The Crime Lady V2, #9: Cold Cases at the Root
Dear TCL Readers,
When I started writing full-time at the beginning of the year, one of my goals was — in addition to having more time to devote to the new book project — was to make room for freelance crime stories that would challenge me to be even more ambitious. Which is why, when one of my favorite editors, Michelle Legro (she and I have worked on stories for three different outlets) solicited me to contribute something for Topic’s crime-themed March issue, I pitched a piece on a subject that I could not stop thinking about since Joseph DeAngelo was arrested as the suspect in the Golden State Killer case in April: how cold cases long thought to be unsolvable were now being solved thanks to forensic genealogy, and one specific company in particular: Parabon NanoLabs.
The piece is up now. It showcases the optimism and hope that scientists, genealogists, and law enforcement have about the use of genealogy in a forensic science setting to identify unknown remains and unidentified perpetrators, as well as the understandable ethics and privacy concerns. Forensic genealogy is still very much in a Wild West space: it hasn’t been tested in a court of law, no other lab other than Parabon employs genealogists (though that’s changing soon, and we’ve yet to hear of any mistaken suspect identifications. Things are moving so fast in the field that I had to update my draft three or four times to reflect brand-new developments.
I’m proud of the published piece. It also kicked my ass, and was made immeasurably better by multiple rounds of edits from Legro and Anna Holmes, and factchecking by Erica Hellerstein (who gets extra commendation for working with me when I had vacation-remote Internet accessibility.) And I could not be more thrilled to thank Matthieu Bourel for his brilliant conceptual art as accompanying illustrations.
As is often the case, there was so much material that couldn’t make it in for space reasons, including a section on Lori Napolitano, the chief of forensic services for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement whose hobbyist pursuit of genetic genealogy led to start an in-house unit at FDLE. Paid subscribers to TCL will be able to read an expansion of that cut section in the next dispatch, which will go out on Wednesday:
EVENTS
The next month is turning out to be quite a busy one for me and The Real Lolita:
On Wednesday, March 13 at 7:30 PM, BOOKTHEWRITER is hosting me as part of its current season of pop-up book groups. Details & tickets here.
I’ll be appearing with novelist Idra Novey on Wednesday, March 20 at 7 PM at “Our Stories Are Magic”, a collaboration between Books Are Magic and Planned Parenthood NYC at the clothing boutique Meg in Boerum Hill. Details & tickets here.
On Saturday, March 23 at 4:00 PM, I’ll be at the Montclair Literary Festival, in conversation with Margalit Fox and D.T. Max. Details here, and I confess to being incredibly excited to be on the bill with two writers I admire unabashedly.
On Sunday, March 24 at 7 PM, I’m moderating a panel on true crime memoirs featuring Carolyn Murnick, Leah Carroll, and Piper Weiss to close out the “Death Becomes Us” true crime festival. It’s at the Gramercy Theater; tickets and details here.
I’m giving a reading at Kenyon College on Wednesday, March 27 at 4:30 PM.
On Friday, March 29 and Saturday, March 30, I’ll be on panels at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans. The Friday one is on Books about Books, with Maureen Corrigan and Anne Boyd Roux (moderated by Susan Larson.) The Saturday one is more of a workshop, where William Morrow executive director of publicity Sharyn Rosenblum and I discourse on what the book trade is really like. (I may have left Publishers Marketplace, but once a publishing reporter, always a publishing reporter…)
And on Sunday, April 14 at 4:30 PM, I will be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books to speak about chasing hidden stories with Mark Bowden, Margaret Leslie Davis, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, all of us moderated by LAT transportation reporter Laura J. Nelson.
READ/WATCH/LISTEN
First, a belated link to last month’s CrimeReads column, devoted entirely to the work and (private) life of one of my favorite domestic suspense writers, Nedra Tyre. I would love nothing more than to see her work — especially her 1953 novel Death of An Intruder and her short stories — reissued.
I spent the last week of February and the first week of March on a cruise ship, which meant that in between shore excursions around St. Thomas, Antigua, St. Lucia, and Barbados, I read a bunch of books. One of them, John Judis’s 1988 biography of William F. Buckley, was obviously for the book project, and it’s the primer and context I needed to understand one of the key people I’m writing about. My mom had read All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews on the ship and loved it, so I read it next — and also adored it.
Otherwise, it was all summer galleys. Marcy Dermansky’s forthcoming novel Very Nice lived up and then surpassed its aim as a “literary soap opera” (I loved every moment of it); Katherine Howe’s The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs proved to be just as delicious as its prequel, The Daughters of Deliverance Dane; and Maureen Callahan’s American Predator and Josh Levin’s The Queen were terrifying and terrific reads for different reasons.
The cruise ship was the Norwegian Gem and I gravitated to any event featuring the showband, especially when they played jazz or big band (the highlight was the Dixieland set, in part because the musicians were so clearly into and having fun with the material.) Steffi Medrano, who plays tenor & alto sax and clarinet, will be on the ship till June, and she’s worth checking out, whether at sea or or land. And Cameron Hicks, the drummer and bandleader, wrote a fascinating piece some years ago about what it’s like to work the cruise ship circuit.
New-ish podcasts I have enjoyed of late: Over My Dead Body, hosted by Matthew Shaer; and Murder Book, hosted by Michael Connelly. And my inability to binge-watch television has re-asserted itself, despite last month’s promise otherwise, which means that no, I probably haven’t watched the latest crime show or documentary, but I might soon.
That’s all for now, with more to come in April.
Until next time, I remain,
The Crime Lady