The Crime Lady: Best of 2024, Raymond Chandler Auction, and More
Dear TCL Readers:
Well, it was a week. I suppose I’ll say that every week from now on, I grant. But it does feel like we’re speedrunning through history, and not just abroad but right here in New York City, with the murder of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson and efforts to apprehend his killer — and the utter collective apathy (and memes) about such efforts.
Most of what I think about this case I’m keeping to myself, though I do think we’ll fully understand some of the apparent clues — monopoly money, the shell casings with messages, etc. — once there is an arrest, whenever that may be. But I found this story on why online true crime types (I can’t say “influencers”, I just can’t) aren’t going out of their way to help the cops to be fascinating:
“We’re pretty apathetic towards that,” Savannah Sparks, who has 1.3 million followers on her TikTok account — where she tracks down and reveals the identities of people who do racist or seemingly criminal acts in viral videos — said about helping to identify the shooter. She added that, rather than sleuthing, her community has “concepts of thoughts and prayers. It’s, you know, claim denied on my prayers there,” referring to rote and unserious condolences.
Although Sparks, 34, has been tapped by law enforcement in the past to help train officers on how to find suspects online, according to emails seen by NBC News, she said this time she isn’t interested in helping police.
Sparks, who also works in health care as a lactation consultant and holds a doctorate of pharmacy, didn’t mince words when asked if her community was working to find the suspect in Thompson’s murder.
“Absolutely the f--- not,” she said.
Is it a vibe shift? A watershed moment in class rage? A chance to channel anger about the pernicious evil of health insurance companies? All of the above? But these larger questions, and the sense that the entire country is rooting for the killer to get away, feels awfully significant. We’re only at the beginning of this story, that’s for sure.
**
I chose my Best Crime Novels of the year, which appeared online last week and will be in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review. Whittling it down to 10 wasn’t easy but it was also pretty clear that Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods was the actual best of the genre (Sarah Lyall included it in her Best Thrillers column, too, along with Tana French’s The Hunter, which also made my list.) And while it’s impossible to sum up a year in crime fiction reading in one paragraph, I tried anyway:
I’ve long believed that crime fiction runs along a spectrum between order and chaos, where the two seemingly disparate states are always intertwined, ever-changing, never settled. It makes sense that a genre offering a window into the way we really function in society and behave with one another would embrace constraints while also constantly subverting them. This year’s standout authors understood the assignment: to push boundaries, to reflect the world in its messy glory rather than in tidy narratives.
As I say every year, my list cannot include some excellent novels because friends (or people I’m connected to) wrote them, they were psychological thrillers and so I didn’t cover them, or some other mysterious reasons. But in the interests of transparency, here’s my so-called Shadow Docket of favorite crime novels:
Here in Avalon, Tara Isabella Burton
Missing White Woman, Kellye Garrett
The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia, Juliet Grames
One of the Good Guys, Araminta Hall
Where You End, Abbott Kahler
Black River, Nilanjana Roy
Alter Ego, Alex Segura
As for 2025? The pickings are already quite good, but stay tuned for my columns for exactly how this will play out.
**
Another good part of the past week (aside from the choir concert, which went exceedingly well on Saturday night) was spending time at Doyle Auctions on the Upper East Side for an evening of readings from classic Raymond Chandler novels to hype up its auction of the Jean Vounder-Davis collection of Chandler materials. (Vounder-Davis, formerly Fracasse, was Chandler’s secretary-fiancee near the end of his life.) When I learned this was happening I immediately invited Megan Abbott — the biggest and most knowledgeable Chandler devotee I know — and off we went to peruse the man’s Olivetti 44 studio typewriter, letters that proved a long-thought-of apocryphal story about The Big Sleep film actually happened, copies of treasured books (like The Maltese Falcon), schoolboy ephemera, and unpublished fantasy stories.
The readers were not whom I would have expected to be Chandler or crime fiction fans, and sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t. I particularly appreciated John Ganz (author of When the Clock Broke) reading a hardboiled selection from The Little Sister in a particularly clipped voice, and Megan Nolan (Ordinary Human Failings) — who grew up in a town where Chandler spent many a summer — giving an Irish lilt to The Long Goodbye that added some welcome notes to the prose.
After the readings, I came across a surprise: the original typed manuscript for Chandler’s one and only opera, the Gilbert and Sullivan-inflected The Princess and the Pedlar, which he wrote with Julian Pascal — at the time, husband to Cissy, whom Chandler would later marry — in 1917. It was forgotten for decades until Kim Cooper found it listed in the Library of Congress. And the article the auction house cited was my own, for the Guardian in 2014.
I asked Peter Costanzo, the Doyle Auctions SVP who was in charge of the Chandler auction, how it came to be. The materials had been in Vounder-Davis’s possession until her death, then bequeathed to her daughter, Sybil, who had looked after them faithfully. But the answer turned out to be mundane and inevitable: the worsening fire seasons in California makes holding on to rare materials an even more precarious exercise, and Sybil realized time was not on her side.
The auction’s over, but there are materials still for sale — including that opera typescript and the unpublished fantasy short stories…
**
Lastly, thanks to everyone who read my Rolling Stone feature on the death and life of Patricia McGlone, for which I’m exceedingly grateful. (And if you have information, call 800-577-TIPS.) The story was also highlighted in the most recent edition of the Sunday Long Read. Here’s what guest editor (and Edgar Award Fact Crime winner) Kim Cross had to say:
Sarah Weinman writes the Crime & Mystery column for The New York Times Book Review and is the author of several true crime books. This is her jam, and this story is peak Weinman. It begins in the basement of a building that once housed an epic ‘60s nightclub called The Scene, which turned into a crime scene in 2003, when construction workers noticed an odd concrete slab behind the furnace. One of them swung a sledgehammer at it and…
I suspect there will be one more newsletter before the end of the year. Until then, I remain,
The Crime Lady