who’d known Mark had considered him a quiet, even gentle, kid—at least until the shooting took place. He was the son and grandson of farmers on both his mother’s and father’s sides, and as the eldest of seven children he stood to lead his siblings in eventually taking over the family farm. In news coverage of the case, Woodworth supporters said that all the boy ever wanted to do was be a farmer like his father. So what exactly happened to Mark, then, to make him turn away from the path that had been laid out for him, eschewing the traditions and livelihood that were his inheritance? And what was it that had Ramsey so convinced that Mark was innocent? How could he maintain such a high level of confidence when two juries unanimously voted the other way? “Well, when you do meet him, I think you’ll know what I mean,” Ramsey told me. What I wanted to know from Ramsey, though, was how he’d come to take on this case at all. The idea that Mark didn’t seem violent, I said, didn’t necessarily matter in light of the two juries who felt otherwise. What was it that convinced him this was a client who was worth the trouble? Ramsey took a second to think it over. At sixty-five, he was tall and well nourished, with a round belly and broad shoulders. His neatly trimmed goatee was the same gray as his dense head of hair. He wore silver wire-rimmed glasses. He hadn’t been in this particular office all that long; it was just another workspace he’d taken up since leaving his previous firm after butting heads with the owner over how he ran the practice. Grabbing this desk in the office of an old friend, Ramsey had brought along his diplomas and a landscape print of a golf course, which now hung on the walls slightly askew. All the flat surfaces were covered with piles of court documents and legal pads flipped to pages filled with dense cursive scribbles. Bankers boxes around the edge of the room were stuffed with papers so thickly annotated with sticky notes they resembled planters of exotic yellow flowers. Ramsey had been grinding away on the Woodworth case for well over a decade, and it had become a full-blown obsession. “Well, the funny thing about that is, it wasn’t any single thing,” he said. “Every part of this case smelled like a skunk from the beginning.” He recalled that, after he met Mark, the family put him in touch with a group of a dozen or so locals in Chillicothe who’d formed the Concerned Citizens for Justice for Mark Woodworth. While the Robertsons and many in Chillicothe took Mark’s life sentences as proof of a functional justice system, a small but zealous contingent felt otherwise. They’d held fundraisers over the years, accumulating enough money to offer a $153,000 reward for information that would lead to the “arrest and conviction of the persons responsible for the death of Catherine Robertson,” as one of their bake-sale posters put it. It was strange that the neighbors in such a small community, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, would so adamantly disagree about who had killed one of their own. When Ramsey went to the courthouse and asked the clerk to pull the grand jury transcript file, the clerk had given him a folder with almost nothing in it. There were just a few pages containing the opening remarks that the judge, Ken Lewis, had made at Mark’s hearing—a long, stinging monologue chastising the county prosecutor, who, for reasons unspecified, had recused himself from the case. Judge Lewis told the grand jury how grateful he was that the Missouri attorney general, the state’s highest-ranking law enforcement official, had gone to the trouble to travel up north from the capital to this small farming outpost to see about Mark’s day in court. What he was doing in Chillicothe, and why this little speech was preserved in the court files, remained a mystery. Standing with me outside his office building in the bright, warm August sun, Ramsey smoked a cigarette and lamented that, ever since a pair of back surgeries, he couldn’t keep up his daily training in aikido, the Japanese martial art. He’d traveled all over the country for aikido retreats and studied the philosophy underlying the practice with an intensity he otherwise reserved for trial preparation. Over the years, Ramsey has implemented some of the aikido principles into his legal practice. “Calmness in action,” he said. “You try to do this without escalating the conflict, without inflicting unnecessary pain on your attacker. It’s based on the old samurai code of a spirit of love and protection of all living things. “It’s all there, downstairs,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “The case squad binders, all of it. You’re free to look at whatever I have.” We went into the lower level of the office, where a conference table was flanked by shelves of bankers boxes jammed with papers from the Woodworth case. It wasn’t possible to guess how many individual pages were in the files. It was many thousands, and a daunting portion of it wasn’t labeled. Ramsey was Mark’s fifth attorney, and he had inherited documents from everyone who had worked on the case before him; then he spent a decade adding his own massive haul of collected materials. Somewhere, I thought I might find the point of origin, of where this case really began—and then perhaps I’d get a sense of what the police had found, and as Ramsey suggested, what they had missed. “It’ll take a while,” Ramsey said, stacking a pile of folders in front of me before he headed upstairs to take a phone call. “But I bet you’re gonna find what you’re looking for.” ___________________________________ From The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided by Sean Patrick Cooper, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. © 2024 by Sean Patrick Cooper. View the full article -
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The Act of Story Statement: Catherine, captain of a secret supernatural order, must defy divine authority and partner with an unknowing human to save Santa Ana Island - and the world - from the effects of climate change.
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