Category Archives: Journalism

What is Murder?

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England, Wales, and Northern Ireland have abolished this law. It’s been deemed unconstitutional in Canada, as breaching the principles of fundamental justice. Yet the United States still has it—at the federal level and in most states—and no other country relies on it more. Hawai`i, Michigan, and Kentucky are the only states to have abolished it. A few states are pulling back, but others still may impose the death penalty for it. And still others are trying to expand its scope.

Most Americans are unaware of this law, despite its draconian legal consequences. That includes most of the people charged under it.

As a writer of mystery and crime fiction, I see considerable opportunities for drama inherent in the “felony murder rule,” which punishes people for killings they didn’t actually commit. When a murder occurs during the commission of certain crimes (possibly kidnapping, robbery, rape, arson), not only are the main perpetrators held responsible, but also their accomplices, co-conspirators, or marginal participants. They can be convicted of murder, even if there was no intent to harm any victims.

In a recent New Yorker article, award-winning university professor, journalist, and MacArthur Fellow Sarah Stillman compiled a review of how a law like this can go wrong. Her article on felony murder garnered her a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and is well worth a read in its entirety to unpack some of the complications and nuance.

Although you can imagine scenarios where more than one person is culpable in a murder case, Stillman provides some telling examples of when it hasn’t worked that way:

  • In Florida, Sadik Baxter was searching parked cars for cash, caught, handcuffed, and placed in a police car. His friend driving their car fled the scene, chased by the police. When he lost control, he killed two bicyclists. Both men were charged with felony murder. Read more here. Twelve years later, Sadik’s life sentence without parole is still under appeal.
  • Two men trying to steal copper wire from a Tulsa-area radio station tower electrocuted themselves. One died. Recovering from his burns in a hospital, the other man was charged with first-degree murder, as was the dead man’s girlfriend who was their driver.
  • Three teenage girls in Tennessee overdosed on fentanyl before their high school graduation ceremony; two died, the third was charged with murder.
  • Five Alabama youths were breaking into unoccupied houses; the police arrived, and one of the boys who had a gun was shot and killed by an officer. Three of the other boys pled down the felony murder charge, but LaKeith Smith insisted on a trial. His sentence was 65 years, reduced to 55, and most recently reduced to 30 years. Read more here.
  • Two young Minneapolis women are serving time after a man they had just met killed a drug dealer. They may be eligible for release after the Minnesota legislature last November revised its felony murder law retroactively to consider intent. Fully one-third of Minnesota prisoners serving time for murder had felony murder convictions. Read more here.

While authorities hope the felony murder rule will deter inherently dangerous crimes from occurring, given that most people don’t even know about it, its deterrent effect is questionable. Victims’ families themselves have protested the law’s unfair application. But prosecutors like it because, threatened with a first-degree murder conviction, those accused often plead guilty to a lesser charge or agree to testify against their confederates.

The full scope of the law’s impact is unknown, but unpublished state-level data suggest there have been more than 10,000 felony murder convictions nationwide.

Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff

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Weary of US politics? How about a peek at the way other countries handle political disputes? Argentina, for example. In this historical “true crime” novel by Argentine novelist and literature professor Elsa Drucaroff, translated from the Spanish by Slava Faybysh, fact and fiction overlap, reinforce, and illuminate each other.

In real life, as in the novel, Rodolfo Walsh was a well-known Argentinian writer of detective fiction and an investigative journalist. His career started in the politically tumultuous 1950s and continued for the two succeeding decades. He joined a militant underground group, the Montoneros, allied with the Peronists (“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”—that Peron family). The Montoneros appointed him their director of intelligence, and he was adept at ferreting out information to aid their cause. These activities and the militance of his daughter Maria Victoria (Vicki) made them regime targets. Walsh was eventually assassinated in 1977, the day after publishing his famously scathing Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta, criticizing its economic policies.

Drucaroff weaves her novel around these facts and a compelling “what if?” What if, using his skills as a writer of detective stories, Walsh investigated the disappearance of his 26-year-old daughter himself? She, along with four men, were involved in a shoot-out with army troops—tanks and helicopter included—but in Drucaroff’s story, he is tantalized by differing reports of the number of bodies removed from the building and whether the woman involved was still alive when she was taken away. He has to track down the facts.

You can see why Walsh might want to shift his interest away from the Montoneros, who are prone to lengthy debates on Marxist principles (I hadn’t heard the phrase “dialectical materialism” in, I don’t know, decades?), and engage in a little practical action.

There’s danger in the air, and Walsh and his key contacts go about their business in increasing peril. In politically fraught stories, peopled by spies and secret police, you can never be absolutely sure which side a character is on, and Drucaroff has some surprises in store.

Drucaroff writes in a particular style, providing limited visual description. To keep the story moving, she places greater reliance on the significance of interactions among characters and their dialog. And move it does. It’s written in short segments—sometimes only a page or two until the point of view changes. From the early political arguments, where the story stalls a bit, to its acceleration with her cinematic cutting back and forth, the pace soon hurtles toward its dramatic climax.

Not a must-read, but an interesting and memorable look at another corner of the world we hear relatively little about.

Broadcast Blues: New from Dick Belsky

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Now that we’ve reached the sixth in former New York City newsman Dick Belsky’s mystery series featuring Channel 10 News Director Clare Carlson, picking up Broadcast Blues is like a rendezvous with an old friend. Belsky is a former newspaperman, as was Clare before her paper folded, and both of them tend to look down just a wee bit on the sometimes dubious journalistic standards of their on-air colleagues.

Clare’s snarky, self-deprecating sense of humor isn’t universally appreciated around the newsroom, at least by her boss, but as a reader I love it! Even better, she immediately recognizes where a story lies, has a bulldog’s determination to get to the bottom of it, and a keen sense of how to tell it. All her nights out, morning coffee stops, minor deceptions, and manipulation of the information machine take place in a Manhattan that is quite obviously the author’s home turf. His New York, like his newsroom, is the real deal.

This story begins with a page from a diary written by former cop and now private detective Wendy Kyle: ‘If you’re reading this, I’m already dead,’ it says. In fact, Kyle is dead, victim of a bomb planted in her car and set to explode when she opened the door. But who’d want to silence her? Clare’s keen to find out.

Kyle left the NYPD on not the greatest terms, accusing her commanding officer of attempted sexual assault. The client list for her agency, Heartbreaker Investigations, is mainly women out to prove marital infidelity. Loaded with some of New York’s richest and most powerful men, that list might generate some suspects. But the police declare the case closed. They say Kyle was killed by her ex-husband who wrote a confessional note then conveniently committed suicide. Clare doesn’t buy it.

Channel 10 is up for sale, and who knows what new ownership may bring. Clare has always been the station’s news director as well as an on-air reporter who breaks some of its biggest stories. Her boss repeatedly tells her to drop the Wendy Kyle case and focus on her management job, especially at a time of organizational uncertainty. A protagonist who won’t back off is a standard trope in crime fiction, and when it comes to Clare Carlson, everything about her tells you she’ll stick with it, regardless.

On a personal level, Clare is nearing her fiftieth birthday (kudos to Belsky for not creating another thirty-year-old, size six protagonist) and tells everyone who’ll listen that she’s not at all fussed about that milestone, but she does keep bringing it up. The author has a way of devising a story that is engaging, believable, and moves forward at the rapid pace of the 24-hour news cycle, and his character Clare Carlson is unfailingly entertaining. Naturally, you want Clare to succeed here, not just for Wendy Kyle’s sake, but also because Clare’s dedication to getting the truth out is something that deserves to carry on. Another win for Belsky!

What’s Happening in Your Back Yard?

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Is your local newspaper thinner-than-ever? Is it mostly advertisements, and those mostly for health care? Does your local paper even still exist? More than 20 percent of US newspapers have closed their doors in the past decade.

We hear a lot about food deserts, but what about news deserts? The competing newspapers in large cities used to keep each other on their reportorial and editorial toes, but bigger cities today generally have only one daily paper—or none. Coverage of local issues has diminished. And, in truth, readership has declined sharply. That isn’t only because citizens (like me!) prefer to get at least some of their news online, but by publishers’ business decisions. National and international news comes from the wire services, local news is almost non-existent. One in five Americans lacks a source of local news.

A ray of hope, then, in the coalition of 22 charitable foundations that has made a five-year, $500 million commitment to an initiative called Press Forward to help news organizations report on their communities. The effort is spearheaded by the MacArthur Foundation, and its president, John Palfrey said that the country is losing a newspaper every week, and “It’s hard to have a democracy when you don’t have good local news. When you lose credible news sources, misinformation and disinformation swoop in.”

According to recent research from Northwestern University, communities that don’t have a strong print or digital news organization see declining voter participation and increasing corruption, due to the loss of the watchdog role.

The business case for local news will still be hard to implement successfully. Local media may be helped by proposal sin Congress and in seven states to give local news operations various tax credits and incentives, but innovative financing built on some mix of revenue sources will be needed and may not always succeed.

Popcorn Weekend: Living and Turn Every Page

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Two recent films that couldn’t be more different arrive at the same place. In both, men near the ends of their careers are determined to do the work necessary to leave behind something of importance. They prove that being a beautiful person is not age-related!

Living is a feature film, with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, directed by Oliver Hermanus (trailer). Rodney Williams, London bureaucrat in a do-nothing department, is portrayed by Bill Nighy. If you’re a Nighy fan like me, that’s all you need to know to want to see this film, but there are plenty of other reasons to do so. Given a fatal diagnosis, Williams is inspired to do something with his life, to leave behind something meaningful.

The film is more charming than sad, and pretty frustrating with its apt demonstration of how resistant to change bureaucracies are! Even so, it’s possible to make a positive difference in at least some people’s lives. Watch for the dinner scene in which Williams’s daughter-in-law desperately tries to signal her husband to confront his father about what she considers his questionable behavior.

The story closely follows that of a 1952 Japanese film, Ikuru, and you can see how its emphasis on conformity would work well in that culture.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 96%; audiences 86%.

Turn Every Page is a documentary that any historian or author or editor is bound to love (trailer). Subtitled The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, it tells the story of the half-century of collaboration between author Robert Caro—The Power Broker(now in its 17th printing) and the LBJ biographies, starting with The Path to Power—and his renowned editor, Robert Gottlieb. They were young men when they started; they’re elderly now, and this film about them is fascinating from beginning to end.

The film was made by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie, and she never puts a foot wrong. She brings in other voices, she takes a trip to Texas, she uses maps of New York City to show how Robert Moses’s massive public works projects shaped New York, and when she showed some of the famous books Gottlieb has edited, I sat there saying, “I read that. Read that. Yep. Another one.” In a classroom discussion of The Power Broker, a teacher says we can’t know whether New York would be a better place without Moses’s projects, but it definitely would be a different place.

After dwelling on Moses’s kind of power, Caro undertook a study of political power at the national level and chose Lyndon Baines Johnson as his exemplar. Because when doing his research he “turns every page,” he uncovered information about this period that was previously unknown, about which lesser writers might say, “We’ll never know whether . . .” Now, for better or worse, we do.

Caro takes a novelist’s interest in the impact the exercise of power had on people—from those in the way of one of Moses’s new expressways to the people who supported Johnson’s political wheeling and dealing. In one of the documentary’s more amusing moments, he and Gottlieb, preparing for a grueling day of editing, must scour the Knopf offices to come up with—a pencil.Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 96%; audiences 100%!

It’s News to Me by RG Belsky

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The fifth entry in former New York City newsman RG Belsky’s Clare Carlson series includes all the features his fans have come to appreciate—an interesting plot, brisk pacing, and, best of all, the self-deprecating wit and chutzpah of Clare herself.

In this story, Clare’s Manhattan newsroom is abuzz about the murder of Riley Hunt, a beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed college co-ed with everything going for her. Just the kind of ratings-bait television news loves to exploit. Clare herself is fully aware of the other tragedies, the other deaths that get shunted to the background in favor of those of “blonde white single female” victims, but ratings are ratings.

Clare began as a newspaper journalist and was probably always a cynical observer of the rush and foibles of New York life. When her newspaper folded, she took a job as news director at a local television station, and she can’t get completely past thinking television news coverage is just a little beneath her. But, hey, a girl’s got to eat.

It all sort of perks along until the station owner throws a spanner in the works. He’s bumping Clare’s long-time boss upstairs to be a consultant, a make-work job if Clare ever heard of one, and hiring a new executive producer. The new gal is known for dramatically increasing station ratings, and she doesn’t care what tricks she has to use to do so. Naturally, Clare loathes her before they’ve even met. Susan makes it clear she’s in charge and won’t put up with Clare’s tendency to go off on her own and make decisions without the approval of Management.

Like Clare, you will be girding yourself for the inevitable confrontations between them. Yet, much as Susan blusters and threatens, she can’t quite rid herself of this annoying staffer, with her Pulitzer Prize and her record of breaking important stories.

The reportage of Riley Hunt’s death is expected to come to an end after a homeless veteran is arrested and charged with the crime. He has Riley’s cell phone, and her blood is on both it and him. We Belsky fans know this tidy conclusion won’t satisfy Clare. She continues to investigate, but the way things are going, she is certain to offend one or more powerful men.

Clare’s doggedness keeps reader interest alive, and a string of new revelations comes quickly. As much as they change the situation, what doesn’t change is Clare’s irreverent humor. She kept me chuckling with her spirited repartee. Belsky has quite deftly developed the voice of Clare, and she may seem like a few people you know—or want to know.

Despite Clare’s terrible track record with her personal relationships, her friend Janet keeps trying to fix her up, and her latest, a Princeton University Spanish professor, seems more than promising.

As a college journalism major myself, I have a soft spot for stories about newsrooms, intrepid reporters, and the tension between the fast pace of new events and the slow and painstaking work of investigation, not to mention the conundrums that face an increasingly embattled profession. I look forward to each new adventure of Clare and her team, and so will you. 

Order from Amazon here with my affiliate link.

“Just One More”

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Michael Venutolo-Mantovani has written a riveting piece for the October 2022 issue of Wired, “Just One More.” Late on the night of August 15, 2021, Worth Parker’s North Carolina cell phone received a Facebook message about the chaos in Afghanistan. It read: “Sir. I hope you are well. By any chance do you know any Marines who are on the ground right now?” Having retired from the US Marines as a Lt. Colonel six weeks before, Parker thought he’d cut those ties.

The message described the plight of the sender’s brother and father who had both worked for the US military in Afghanistan. With the American pullout scheduled for the end of the month, their lives were in increasing peril. The sender, Jason Essazay, had also worked for the US, but had obtained a Special Immigrant Visa for his service and was living in Houston. “Parker was Essazay’s last resort,” Venutolo-Mantovani writes. At the time the pullout was announced, 81,000 Afghans had pending applications for a SIV. US intelligence reports predicted it would take several months for the Taliban to take Kabul, but as we now know, the fall of Kabul occurred only days later.

When Parker read that the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit was helping with the evacuation, he called an old friend in the unit who said he’d try to help. Working in the eye of a fast-moving hurricane of fragmentary information, changing requirements, and coordination difficulties involving violent extremists and desperate families, Parker’s initiative succeeded.

Three days before Essazay’s contact with Parker, Joe Saboe, who’d left the Army 20 years earlier received a call from his younger brother, wanting help to get a friend and his family out of Afghanistan. Saboe didn’t know how he could help, but “tried the closest thing to a Noncombatant Evacuation Operations tool he had: Facebook. His post asking for help generated a message from a friend of twenty years before also trying to rescue someone. The two men strategized. Soon he heard from more veterans, each worried about a single contact. By August 17, Saboe had a group of volunteers working on the cases of 128 potential evacuees. A story in the Military Times generated more than a thousand contacts from Afghans looking for help and Americans wanting to provide it.

Parker, the former Lt. Colonel, enlisted his high-powered connections in the military establishment to form a group calling itself “the Graybeards.” Learning about Saboe’s operation, Parker hoped to convince Saboe’s volunteers to support the Graybeards’ efforts. “But almost immediately, Parker realized (the younger generation) was comically more tech savvy” than the retired military and civilian leaders. “It was time to reject the chain of command that had been drilled into him from the minute he joined the Marines.” He put the Graybeards’ Project Dunkirk in direct support of Saboe, giving him “some of the best-connected people in the US military and intelligence worlds.”

Heroic efforts were made in a fluid and increasingly dangerous Kabul. They achieved the rescue of more than 1,500 Afghans and, even today, more people continue to be evacuated in ones and twos. Each is a victory, but, collectively, they represent only five percent of Saboe’s database. Volunteers continue to chip away at that list, trying to save, as Project Dunkirk’s motto has it, “Just one more.” This whole inspiring and infuriating article is well worth a read.

Power in the Blood

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Highly recommended is debut fiction author Hiawatha Bray’s entertaining new techno-thriller, set mostly in Boston. Like Bray himself, his protagonist, Weldon Drake, is a technology reporter for a leading newspaper, and both are deacons in an African-American Baptist Church.

Late one night, MIT graduate student Astrid Nelson is stabbed in the basement of Drake’s church. The motive for the attack is unclear, but the victim’s phone and laptop are missing. Days later, when she can finally talk, she tells Drake she’s been working with an international team of hackers on a secret botnet protection project. The day she was attacked, another member of her team was murdered in Germany.

She explains to Drake they are trying to thwart a botnet created for a worldwide attack on the banking industry. Bray’s descriptions of the botnet and other elements of the cyber attack are not overly technical but convincingly convey their dangers, and there’s plenty of danger to come in the physical world as well.

As he pursues leads from Astrid, Drake concludes her team members are not trying to protect the banking system. Rather, they seem more interested in increasing the attack’s destructiveness. Finally, Astrid confesses that, as launch time neared, she and the German hacker got cold feet and tried to call it off. In a flash, they went from insider to expendable. Now Drake is a target too.

The character of Drake has a number of interesting attributes. He says he has antisocial personality disorder, but what he’s really missing seems to be empathy. At least he says he doesn’t care about other people’s problems and that his church activities are a way to compensate.But I don’t quite buy it. For example, Drake has good relations with his friend, Boston PD detective and fellow deacon, Damon Carter, and they candidly discuss the tricky issue of how a black man must behave in encounters with white police officers. You may wonder whether a lifetime of such experiences has contributed to Drake’s tamped-down emotional responses.

The author has written for The Boston Globe, Wired, and Fast Company, so you’d expect him to write well, and he does. You keep cheering Drake on in part because he’s quite funny and shows excellent psychological insight. And I haven’t even mentioned his intriguing descriptions of how he uses a flight simulator to overcome his fear of flying.

The dangers of cybercrime are front and center in this book, along with the risks involved in an increasingly connected world. If you worry that the Powers That Be don’t take these risks seriously enough, this story won’t reassure you. Not only has the author crafted a timely adventure, he’s peopled it with believable, complex characters. You’ll be rooting for Weldon Drake all the way. A great read!

A Feast for Book Lovers!

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Last week, to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the New York Times Book Review, current staff and contributors presented an entertaining look back at books where reviewers got it dreadfully wrong and reviews that sparked particularly pointed letters to the editor.

Contemporary authors read scathing sections of reviews panning books now considered classics. Catch-22, reviewed in 1961, was deemed too long and too episodic—a collection of incidents, not a coherent novel. Though the reviewer of Anne of Green Gables considered her “one of the most extraordinary girls to ever come out of an ink pot,” she was deemed far too clever, well-spoken, and much too wise. (That’s why we readers loved her!) Fahrenheit 451, reviewed in 1953, was dismissed as a polemic. The reviewer believed Ray Bradbury had “developed a hatred for many aspects of current life,” and showed what would eventually happen if the tendency to treat reading as a heinous event went unchecked.

Book Review editor Tina Jordan called the letters the review has received “the Internet message board of their day,” containing praise, complaints, grievances, and corrections. In one from 1962, an author pointed out a mistake in the review, and the reviewer agreed she’d mis-read something (a bit unfathomably when they read us the disputed passage). Norman Mailer was mentioned in the review of a book by a different author, and Mailer wrote to dispute the comparison and in the process, assuring that more people heard about the controversy.

Best was Jack London’s response to a 1905 review that criticized the “unrealistic” fight scenes in his short story, “The Game.” A devoted boxing fan and amateur boxer himself, London felt obliged to respond, saying, “I have had these experiences and it was out of these experiences, plus a fairly intimate knowledge of prize-fighting in general, that I wrote The Game.” So there!

The 1986 novel in verse, The Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth, received only condescending praise from its reviewer, which instigated a fiery letter from Susan Sontag, who called it “a thrilling, subtle literary achievement.” Clearly, opinions differ.

This month, the Book Review will be publishing its list of finalists for the best book of the past 125 years—and you can nominate your favorite here! Meanwhile, you can read reviews and interviews selected from the Review’s amazing archives. The Book Review’s anniversary celebration isn’t ignoring the crime/mystery/thriller genre. Included in its retrospective content—linked above—are a 1912 review of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and commentary from over the years on such classics as Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Ellery Queen’s The Dutch Shoe Mystery, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and, one of my favorite books, not technically a crime novel, but filled with crimes, high and low—Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. A feast for book lovers!

I Saw It at the Movies

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Bernie

My original impetus for seeing Richard Linklater’s 2012 movie Bernie (trailer) was that at least some of it was filmed in Smithville, an east Texas town named after my great great grandfather, William Smith (as was Smithville, Mississippi). Smithville is in Bastrop County, where a lot of movies made in Texas are filmed. Add to that, it’s based on a true crime My interest was piqued.

Cleverly filmed like a Cold Case documentary, it uses interviews with the principals and various townspeople to gradually build up the story. Many of them are outrageously hilarious.

Jack Black does an impressive portrayal of the small town’s genial, much-loved assistant funeral director, Bernie Tiede. Reviewer Roger Ebert said his performance “proves that an actor can be a miraculous thing in the right role.” Out of compassion or greed (depends who’s talking), Bernie takes up with a truly nasty elderly woman (Shirley MacLaine), and is accused of murdering her. Bernie’s nemesis is ambitious district attorney Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey), determined to prosecute, no matter what the townspeople think about the crime. These are the kinds of roles where you can go over-the-top, and the cast does.

Rotten Tomatoes’ critics rating: 88%; audiences: 73%.

The Lost Leonardo

Here’s a story rife with ideas for crime writers! The documentary follows the trail of a painting purchased in 2005 from a New Orleans auction house for $1,175 (trailer). After restoration, it was believed (by some) to be the much-copied “Salvator Mundi” by Leonardo da Vinci. Twelve years later, carrying that identity, it sold at auction for $450,300,000. Now presumed to have been bought by Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, some believe it’s headed for Louvre Abu Dhabi.

The Scandinavian documentarians, led by director Andreas Koefoed, never come to a conclusion about the work’s authenticity—how could they, when the art world remains so sharply divided?

However, it’s the middle of the story in which events become as murky as the overpainting of the possible masterpiece. In 2013, a Swiss art dealer, Yves Bouvier, purchased the painting for around $75 million and sold it to a Russian oligarch  for $127.5 million. The oligarch was displeased with Bouvier’s mark-up and sued. Interestingly, Bouvier ran an international company that specialized in the transportation and storage of art works, luxury goods, and other collectibles, and is currently under investigation in several countries. He exploited the concept of freeports, which rent space (and services) to art collectors and museums. These facilities are outside the control of customs and taxing officials and have come under increasing scrutiny for their possible role in the trafficking of looted Syrian artifacts, tax evasion, and money-laundering.

At present, no one knows for sure where the painting is. Some investigators believe it is in storage in one of Bouvier’s never-neverland storage facilities. Others, that it’s on bin Salman’s yacht. No one knows for sure. Prepare to be astonished!

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 97%; audiences: 80%.