The Crime Lady: Pushing Forward
Dear TCL Readers,
I turned forty-one last week and spent the day with people I love. I had, in half-jest, posted on Twitter that what I most wanted for the day was for people to stop spreading misinformation, think critically, and for democracy to function properly. (There was, also, cake.) Of course I was not really joking. But the crux is what Jenny Offill, at her book launch in Brooklyn for her stunning new novel Weather, hoped readers would take away from the book: that we’re better off doing collective actions, finding ways to be together to see the change we want happen. It can be national, regional, local, all of it. And it should also cause more than a little bit of discomfort, especially if you’re in a position to absorb it, because so many people simply cannot.
There is so much we cannot control, and that can be terrifying. But there is so much we can control: whom we spend time with, what causes we hold dear, the energy we spend on meaningful projects (paid and volunteer.) So for my just-past birthday, I wish you all whatever is the equivalent for you. A sense of purpose at a time when so much makes ever less sense.
I’m lucky to have a community in a neighborhood I adore as well as a quiet place to write at home, while being able to go elsewhere for other quiet places to write. But I also feel like I have to step it up. This is a good thing.
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I should really lead with the National Magazine Award nomination for “Before, and After, the Jogger”, which I found out from Twitter (because that’s how it works now.) It is truly an honor to be nominated in general, but especially in the category of reporting (alongside stellar writers like Pamela Colloff, whom I would be happy if she won everything) and for what I think is the best work I’ve done to date. There’s an awards ceremony in Brooklyn on March 12th and I’m excited to attend.
Some other recent-ish news of me: I wrote an essay about a recent documentary on the women in Ted Bundy’s orbit — those he murdered, those who survived, those who loved him, those who wish they never had — for GEN/Medium. The documentary, by Canadian filmmaker Trish Wood, is excellent, and perhaps unjustly neglected because there are so many competing projects that aren’t nearly as good but got there first. But none of those have Elizabeth Kendall and her daughter, Molly, as well as other survivors, on camera, on the record.
The Queen of Suspense, the all-time great, the justly beloved Mary Higgins Clark died earlier this month, and I wrote about her work and life for the Los Angeles Times. (That photo of MHC, by the way, is from a 1969 Bergen Record profile, years before Where Are The Children? made her famous.)
It was such a pleasure to be in conversation with Hilary Davidson at the Mysterious Bookshop to launch her new thriller Don’t Look Down. I’ll also be in conversation with Elizabeth Little at Chevalier’s Books on Wednesday, February 26 for her stunner of a crime novel, Pretty As a Picture. See you there, Angeleno readers!
There’s also some advance press for Unspeakable Acts, as well as a podcast episode I taped for HarperCollins’ wonderful library marketing team. The July 28 publication date is approach fast…
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READ/WATCH/LISTEN
The book I can’t stop thinking most about is Morgan Jerkins’ Wandering In Strange Lands, which publishes in May. It is part family history, part travelogue, and largely a reckoning with the effects of the Great Migration, and how the black diaspora happened, and the costs and benefits of looking for a place of one’s own in a deeply inhospitable country.
Other books I recommend highly: Alexis Coe’s revisionist biography of George Washington, You Never Forget Your First; Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Hid Before Your Eyes, the much-anticipated, years-in-the-making return of her Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series; and Scott Phillips’ Left Turn At Albquerque, which is down and dirty and a total blast.
I tried watching Hunters, this new Amazon Prime Original series (it doesn’t debut till February 21, but I got screeners of the first five episodes.) And my problem with this series is the same reason I bailed early on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (also, incidentally, an Amazon Prime show): the ersatz quality of depicting American Jews, and Holocaust survivors, especially, accentuated by the color-saturated, comic book-y cinematography. Now, I might not be the target audience, but I mean, the show is about Nazi hunters in the 1970s, so shouldn’t I be? Except the attempts at gallows humor are simply unfunny, the accents — Brooklyn and Eastern European — feel off, and it just wasn’t grimy enough. There’s a sense that this show was conceived with a degree of distance that we can no longer afford to have, if we could have ever afforded it, or taking cues from film and television from the era without really engaging with the 1970s itself. The fictional Holocaust horrors also don’t help, and if anything, diminish the actual horrors endured by those in the camps. Obviously, there is a way to talk about the Holocaust with humor (“Springtime for Hitler”, anyone?) but Hunters misses the mark.
The newest season of CBC’s Uncover podcast is on the Satanic Panic, particularly events in the small town of Martensville, Saskatchewan in the early 1990s. Listening to it is like a fast-motion horror film of how people could be trapped in an astoundingly toxic mindset, and a reminder of how easy it is to slip into the worst of confirmation bias.
When next I write, it will be from somewhere else than Manhattan. It’s time to get back to the book, which most certainly won’t write itself.
Until then, I remain,
The Crime Lady