Category Archives: real life

Why the Long Hiatus?

Posted on by

Possibly one or two followers noticed my vacation from 4 x per week blog posting in the last few months. There were good reasons—several of them. The flow was interrupted by out-of-town trips in October, November, and December (Austin, Louisville, and The Holiday Rust Belt Tour). Then there was the election, about which, what can one say that’s actually useful and, preferably, healing (see below)? Then the Holidays, and we celebrate most of them, plus our wedding anniversary. The first six weeks of the year are busy with birthdays, and, next thing I knew, here it is, the week of February 10.

Or maybe I was in shock that in mid-October I finally got my stove fixed, which had been out of commission for one year, five months, and ten days, an enervating experience of itself. During that time, I learned a lot about my grocery store’s prepared foods counter. Interesting. But now I have to cook again! I did managed to send out my quarterly newsletter, full of good reading and watching tips and my writing news. Are you a subscriber? Sign up here and receive three award-winning short stories.

At least during those months, an awful lot of reading got done. In its excellent November 18 issue, The New Yorker compiled essays “reckoning with Donald Trump’s return to power” written by a slew of authors tackling various issues. Most helpful to me, personally, was the piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders, titled “Concerning the Underlying Disease.” So apt, because the schisms in our national psyche did not suddenly manifest on November 5.

The essay proposes various thought experiments on  circumstances in which we do (or could) mostly get along with people of differing views (Chiefs versus Eagles, for example). People today receive a Niagara of information that helps shape those views, but it’s “information of a peculiar sort, information that is powerful, and has been constructed far away, by people with agendas.” This information is delivered invisibly, in a way to stoke feelings of belonging; it’s addictive (doomscrolling); it’s overwhelming. It’s too much.

He asks whether it’s possible that these “heavily agenda-laced ideas from afar,” as he calls them, have such power within us that we mistake them for our own ideas, that they’ve accumulated exaggerated importance in our lives? This importance may be disproportionate to the issue’s actual effect on us and irrespective of whether we can do anything about them. We’ve come to feel, he believes, responsible for too much. It’s paralyzing.

For the sake of my own mental health, I’ve decided to calibrate how much I do feel responsible for. And what that is, exactly. I can’t turn Gaza into the Riviera (even if I wanted to). I can’t reunite immigrant families separated from their children (even though I would want to). I can’t do any of the hundred things I can think of that actually make more sense to me than what the politicians are either doing or not doing. What I can do is take a step back from other people’s agendas and concentrate on simply being kind. To myself, to you, to strangers. In the long run, living by example may have some effect. That isn’t to abandon all responsibility. It’s just to assess it better. To care about the people affected, not the affecters (a word?). And to do what I actually can, however large or small.

The Dynasty That Keeps on Giving

Posted on by

Last week, American Ancestors hosted a Zoom presentation about potential?? English ancestors—those lusty, murderous Tudors. I’ve been a fan of stage, screen, and tv interpretations of Tudorabilia starting with the BBCs The Six Wives of Henry VIII, now more than 50 years ago! and still memorable, on to Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett), up to the salacious (and highly inaccurate) The Tudors in 2007-2010, and the three volumes of the late Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning novels, which started with Wolf Hall, through their stage and television versions (Mark Rylance at his very best). So, of course I couldn’t miss this latest program, led by Curt Di Camillo, curator of Special Collections for the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Here are some tidbits.

Di Camillo started with a little background on what paved the way for the Tudors, and that was the War of the Roses, the Plantagenets—the longest running royal house in Britain—symbolized by the White Rose and the Lancasters (red rose). When Henry VII seized the throne from the reviled Richard III, he created the “Tudor Rose,” red and white a bit of transparent pandering.

(As an aside, if you missed last year’s film, The Lost King, the true story of a persistent English woman who went on a hunt for Richard III’s body, which scholars searched for fruitlessly for centuries, rent it!.)

But what I learned about the first Tudor, Henry VII, was less well known (to me at least). He was reviled as well, considered a usurper, and, possibly worst of all, he was Welch. He was under such threat he created a special bodyguard and designed their uniforms. You recognize them as the Beefeaters, who still wear Henry’s design today. For Britain, at least, Di Camillo says, Henry Tudor’s accession to the crown in 1485 represented the end of the Middle Ages.

He undertook a number of acts to establish his legitimacy. He introduced a gold coin, called a sovereign, that bore his image with the trappings of the monarchy, he married Elizabeth of York (who passed on her red-hair genes to her son and grandchildren). And he added the Henry VII Lady Chapel to Westminster Abbey, which now holds the remains of many English kings and queens. But it was up to his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of Anne Boleyn, to employ England’s first spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, setting the stage for many great spy novels to come.

More information:
American Ancestors/New England Historic Genealogical Society
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Lost King
Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (have not read this one)

Looking for a Weekend Movie?

Posted on by

Here are brief takes on four films we’ve seen lately. All have good points. The one I enjoyed most is first.

The Cowboy and the Queen
You may have seen previous coverage of horse whisperer Monty Roberts. Now you see him in a reflective mood, looking back over the shape of his career. Son of an abusive dad, he was determined not to follow that path (trailer). By watching horses in the wild, he began to understand how they communicated, and he adopted their approach in his training. “Breaking horses,” he says, amounts to breaking their spirit; they’re abused until they give up. He doesn’t do it that way. So, where does the Queen come in? We’re talking about Elizabeth II, late monarch of Britain, who read articles about Roberts and wanted him to coach some of her equerries in his methods. Like most traditional U.S. horsemen, they were skeptical. They relied on using their aggressive techniques for a week or two until the horse would accept a saddle and, ultimately, a rider. Roberts could achieve this in less than twenty minutes. The Queen comes across beautifully, and so does the cowboy! A real feel-good film. For a fictional take on humane horse-training, there’s the wonderful 2018 film, The Rider.

The Critic
You can’t fault Ian McKellan’s portrayal of an odious 1930s theater critic for a dying London newspaper (trailer). He delights in skewering the shows and performers he reviews, and, although at first I found him a nice contrast to the starchy newspaper publisher, when he roped an ambitious female lead into his manipulative schemes, I gave up on him. The performances are all good, but he’s no hero.
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 47%; Audiences: 73%.

Between the Temples
Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) is the nebbishy cantor of a synagogue with a transparently ambitious rabbi (trailer). Through stress and anxiety, he’s lost his voice and is near suicide. Coming to his rescue (in more ways than one) is Mrs. Kessler (Carol Kane), his elementary school choral teacher. No one in their families is sure what the relationship is, exactly, they just know they don’t like it. Some good jokes, some outlandish family behavior. A pleasant film with a few slow spots.
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 85%; Audiences: 41%.

Skincare
This thriller loosely inspired by a true story, centers on a Hollywood entrepreneur who has developed her own line of facial products, using European (fancy!) ingredients (trailer). Her struggling business faces an existential crisis when a competitor moves in across the street. Violence ensues (nothing too graphic). Entertaining, and Elizabeth Banks is perfect as the increasingly frantic beauty maven. Coincidentally, I recently read a short piece about her in The New Yorker, where she talked about difficulty getting parts in her early career, in part because “I wasn’t pretty enough.” In this film, she’s a knockout!
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 65%; Audiences: 64%.

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.

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!

Traveling to Upstate New York

Posted on by

If you’re on I-87 or I-90 skirting Albany, you might want to think twice about not stopping. A visit to New York’s state capitol building is well worth a visit. And there are tours. Here are some fun facts we learned. 1. Construction delays and cost overruns are nothing new. (Huh!) When it was finally finished in 1899, 32 years in the making, the Empire State’s new building had cost more than the US capitol in Washington, D.C. It sounds as if Governor Teddy Roosevelt gave up and finally declared it finished. 2. The Senate Chamber is so acoustically well designed that a state senator cannot speak to a colleague sotto voce without risking being heard. To have a quiet conversation, Senators duck into one of the chamber’s two massive (solely decorative) fireplaces. Talk about a fireside chat! Oh, and 3. It was the first public building in the US to have electric lights.

The results of lengthy refurbishment are spectacular. The assembly chamber is now being reconstructed, so we couldn’t visit it, but the other refurbished areas, including the Senate Chamber (pictured in part, above), are truly impressive. Most inspiring are the grand staircases (pictured below).

The stonemasons came mostly from the UK. They did their carving on the stone after it was in place, by the way, often working many stories up on scaffolding or ladders—not in a workshop on the ground which sounds so much safer. “No OSHA back then,” our guide said. The architect didn’t care what they carved on the column capitals and other large areas—faces, plants, animals, abstract designs—“just don’t carve the same thing twice.” As a result, the carvings are a feast of diversity. Recognizable faces and objects—Lincoln, Frederick Douglass—and imaginary ones surround you.

Capitol buildings become mini-history lessons too. Albany’s Flag Room houses military exhibits and battle flags from conflicts from the War of 1812 to the Gulf War. The Hall of New York features landscape paintings of various state regions—a reminder of what the legislative branch is there to represent. The Hall of Governors gallery displays portraits of 53 of the state’s 57 governors, each with a brief biography. It’s fun to walk that hall saying, “I remember that one!” and noting the governors who became US Presidents and Vice-Presidents. We didn’t see any of those who departed office under a cloud, though at some future point, perhaps they will be “rehabilitated.”

The capitol is located at Washington and State Street in Albany (518-474-2418). Open Mondays through Fridays, 7-7. Free tours weekdays at 10, 12, and 2. Meet at the information desk in the State Street Lobby. To find out about any special tours being offered, visit the Capitol’s website.

Enjoy!

Murder Takes a Holiday

Posted on by
cruise ship

A new issue in editor Janet Rudolph’s excellent Mystery Readers Journal, in which mystery and crime authors talk about what inspired them to write about a particular theme, setting, or domain and how they went about doing it. There’s a certain commonality to some sources of inspiration, but there are always those fascinating quirky bits. Some of the authors that are most interesting to me draw on a vast well of knowledge, experience, and research, so that it sometimes seems they could make a valuable contribution to almost any MRJ issue!

I was tremendously amused by the cover drawing for Summer 2024 (which is Volume 40, No. 2), “Murder Takes a Holiday.” It features the Grim Reaper, ensconced in a deck chair with a cocktail and a book (yay!), while a puzzled cruise passenger looks on. “Taking a holiday” for sure. One hopes.

In Donna Andrews’s essay “Monkey Business Meets the Flying Dutchman,” she points out the value of actually visiting the place or having (some aspect of) the experience you’re writing about. She wanted to write a locked room mystery involving a cruise, but had never been on one. Easy solution: book it! Though she soon found out the crew wasn’t very forthcoming when she asked her questions about crime aboard and missing persons. “They tended to look panic-stricken and find an excuse to sneak away whenever I asked,” she says.

All this reminded me of a recent conversation with friends about the number of people who actually do go missing from cruise ships every year—the very topic the crew of Andrews’s ship avoided. Their mantra: Cruises are fun! They’re exciting! (But not in that way.)

I knew nothing about the missing cruiser phenomenon until a few years ago when I reviewed Sebastian Fitzek’s thriller, Passenger 23, for CrimeFictionLover.com. His premise of a serial killer disposing of cruise ship passengers struck me at first as an eye-roller. Then I did some research. At that time, an estimated 23 people a year—passengers and crew members alike—disappeared from the world’s cruise ships.

That number was widely viewed as an underestimate, because of the cruise shop operators’ public relations imperative to keep such incidents under wraps. They also encourage the narrative that disappearances are suicides, though often there is no evidence of that, or even contrary evidence.

Investigation is often left to a police official from the ship’s country-of-registry. For Carnival Cruises, that would be Panama, and possibly the Bahamas or Malta, where Celebrity Cruises also are registered. Disney? The Bahamas. The initial investigation and autopsy for a woman who died on a Carnival ship in 2023 was conducted by Bahamian authorities. They concluded it was a natural death, but the FBI considered it suspicious and began its own investigation some days after-the-fact, when the ship docked in Charleston.

In a case of presumed suicide from a Royal Caribbean ship late last month, the company is being fairly close-mouthed. Said a lawyer who investigates such incidents, “It’s rare for a company to publish anything that could make them seem liable for the death”—including issues like alcohol consumption.

These incentives and circumstances create the perfect set-up for deadly shenanigans. The Mystery Readers Journal cover artist apparently thought so too!

(photo: ed2456 on pixabay; creative commons license)

An Unexpected Gem: A Fire Museum!

Posted on by

On Saturdays in Allentown, NJ, the New Jersey Fire Museum and Fallen Firefighters Memorial opens to the public. It may sound a tad remote, but if you’re on the NJ Turnpike (unlucky you) approaching exit 7A, you’re only 4.5 miles away!

It’s a volunteer-run facility, and the time investment and thoughtfulness of the volunteers are evident at every turn. The museum building has an interesting collection of esoterica. You find out how fire alarm boxes work. You find out about “fire grenades” (glass bulbs filled with water or carbon tetrachloride thrown at the base of a presumably small fire. They were outlawed in 1954 not only because of hazardous broken glass, but because burning carbon tet produces phosgene, the deadliest WWI gas). You find out why US firefighters’ helmets have such an unusual shape: the long back brim keeps water from running down inside the firefighters’ collar, and the peaked front, often featuring an animal, can be used to break glass), and much more.

The photo above shows a hand-pumper purchased in 1822 by the Crosswicks (NJ) Fire Department for $100. Damaged at a fire, it was rebuilt in 1850 and still being used in 1922—giving the community more than 100 years of service! The horse-drawn fire wagon pictured below is from 1789, the year George Washington became President. (The flowers seem an unusual touch, though early luxury automobiles sometimes offered bud vases, as did the Volkswagen Beetle, with its blumenvasen.)

A barn adjacent to the museum houses a fantastic collection of mostly vintage fire trucks, mostly restored to dramatic beauty (see more here). Lots of red paint. Clearly a labor of love. Kids (adults too, I suppose) can sit in the driver’s seat. Also there’s a gift shop in the museum. If you’re in the market for a stuffed Dalmatian, you’re at the right place. Another reason kids will enjoy this museum? A roomful of fire trucks and related toys.

The memorial component is woven into mission of the organization. The website includes a list of fallen firefighters, noting nine whose Last Alarm was in 2021, 12 in 2020, and a list of 107 whose service dates back more than 200 years. An area is set aside to honor the 343 firefighters and paramedics killed on 9/11. The memorial itself will be on the Museum grounds, when it’s complete.

I Saw You!–or Maybe I Didn’t

Posted on by

Unease about the growing use of facial recognition technology has clustered around some by now well-known difficulties: inaccurate results when non-white individuals are involved; inadequate training of personnel who “read” the results; adoption of privacy-invading systems without public knowledge or input; inadequate monitoring of accuracy.

Despite these concerns, use of this technology is expanding in law enforcement, border control, airport screening, even business, including retail. Remember Rite Aid? How’s it really being used? What are the benefits as well as the unintended consequences? These questions create a fertile arena for authors of crime fiction.

Properly implemented, facial-recognition could help make policing more efficient. It has been used to identify a number of the January 6 rioters, whose participation was then verified by other evidence (their own Facebook posts, often). The UK, whose cities are blanketed with camera surveillance, nevertheless still values the human element—a cadre of super-recognizers who “never forget a human face.” That would not be me.

Unfortunately, an identification facilitated by the facial recognition technology sometimes trumps other evidence gathered in more traditional ways. The arrestee’s alibi, for example. No matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, it remains true that a person cannot be in two places at once.

Police departments say the technology is used only to generate leads, and people should not be charged with a crime until there is corroborating evidence. In practice, though, the algorithm’s output often doesn’t mark the beginning of an investigation, but its end. That perception was borne out by a Washington Post story yesterday about. A Texas man has filed a lawsuit against Macy’s (and others) claiming overconfidence in the technology led to his arrest by the Houston police. While in custody, he was sexually assaulted. This is one of a half-dozen ongoing wrongful arrest cases are around the country.

In the U.S., a growing number of state and local law enforcement agencies have available to them the faces of nearly half the adult population. These photos come from various sources—including billions scraped from social media, as well as government-issued I.D. cards, mug shots, driver’s licenses, etc. (In which case I don’t need to worry, because my driver’s license photo looks nothing like me! Though probably it matches up with the eighty or so “nodal points” that define a particular face.) The Georgetown University Law Center’s project on privacy and technology calls this vast database “the perpetual line-up.” And you’re likely in it, no matter how law-abiding you are.

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what? I’m not a criminal. This doesn’t affect me.” At least not until there’s a misidentification. Crime fiction writers should have a field day with this one. It’s one thing in a traffic stop or arrest situation to attempt to verify someone’s identity; it’s quite another to use the database for a fishing expedition after-the-fact. And fish will be caught, possibly using grainy, out-of-focus, out-of-date, candid selfies, to create a list of possible matches. Facebook for a while identified individuals in the photos on our news feeds. My friend’s wife was consistently identified as me. I didn’t think we look at all alike, but the algorithm did, so I understand the reality of misidentifying people.

Police departments in several major American cities are experimenting with street surveillance cameras that can continuously scan the faces of people in real time. More than a whiff of China here. The People’s Daily has reported that China’s facial recognition system needs only one second to scan the faces of its 1.4 billion people.

Warrants aren’t required for a search of facial databases. The investigations aren’t necessarily limited to serious crimes. Defendants may never be told that it was an algorithm, not a human witness, that identified them. People who don’t trust the justice system, may prefer to take a plea deal and never have their case tried in court and face a potentially longer sentence. This means the true rate of false positive identifications is unknowable. All these aspects of the technology and its implementation, good and bad, lend themselves to situations crime writers can exploit.

Graphic by Mike MacKenzie (www.vpnsrus.com) under Creative Commons license 2.0 Generic.

What’s Down There?

Posted on by

In the last few weeks, a Missouri man (described as a “YouTuber”) discovered the car and body of a man missing since 2013 in the waters of a Missouri pond. It reminded me of a New Yorker story last summer titled “Hidden Depths,” by author Rachel Monroe, who dived (sorry!) deep into this particular specialty in the true crime cold case genre—underwater crime-solving.

The story focuses on a group called Adventures with Purpose (AWP). These are volunteer salvage divers who search lakes and rivers for missing cars—sometimes long-missing, and sometimes with the drivers still in them—and share video of their results for a YouTube audience that numbers in the millions. (Yet another massive social trend I’ve completely missed.)

Jared Leisek of Oregon founded AWP in 2018 intending it to feature treasure-hunts, but found it hard to compete with other dive sites that had much bigger audiences. The next year he found two handguns in the water, and a light bulb went off. He could build a bigger audience by focusing on the cold cases and missing persons.

Once he solved the case of missing man Nathaniel Ashby (a video about the discovery has been viewed more than ten million times), AWP was deluged with requests from friends and family members of other missing people. Responses from local law enforcement cover the gamut. Some welcome the help they can’t afford and the resources (dive equipment, trained divers) they don’t have; other not so much. Cause-of-death also varies. Many of the cases are the result of accident or suicide, but some may be actual crimes.

Interestingly, Leisek told Monroe he hates the true-crime community. Perhaps because of its voyeuristic love of sensationalism can lead to excess. As Monroe said, the true-crime fandom has “a tendency to assume that the official story of a tragic death obscures a more horrific reality.”

(Naturally, in the “no secret is secret for long” in the social mediaverse, AWP is criticized on numerous fronts and long-ago accusations that the teenage Leisek raped his cousin emerged, which at least for a time resulted in lost viewership for his YouTube channel.)

The Missouri case was resolved through the work of independent investigator James Hinkle, a local videographer who has his own YouTube channel, Echo Divers. Although there’s room for abuses here, the families Monroe interviewed are grateful that their days of wondering can come to a close.

Photo by Aviv Perets