Short Story Prowess: EQMM Sept-Oct 2024

Posted on by

Last week’s post about what to look for in a short story received a lot of likes, and reading the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine offers the opportunity to put those insights to the test. And, the competition was fierce. Here’s what the panel of experts said they (and editors) look for in a good short story.

  1. It needs a point – Andrew Walsh-Huggins’s story, “Through Thick and Thin” is a testament to the wisdom in the old saying, “let the dead past bury its dead.” It’s also a reminder of a point you can’t help but notice nearly every time you watch a television mystery show: If people didn’t keep secrets, they’d have a lot fewer problems!
  2. A strong ending – Kai Lovelace’s tale, “Head Start,” in the Department of First Stories, had a powerhouse ending because it was so unexpected. Based on the fourth-grade memories of the narrator, it focuses on his delight in Halloween, and, true to his age-appropriate sensibilities, the gorier the better. It’s one of several spooky stories in this volume, a bow to the season.
  3. Believability –Extra credit to Kate Hold for the mid-century Los Angeles she created in her delightful story “Rosabelle.” You don’t actually have to believe in ghosts to believe in her narrator and the venality of her landlady, a fortune-teller named Madame Zelda.
  4. Strong characters, right from the get-go. EQMM offers numerous candidates, but I’d choose the boy who narrates “The Phantom of the Concourse Plaza” by Jerome Charyn, whose story starts, “I was nine years old, and I lived at the Concourse Plaza with Nick Etten and eleven other New York Yankees, most of them scrubs like Hersh Martin and Don Savage, who would disappear from baseball once the war was over.” A good example of how specific detail adds to believability. You can’t fault the crime fiction awardee giving her acceptance speech in “[The Applause Dies]” by Lori Rader-Day, either.
  5. Fact based? The facts have to be right. This is one of those good-writing principles that you don’t notice until it’s violated, or some stray fact dings believability, and I have to say, from that perspective, all the stories I read were believable, or mostly so (allowances for the Halloween influence). Quite a lot of facts, fitted together so nicely that I believed them all, were in Pat Black’s “Cadere ex Stellae.” (“Fall from the Stars”—I looked it up).
Milky Way, night sky
The Milky Way (photo: Forest Wander, Creative Commons license)

Correction Line

Posted on by

Craig Terlson’s crime thriller, Correction Line, underscores how badly off track people can become if they just keep doing what they’re doing. Surveyors learned this in a late-1800s project to survey the vast prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba and divide them into equal sections. They soon realized the longitudinal (north-south) meridians they established would converge as they reached higher latitudes, so that truly square sections would be impossible to achieve. They needed correction lines.

Just as the survey’s meridian lines met at a single point, the characters in Terlson’s story converge on a destructive human nexus named Dave. Like a black hole, he draws people and their energy to him. Being involved with Dave is extremely risky business. His career has gone from bringing in liquor, to marijuana, to hard drugs, to human trafficking. Dave doesn’t appear all that much in the story, yet he is everywhere in it. He’s the motivating force behind almost everything Terlson’s fascinating cast of characters does.

Terlson uses the wide open prairie of western Canada to great effect, as the characters range over its empty spaces in their pickup trucks and old Dodges and Pontiacs. Much of the novel is set several decades ago, and the gas-guzzlers cruise the surveyors’ grid and take the gentle curves—the correction lines—that adjust the strict geometry. He describes the stunning sunrises, the farm fields and grasslands that stretch to the horizon, and the lonely dwellings. When it seems you can see forever, the sky becomes more present. Terlson’s descriptions are more than painting pretty pictures. You need this solid grounding in the familiar, because what the characters are up to will stretch your perspective.

A young woman named Lucy has a past relationship with Dave, but she’s disappeared. Now he has cancer, and he wants her back. Alive. Lucy’s late mother made a strange potion he thinks will cure him, and Lucy makes something similar, but does it work? Dave puts his best man, Lawrence, on the job, and Lawrence recruits the rootless Curtis to help him search.

Whether she can replicate her mother’s strange mixture or not, her real talent is precognition. Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what bad thing is going to happen, but she knows something bad is heading her way. And it isn’t Roy, the failing door-to-door encyclopedia salesman who’s taken up with her.

Roy is a good guy in way over his head, with the opportunity to do something worthwhile for a change. He also has a sixth sense when trouble is brewing. Of course, this realization isn’t much of a stretch, when violent armed men are lurking about. Houses get destroyed. Cars, even big ones, don’t have a chance. Hospitals are visited. Much of the drama plays out along the roads surrounded by those endless fields, and, as you gradually get to know these dodgy characters, you come to like most of them too. You may yearn for their travels to make the slight angle of correction that would bend their lives in new directions—somewhere Dave is not.

Order from Amazon here.

Going to the Dogs

Posted on by

Interested in how police and emergency service dogs are trained and used? Lots of readers are, and mystery/crime authors often want to include service dogs in their stories, but accurately. Members of the Public Safety Writers Association got a close look at that corner of the world last Saturday from organization Vice-President Steve Ditmars. Ditmars worked many years as a police service dog handler and K-9 Unit supervisor for the Long Beach (Calif.) Police Department and gave a jam-packed Zoom program on the topic.

His first piece of advice was to find out what the policies and procedures are in the locale where you’re writing about, if it’s a real place, in the time period of your fiction. Ways of handling and using dogs vary by jurisdiction, he explained, and these practices change a lot too. If the locale is totally fictional, you have more leeway.

The training process for a police service dog is extensive, but the risk here, he said, is to get so caught up in it, you give Too Much Information. Ditmars has skirted such pitfalls very well in his own books—Big Dogs, Gasping for Air, and a third (coming soon). He finds adding canine characters helps him tell a story, because they enable a variety of perspectives and events. For example, the way someone handles or react to a dog can reveal key aspects of that person’s character.

And, of course, he cautioned authors to be mindful about what happens to the dog. Many readers have a soft spot for Man’s Best Friend, especially when they’ve shown heroism, loyalty, and discipline. You can write a gritty thriller where human lives come to a bad end, but if the dog doesn’t survive the last chapter, you’ll get pushback.

Dogs can be trained to take on many different roles: search and rescue, personal protection, patrol, tracking and trailing people, finding things (narcotics, cadavers, explosives, gas leaks, even from buried pipes). Each of these roles has a different training regimen and relies on dogs’ acute senses of smell and hearing. Ditmars said they are better than humans at pinpointing where a sound is coming from.

Public safety personnel like to use dogs for certain jobs, because it saves time, in, say, searching an area or building. They can be trained to guard suspects until their handler arrives. The threat of a bite is sometimes enough to keep the suspect in place. Dogs are good for departmental public relations too, at open houses and other public events.

Just as new parents “suddenly” notice how many baby products are out there, in a few days after hearing this excellent presentation, I read two stories in which dogs played a role. They were: Doug Crandell’s lively story “Bad Hydrous” in the Sep/Oct 2024 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”

Thanks, Steve, for this literary heads up!
Read more about Steve here.

Meet Author Laura van den Berg

Posted on by

The interviews the late lamented Glimmer Train magazine published are a fine source of information on authors beyond, say, John Grisham and Lucy Foley. The mag’s interview with Laura van den Berg was published in 2012—a dozen years ago. Accomplished as she was at that time, she’s done even more now! Then, she was “working on” a novel (isn’t everyone?), but now she’s published three: State of Paradise, The Third Hotel, and Find Me, plus four collections of short stories, including the one with my favorite title, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. All the while, she’s been racking up the prizes. (Van den Berg’s website here.)

Her newest novel, State of Paradise, was published only two months ago and deemed a “most anticipated book” by a great many review publications. NPR said it was “at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida’s psychogeography,” and if you know very much about Florida, van den Berg’s home state, you’ll know what a deep and complex subject that can be. “So many worlds,” she says.

In the interview, she talks about the attraction of Gatorland, where people wrestle alligators, which reminded me of Karen Russell’s 2011 Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist about an entire family of Florida alligator wrestlers. Not recommended bedtime reading. “And many other parts of the state are just as strange,” van den Berg says.

Unlike so many authors, van den Berg didn’t start out to be a writer. She wanted to be a psychology major but ran into a major stumbling block: math. As a person who used to sleep with her statistics book under her pillow in case some insight would crawl out of it and into my head during the night, I can relate. What turned her attention to the possibilities of writing was discovering contemporary literature—not the classics.

Part of her learning to write fiction was to learn how not to be “willfully strange.” When her stories have strangeness in them, as they often do, it must “have roots in the characters’ lives” and not feel as if she is “imposing strangeness on them.” Certainly in writing mystery and suspense stories, events, however untoward, should not feel arbitrary or conceived merely to move the plot along. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking a particular character wouldn’t act as the story describes, you may have encountered something “willfully strange.”

Twelve years ago, van den Berg explained her attraction to magical realism themes, “monsters and myths,” as due in part to Florida’s influence. In addition, she says, “there’s so much about the world, so much mystery, that I would never understand,” that may be better described or appreciated through a totally different perspective. Her view was prescient, given the popularity of paranormal themes in fiction today. Recent crime novels with neurodivergent protagonists—Nita Prose’s The Maid, Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond, or Tim Sullivan’s Detective George Cross come to mind—may be another manifestation of shifted perspective.

Part of the pleasure of reading van den Berg’s work or that of the other authors I mentioned is sorting out what’s real and what isn’t. These alternative realities, like belief in the Loch Ness Monster or the power of wishes, are both “beautiful and terrifying,” she says, because in a way, “it’s easier to not believe in things.” And, “There’s a beauty to people who do live in the world with imagination, and who embrace the mystery of the world at large.”

Take it from me, it’s possible to love such flights of imagination and the cut-and-dried world of “just the facts, ma’am” police procedurals at the same time.More Recommended Florida Reading:
Swamplandia!by Karen RussellNaked Came the Florida Manby Tim Dorsey – irrepressible craziness

Dark Streets and Dark Deeds

Posted on by

The last two films in our class on neo-noir were A Simple Plan and the remake of the classic noir, Nightmare Alley (which I’d seen in a movie theater and was NOT looking forward to!).

A Simple Plan
I guess we should have learned from previously seeing the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple that, when it comes to murderous intent, nothing is simple. And it sure isn’t in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, written by Scott B. Smith, author of the novel the film is based on (trailer).

Straight-arrow Hank Mitchell (played by Bill Paxton), his slower-witted brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and Jacob’s friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) discover a small plane that has crashed in the snowy woods of rural Minnesota. They check on the pilot, who’s dead, of course, and discover a duffel stuffed with more than $4 million. Whose is it? What to do with it?

As you will anticipate, this stash brings out all the characters’ worst instincts. Even Hank and his wife (Bridget Fonda in her last film before retiring from the screen), who start out wanting to be on the up-and-up, are at risk of succumbing to the lure of unexpected wealth. This makes the film on one hand an exploration of ethical behavior and on another a thriller full of menace and surprise. While I couldn’t warm up to any of the characters, Thornton’s performance alone makes it worth a viewing

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 90%; audiences: 81%.

Nightmare Alley
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2021 remake of the 1947 noir classic, which starred Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, and Colleen Gray, was the sixth and final film in our neo-noir class (trailer). The acting in the new version can’t be faulted, with stars Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett [wearing a LOT of red lipstick], Toni Collette, and Rooney Mara, along with Willem Dafoe, David Strathairn, and Richard Jenkins. They all do a great job.

\Cooper plays charming, ambitious Stanton Carlisle, who’s apparently just killed his father and is looking for a fresh start in life. He finds work doing odd jobs for a seedy traveling carnival. The movie is set in 1939, and the carnival includes all the cheesy acts and mysterious biological specimens in jars that you can imagine.

Carlisle observes the system that the show’s mentalist uses to “read the minds” of the patrons and eventually goes on the road with his partner Molly to do the same work wearing a tuxedo at high-class nightclubs. Disaster is inevitable.

The remake (2h, 30 m) adds all the content about the father, whereas the 1947 version (1h, 51m) added an upbeat closing scene to assuage producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s concerns about commercial potential. Both versions were based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 80%; audiences 68%.

Our Class
The neo-noir film class was a Princeton Adult School program, taught by Mark Schwartzberg, who holds a PhD in English literature from NYU, and much of his research has been in film studies. He’s taught at the high school and college levels in New York and New Jersey, and many film classes at the Adult School. His—and several of our fellow students’—knowledge about film, including the gossipy bits, is encyclopedic. A real pleasure!

The Missing Family

Posted on by

The Missing Family is the latest in Tim Weaver’s popular series of thrillers featuring missing-persons investigator David Raker. Here, Weaver presents an impossible crime, the unexpected tentacles of which stretch clear from England across the Atlantic to the North American continent.

Sarah Fowler hires Raker to solve the mysterious disappearance of her family a year earlier. After a day at a favorite Dartmoor lake, her husband, teenage son, and his girlfriend row the family’s twenty-foot dinghy out onto the water one last time. Drowsy from the sun, Sarah briefly falls asleep—her wristwatch confirms she napped for no more than a minute or two—until her toddler, Mable, awakens her. Halfway across the lake, the dinghy bobs, empty. The police are baffled. The boat’s too far out for the trio to have swum to shore in the available time, not to mention the girlfriend’s arm was in a cast. They find no evidence of violence and have no witnesses.

You don’t stay with the grieving Sarah long, though. In Los Angeles, detectives from two different departments—eventually three jurisdictions—are baffled by a trio of shootings. Five bodies, killed by bullets typically used in hunting rifles, are found in remote areas. Far apart, there’s nothing to link them, and they continue for years as separate cold cases.

In yet a third plotline, at a massive London-area casino resort, the Skyline, a high-rolling gambler and casino investor is viciously stabbed to death. He and the two brothers who own the casino have been best friends for years. Despite the owners’ determination to find the murderer, security camera footage of the victim in the frequent company of another man is notably—possibly suspiciously—uninformative. Who was this stranger?

The brothers also own the world’s largest casino, The Afrique, in Las Vegas. (Coincidentally, I was at a conference in Las Vegas while reading this book, which was almost too much verisimilitude!) Weaver certainly captures the over-the-top, mildly uneasy, anything-can-happen casino buzz.

The suspected murderer returns to the Skyline, is identified (facial recognition software at work), detained, and put in one of the casino’s secure holding cells under guard. When the police arrive to arrest him, the locked cell is empty. It’s another missing person case, which cries out for Raker’s assistance. Raker’s investigations—the missing family and the casino murder and disappearance—work in tandem, while you learn about the West Coast murders through the eyes of the California detectives. A lot is going on. You may suspect that all three plot lines will eventually weave together, but how?

Though the plot is complex, Weaver’s chapters are short and keep things moving. Sometimes he tries a little too hard to end each chapter with a startling revelation, just before the next chapter switches to another plot. That said, you’ll encounter quite a few nifty surprises.

The book is written in both first-person (the Raker chapters) and third-person (all the others), which effectively provides immediacy from the lead detective, plus the differing points of view and voices of other characters. It’s never confusing. Overall, an entertaining puzzle.

Order here from Amazon.

Sense and Sensibility: See it!

Posted on by

Congratulate The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey for producing a version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility that lives up to its title! It showcases both a fine theatrical sense and the complicated interpersonal sensibilities of the classic story. Adapted by British playwright, theatre director, and screenwriter Jessica Swale and directed for STNJ by Nisi Sturgis, it opened September 7 and closes September 22.

It’s in 1797 England that we find the Dashwood family, comprising a widow (played by Lynette R. Freeman) and her three daughters—Elinor (Mandi Masden), a model of good sense, Marianne of heightened feelings (Billie Wyatt), and inquisitive, adolescent Margaret (Terra Chaney). A conniving sister-in-law (Kayla Ryan Walsh) deprives them of their inheritance, and they must retire to a modest country life. The two older girls are of marriageable age, and Elinor falls for Edward Ferrars (Patrick Andrew Jones), previously engaged in secret and seemingly unattainable; Marianne falls for the dashing Willoughby (Christian Frost) who returns her affection, and she is also adored by mature, reliable—and therefore unappealing—Colonel Brandon (Sean Mahan).

That group of actors makes up most of the cast, except for utility infielder Patrick Toon, who appears in many guises and has dozens of offstage costume changes, portraying each character to perfection. In fact, except for the two older sisters (Masden and Wyatt), all cast members play multiple roles, including that of stagehand. It was a particular pleasure to see Chaney move so convincingly from little sister and budding naturalist to sly fiancée to a street gossip. These multiple personas all work, except when Mrs. Dashwood reappears as Willoughby’s fiancée. The age difference was insurmountable, but all the other female cast members were otherwise engaged, one might say. Masden and Wyatt’s strong performances make you yearn for the happiness of these young women. Lovely costumes too, thanks to Sophie S. Schneider.

Swale’s adaptation is faithful to the novel and some of the judicious cuts Emma Thompson made for the 1995 screenplay. Fidelity to material and memory produces deep associations, even if act one does become rather long. The versatile set by Brittany Vasta nicely accommodates, with some well-choreographed rearrangements of furniture, the various houses, rooms, and outdoor settings where the story takes place, leaving much to the imagination except for lovely verdure.

Austen’s works, including this one, continue to capture audiences by their fundamental emotional truths. The characters in Sense and Sensibility are trapped in the conventions of their time—women didn’t work or inherit, honorable men lived up to their marital commitments—yet most find their way to happiness in ways that satisfy them and the audiences of today. Modern constraints may be different, but they nevertheless exist. STNJ productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

Keep Them in Suspense

Posted on by

What is suspense? In the world of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction, it can seem like an all-purpose label for books that don’t fit the other, increasingly blurry categories. Know who the villain is?—not a mystery. Single narrator?—not a typical thriller. Bad things happening but not, technically, crimes?—not crime fiction. Occasionally, I’ve had to justify reviewing a book for the UK website CrimeFictionLover.com by saying something like “if you think it’s a crime for governments to deceive their citizens…” Not everything that’s a crime, writ large, is illegal. Just ask the fake news purveyors.

A few months ago Kathryn Schulz wrote an interesting New Yorker piece on suspense. “Like a lot of fun things,” she wrote, “suspense has a bad reputation,” and its detractors think of it as just a cheap trick to entertain “the masses” (like me!). A hundred-fifty years ago, when detective novels and mystery stories began to appear, they were criticized for merely appealing to curiosity, rather than offering nobler forms of fulfillment or ethical example.

I’ve been rereading Sherlock Holmes (complete works, 2 volumes, I’m on page 1052). It turns out The Great Detective provides not only suspense, but many ethical examples. Working outside the law enforcement apparatus, he relies on his personal sense of justice. And it doesn’t always entail turning a perpetrator over to the police, though in other situations, he does so gleefully.

The critiques are also misapplied, Schulz said, because almost every form of writing—excepting, she says, telephone directories and instruction manuals—makes use of suspense to captivate its readers. (I might disagree with her here, given some of the highly mysterious instruction manuals I’ve encountered for electronics manufactured abroad.) Shakespeare certainly deployed suspense to great effect. Will Othello kill Desdemona? Will Macbeth evade justice for slaying Duncan? Will Hamlet follow the order given by his father’s ghost? The late thriller writer Henning Mankell once said, “Every good story has a mystery in it.” I use that truism as the epigram for my own website.

Today’s descendants of the critics whose noses turned up at suspense 150 years ago today cluck over “genre fiction”—you know what that is. Mystery, romance, science fiction—in other words, the kinds of books people like to read. E.M. Forster, in noting that every fictional work must be built around a story, said that for a story to be effective, it must make readers want to know “what happens next.” That is, suspense.

While it might seem that withholding information is the key to creating suspense, Schulz points out that suspense also requires sharing information. A reader may not know what’s behind that door, but the writer has implied there are dark doings somewhere in the house; has shown the little boy’s fear; has made the rusty door handle hard to turn, but turn it he does … ever … so … slowly.

She cites Alfred Hitchcock’s example of a bomb going off in a crowded theater. The reader (or filmgoer) can know the bomb is there in advance, or not. How much more scary is it to know that the bomb is ticking away, while people blithely munch popcorn than it is to have a sudden loud Boom! and a lot of flying body parts and settling dust? Even knowing what will happen, we can feel excruciating suspense.

An excellent example of this is the new novel by Robert Harris, Precipice, set in 1914 on the very eve of World War I. He presents, verbatim, some of the hundreds [!] of love-letters UK Prime Minister H.H. Asquith wrote to young Venetia Stanley. Asquith hears the saber-rattling on the Continent, reads the desperate telegrams from diplomats in Russia and France, but can’t be distracted from his obsessive correspondence. Meanwhile, I was tearing my hair out! Because of the extreme suspense, waiting for the worst to happen, this book was one of the most gripping I’ve ever read (my review coming soon). I hope you wait for it with suspense—of the anticipation variety, not the dread kind.

Short Story Essentials

Posted on by
reading, apple

Almost a year ago—how time flies!—the Central Virginia Chapter of Sisters in Crime organized a Zoom workshop on the ingredients of a great short story. They assembled a fine panel of presenters, too—Michael Bracken (well over a thousand short stories under his belt), Barb Goffman (recent winner of the Lifetime Achievement award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society), K.L. Murphy (Virginia native, novelist, and short story author) and Josh Pachter (not only a prolific writer—first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine at age 16—and anthology editor, but also an expert translator of others’ fiction).

In the piles of notes from the various seminars I Zoom in on are many intriguing insights. They often help me crystallize my own thoughts on a topic and, eventually, maybe, lead to a blog post for you. Here’s what I took away from this estimable group.

Among the most important things that a short story needs:

  • It needs a point. That’s what convinces readers the story was worth it; short stories that aspire to being literary often miss this, obscuring their vague purpose in high-flying prose. If you read the masters, like Chekhov and Gogol, the point is not only present, it’s significant. Yet it needn’t hit you over the head. It’s intrinsic. As George Saunders says, “I want my stories to move and change someone as much as these Russian stories have moved and changed me.” Dry, meandering modern stories will never achieve either impact or staying power.
  • It needs a strong ending, Goffman emphasized, which is what makes the point clear—again, even if not stated in so many words (actually, preferably if not spelled out). Trust your reader.
  • It needs believability. Even if it’s fantasy or about alien worlds, there must be a core of truth that the reader can invest in.
  • It needs strong characters, “right from the beginning,” said Murphy. She wants them to draw her in. Here’s an example: “‘Tell me the truth,’ Ruthie Ford said. ‘Why exactly did you come here?’” from John Floyd’s terrific story “Moonshine and Roses” in the Jul/Aug 2024 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. You know something—something interesting—about both these characters in just those first lines.

When selected stories for an anthology, Pachter looks for reliable writers, ones who’ve withstood, as he said, “the test of time,” which I’m guessing in part reflects writers who follow guidelines, who can meet a deadline, who won’t send in a too-early draft that will require a lot of editing. Such problems can hold up an entire project. An anthology is a collaboration among points of view, but the editor has the Master POV, the overall conception of the project, so Pachter also looks for authors who are willing to be edited, or, as Goffman put it, who will “work with me.”

If there’s fact-based information, Pachter added, the author needs to get it right. I’ve read a two stories very recently (novels, actually), where the author didn’t seem to have a good handle on the world. I referred to one of them in a post yesterday about the top temperature humans can survive at. In another, a character was bragging about her 14-carat diamond engagement ring. Whoa. That would be heavy! Not something you would/could wear every day.

Asked to suggest a memorable short story, Murphy mentioned Goffman’s “Dear Emily Etiquette,” which is one of my favorites too. It appeared in the Sep/Oct 2020 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, winning the Agatha Award as well as the magazine’s annual Reader Award. Pachter is a fan of Stanley Ellin’s “The Specialty of the House,” which appeared in EQMM in 1948; you may remember the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television version from 1959. Bracken recommends John M. Floyd’s well-plotted stories: “twist, twist, twist,” he said. And Goffman is a fan of John Connolly’s “The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository” (2013), which won both Edgar and Anthony Awards.

For more, see the authors’ websites:
Michael Bracken
Barb Goffman
K.L. Murphy
Josh Pachter

Imaginations on Fire

Posted on by

As news of the Southern California Line Fire explodes, another in a long line of catastrophes, authors have taken note. Fire’s destructiveness reveals heroism, and can equally well hide dastardly deeds. These thrillers have some strong points, and I also recommend the nonfiction Fire Weather by John Vaillant. You’ll discover real-life heroes (and villains) and understand fire’s dangers much better.

What Fire Brings
From the first pages of Rachel Howzell Hall’s new psychological thriller, What Fire Brings, Bailey Meadows’s situation is fraught with deception. This young Black woman has finagled a writing internship with noted thriller author Jack Beckham, but she isn’t a writer. She’s secretly working toward obtaining her private investigator’s license, and wants to use this opportunity to find out what happened to a woman who disappeared near Beckham’s Topanga Canyon property.

Topanga is a famously bohemian community west of Los Angeles whose hilly terrain and dense tree cover make it seem remote and wild. Thanks to Hall’s deft descriptions, the Canyon, with its one road in and one road out, becomes another potentially dangerous character here.

The story is told entirely from Bailey’s point of view. If you’ve read other works by Howzell, notably her debut, Land of Shadows, you won’t be surprised her narrative reads as if she is in an existential crisis. Living in two worlds makes her easily distracted—not the best headspace for conducting an investigation.

On a hike in the canyon, she sees a fire in the distance—too far away to pose any risk to the Beckham property, or is it? I read an advance reader copy of this book, which was labelled an ‘uncorrected proof.’ Typos will (presumably) be caught, and other changes may be made. However, when Bailey asks the fire chief about the maximum temperature a human body can tolerate, and he says 250 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s so wrong, I thought it was another intentional deception. The human body is about 60 percent water, which boils at 212 degrees F. Then he says higher temperatures are survivable “if there’s water around.” Water (humidity) actually worsens heat’s effects of heat on the body. This apparent slip-up is much more than a cosmetic problem, it affected my understanding of the plot.

That stumble aside, when you finally understand the whole of Bailey’s predicament, you may, like me, be struck by Hall’s accomplishment here. She turns the tables on some issues I didn’t realize were actually on the table. Despite Bailey’s annoying dithering, and the unanswered story questions (like, who was that old lady?), What Fire Brings is an exciting and memorable read.

Into the Flames
James Delargy’s incendiary new crime thriller, Into the Flames, like his previous two, is set in wildfire-prone rural southeastern Australia. Former Sydney police Detective Alex Kennard is making a heroic effort to reach the hilltop home of a missing artist—Tracy Hilmeyer—on one of the most threatened blocks in the rapidly burning fictional town of Rislake.

The superheated road surface pulls away as the tires of his commandeered Personnel Carrier labor up to the Hilmeyer house. Kennard doesn’t expect to find much at the house, certainly not what he does find—Tracy’s dead body, lying in a pool of blood. It takes superhuman cajoling to persuade the firefighters to concentrate on saving this one structure—now a crime scene—and to get the necessary investigating officers up the hill to the endangered dwelling. All the usual trappings of a murder investigation are here—coroner’s reports, paper trails, motor vehicle searches, warrants, interviews, development of suspects—all of which takes place amid an utter catastrophe.

Author Delargy is good at developing a complicated plot, red herrings and all. And, if you like a flat-out adventure, the story moves quickly from one event to the next. His writing style doesn’t lend itself to much character development, and he tends to tell you what his characters are feeling, rather than convey their motivations through more subtler means. As a result, I didn’t become really attached to any of them and to outright dislike a few.

What I did like was the dramatic set-up. The increasing number of devastating real-life wildfires around the world are a growing menace, and a story like this one vividly brings home the kinds of perils that such tragedies pose.

Order from Amazon here:
What Fire Brings
Into the Flames
As an Amazon Associate, I receive a small payment for books ordered through this site. Thank you!