Bad Machinery Vol II: The Case Of The Good Boy
Magic pencils, missing babies, pony stories, and TEEN MOCKERY!
Fresh Meat: Providence Rag by Bruce DeSilva
How far would you go to keep a serial killer in jail?
The Black-Eyed Blonde: New Excerpt
Philip Marlowe is back, and he's learning just how far people will go to keep their names clean.
Fresh Meat: Brooklyn Graves by Triss Stein
Historian Erica Donato researches broken glass and shattered lives...
Zoinks! This Friday night brings the limited theatrical and video on-demand release of the movie Veronica Mars, crowd-funded at lightspeed by fans of the iconic tv girl detective of the 'oughts from Neptune, California. Here's the trailer, with plenty of the signature snark, showing how they'll work in the Then and Now of it all. We're looking forward to it! How about you?
If the popularity of writers such as Donald Ray Pollock, Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Woodrell and Frank Bill is anything to go by, rural noir is a big deal in the United States.
While it may not be anywhere near as well-known, for my money, the 1961 novel Wake In Fright by Australian writer Kenneth Cook is up there with the best of them. The film adaption of Wake In Fright hit Australian cinemas in 1971. Forty-three years later and it’s hard to think of comparable piece of cinema that has come out of the country.
Wake In Fright was a blistering take on three of the central features of the 1960s white Anglo Saxon culture in Australia: mateship, the romance of the outback, and drinking. Especially drinking.
Bad Machinery: The Case Of The Good Boy by John Allison is the second volume in the web comic series about the middle grade sleuths of Griswald's Grammar School in Tackleford, England (available March 12, 2014).
I have a huge weakness for John Allison’s Bad Machinery series. While I love most of his work, there’s something about his tales of two rival teams of young adolescent sleuths that makes them very dear to my heart. The girls’ team consists of the responsible, if poor, Shauna; her best friend, the irrepressible Lottie, and Mildred, the rebellious product of an extremely left-wing upbringing. On the boys’ team, you have quiet, handsome Jack; sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued policeman’s son, Linton, and sensible, resourceful Sonny, who is also Mildred’s cousin. Jack and Shauna are sort of dating, but careful to keep it quiet, partly in case anyone on their teams should take umbrage, and partly to avoid teasing from their wider social circles. Goodness knows, Sonny gets enough teasing just as a result of being related to Mildred:
Linton: Are you coming down to the park tonight?
Sonny: No, I'm busy.
Linton: Is it Naturecraft Folk? Leaf touching? A big night of leaf touching.
Sonny: We don't touch leaves.
Linton: NOT EVER?
Sonny: My cousin is coming round. I have to be in.
Linton: A play date! A play date with MILDRED! A tea party with hair brushing and teddies and pony stories!
Sonny (deadpan): Sometimes the pony stories are so good that we don't even get round to the hair brushing.
Jack: Are we going to solve a mystery soon? Other than the mystery of why Linton isn't going to have any friends soon. Because that's not really a mystery.
If you’ve been pining for the return of Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey since they solved their last case back in 1988, I have some good news for you.
Even if you’ve never heard of Cagney & Lacey (perish the thought!), listen up.
The girls are back in town—except this time the girls are Janet Scott and Rachel Bailey and the town is Manchester, England. The ITV series Scott & Bailey, available on some Public Television stations (including WGBH in Boston, KCET and KPBS in southern California, and WLIW in the New York area), is close enough to Cagney & Lacey to be an unmistakable homage, yet original enough to stand on its own.
After the pilot episode of the series set up the town and the central mystery of homecoming queen Laura Palmer’s murder, the first regular episode, “Traces to Nowhere,” begins to expand the canvas and deepen that mystery. FBI Agent Cooper, after securing a superior cup of java, questions a young man named James Hurley (played by James Marshall) about a video that shows Laura and her friend Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and hints at the presence of an unseen third person. Hurley admits that he shot the video, and that he was indeed having an affair with Laura, cheating with her behind the back of her batshit boyfriend Bobby Briggs, but he denies having anything to do with her death. We believe him, and so does Cooper.
Meanwhile, we get a closer look at the abusive marriage of the waitress Shelley and her asshole husband Leo the truck driver. Shelley is carrying on an affair with Bobby Briggs, but Leo’s got more than few secrets of his own. He’s bringing drugs into town (a lot of drugs apparently, since Bobby owes him $10,000) and he’s concealing a bloody shirt. When Shelley hides the shirt from him, Leo beats her with a bar of soap in a sock.
It seems as if there are certain perks that come with being James Bond, and we're not just talking about the women, gadgets, and suave one-liners. As if all that wasn't enough, listen to the deal that current Bond Daniel Craig was offered by Aston Martin after filming his Bond debut Casino Royale – any Aston Martin car, anytime he wants to go for a spin. And not just any old spin – a spin around Aston Martin's private racetrack.
Craig's deal is good for any model at any time. But Craig doesn't own an Aston Martin, owing to the fact that the luxury of the car would be wasted in a city landscape like London. Maybe he's waiting for another day.
All we know is that for a man whose car rides have a knack for ending in explosions, Aston Martin better hope it has good insurance.
It’s me again, kittens. Your friendly neighborhood Bibliotherapist, and believe me when I tell you that I know what’s ailing you. Yes, you. And you, too. Gather round, chumps and listen up.
As I write this now, we are out of salt, out of sand, and out of patience. I love the winter. Really, I do. It’s just right in my wheelhouse, with all the staying inside, all the cups of tea and cocoa (with whiskey), all the snuggling down to read.
But really? I’ve had enough. And when I have had enough, you know enough has been had by all.
But there’s nothing to be done about it, except settle in for another storm. So here’s my reading list for combating the Snowbound/Cabin Fever situation. Some of them feature snowbound detectives and manor houses, so you’ll know you’re not alone. Some feature sunny and summery vacation spots to give you something to look forward to. Others, well…sometimes it’s good to watch somebody else go on a murderous rampage, so you don’t have to do it yourself.
The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie
Hail to the Queen, baby. Nobody can make a snow day pass more quickly than Dame Agatha can. And while The Sittaford Mystery has neither Miss Marple and her knitting bag, nor Poirot and his little gray cells, it gets extra points for featuring not only a snowbound manor house, but also a murder predicted by a Ouija Board, which is always a plus.
Recommended beverage: Earl Grey Tea with Brandy
Here’s how it commenced: One night when I was twelve, maybe thirteen, I caught the film Ten Little Indians on TV. It was the 1965 version, not the best (see 1945’s Then There were None) but compelling all the same. The set-up and execution (literally!) really grabbed me: Take ten strangers, strand them in an isolated mansion, and toss in some shadowy past sins, a slew of quirky murders, and an embedded killer, and what have you got? The beginning of a Christie reader.
Not long after that evening, I learned that the person who’d dreamed up that dastardly little soiree was a rather renowned Englishwoman, well-born and cultured, who’d been responsible for scores of cold-blooded murders. That week I invested in my first Agatha Christie novel. It was a Dell paperback called Murder After Hours (aka The Hollow.) The cover art reminded me of the Golden Book Encyclopedia covers: a collection of seemingly random objects arranged in still-life. Here, scattered upon a window ledge, were a glowing flashlight, a crumpled note, a teacup and a revolver. Just outside the cracked windowpane, a large owl—shorthand for all things mysterious—sat on a bare black branch and stared forward menacingly. Good stuff.
...baby name expert [Laura Wattenberg] took stock of the increase in gun and hunting-themed baby names. Her statistics [from 2002-2012] show a steady rise in firearm nomenclature.... “Colt, Remington, and Gauge have all soared, and Gunner is much more common than the traditional name Gunnar.”
Ruger is also a surprising new star among current boys' names. But what about the girls?
According to Wattenberg, the fastest growing name for girls in the past year was Cataleya, the main character in the movie Colombiana, where Zoe Saldana plays a child of murdered parents who grows up to be an assassin.
Read the rest by Abby Haglage at The Daily Beast for more unusual trends in baby names. Apparently, by New Mexico state law, you can't name your kid Scrotum anymore. Killjoys.
Providence Rag, the third book in the Liam Mulligan series by Bruce DeSilva, forces a journalist to dig through his town's archives in order to keep a convicted serial killer in jail (available March 11, 2014).
Bruce DeSilva, 2011 Edgar winner for Best First Novel, reflects his 41 years as a journalist in his new novel, Providence Rag, a crime novel inspired by a true story.
The captivating beginning of Providence Rag describes the thoughts of a convicted serial slasher, Kwame Diggs, who is at the heart of this novel. Here, Diggs is a child torturing a grasshopper.
“The grasshopper struggles, its six legs making a faint scratching sound as they rake the stone. The boy burns the legs off one by one, and the scratching stops. Carefully, he amputates each antenna. A brown, unblinking eye stares up at him, pleading for an end to this…”
In the end of the scene, Diggs is amazed at his power:
“With a start, he feels a swelling in his jeans. He wonders: Am I God?”
Many chapters are introduced with Diggs’s twisted thoughts as he grows into full adolescence driven by sexual needs and the physical power to fulfill those needs.
He lingered under the tree, giving her time to fall asleep. Then he laid his binoculars in the pine needles, crawled out from under the branches, vaulted her white picket fence, and crossed the wet grass to the rear door. There, an overhead lamp was burning. He reached up and gave the bulb a twist, extinguishing the light.
He tried the door. It was locked. He considered breaking a pane of glass to reach the inside latch, but that would make too much noise. Instead, he edged along the back of the house, looking for another way inside.
Candles can be soothing, aromatic, and perfect for adding some warmth to a cold winter's night. But if you prefer a side of “creepy critter” with your candles, these might just be the ones for you. These candles will be available at PyroPet later this month, just in time to send those winter blues running—or maybe just send you running away screaming “Kill it, kill it with fire!” Either way, we think it'll be a fun addition!
The Black-Eyed Blonde, by Benjamin Black, brings back Raymond Chandler's famous PI Philip Marlowe as he follows a seductive, young heiress into the riskiest case of his career (available March 4, 2014).
Channeling Raymond Chandler, Benjamin Black has brought Philip Marlowe — yes, that Philip Marlowe — back to life for a new adventure on the mean streets of Bay City, California. It is the early 1950s, Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson. Marlowe sets off on his search, but almost immediately discovers that Peterson’s disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City’s richest families and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune.
Chapter 1
It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it’s being watched. Cars trickled past in the street below the dusty window of my office, and a few of the good folks of our fair city ambled along the sidewalk, men in hats, mostly, going nowhere. I watched a woman at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood, waiting for the light to change. Long legs, a slim cream jacket with high shoulders, navy blue pencil skirt. She wore a hat, too, a skimpy affair that made it seem as if a small bird had alighted on the side of her hair and settled there happily. She looked left and right and left again—she must have been so good when she was a little girl—then crossed the sunlit street, treading gracefully on her own shadow.
[Read the full excerpt of The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black]
Brooklyn Graves by Triss Stein is the second traditional mystery featuring historian Erica Donato, who'll research Tiffany glass as well as the murder of a family friend (available March 4th, 2014).
Erica Donato is a single mother of a teenage daughter and an overworked, underpaid, dissertation-writing apprentice historian. In the space of one twenty-four hour period, all of the balls she has been juggling drop around her. At work, she is assigned a historical research project involving the Tiffany family—yes, that Tiffany. Between exploring dilapidated mausoleums containing Tiffany artwork in Green-Wood Cemetery and digging through turn of the century letters, Erica must complete all of her other academic work.
Then Erica’s daughter, Chris, drops a bombshell. A good friend of the family, Dima, who worked as a custodian at Chris’ school, has been killed. He was shot through the head and found lying on his front lawn. In the days after the news breaks, Erica tries to help her friend, Natalya, Dima’s wife, navigate the waters of police interviews and grief. However, as she works to help Natalya, Erica discovers there’s more to this family than meets the eye.
And history doesn’t always stay in the past.
Brooklyn Graves is the second novel in the Erica Donato series. Here history meets modern Brooklyn. With her contacts and background in New York history, Erica is where the past and present meet. She sees connections and links where others don’t.
Neat, historical touches are woven throughout the story. Erica’s first brush with Tiffany artwork takes place, macabrely enough, in a cemetery: Green-Wood Cemetery. There are mausoleums with stained glass windows attributed to Tiffany’s work. Erica visits the cemetery with the preeminent Tiffany expert, Dr. Thomas Flint. Together they learn there may have been damage to the windows, a circumstance that greatly bothers Dr. Flint and causes Erica a mountain of follow-up work.
Board Stiff by Annelise Ryan is the 5th in the Mattie Winston Mystery series about a small-town coroner who'll investigate the death of a nursing home owner (available March 4, 2014).
Mattie Winston is a nurse-turned-coroner by profession, living in a small town in Wisconsin. Mattie is tough, never dainty, and sweet on Steve Hurley, a local homicide detective whose ex-wife, Kate, just moved back in with him. When Kate shows up on his doorstep, Hurley finds out that she’s not so much his ex-wife as his current wife (since she never signed the divorce papers) and she’s not so much alone, as she's traveling with the 15 year-old daughter that he never knew he had. Feeling bad, Hurley lets them stay with him, causing Mattie to enter a downward slide. Losing your boyfriend is one thing, but finding out he’s still married and has a daughter is more than most people can handle.
As the story opens, we find Mattie attending a mandatory therapy session, ordered by her boss, Izzy, at the coroner’s office. It’s a requirement to getting her old job back, which she desperately wants. She might as well work for the coroner if she’s not going to date Hurley. Since they broke up, the conflict of interest issue is a moot point. In addition, she’s been spending a little too much time at the casino, and kind of needs to stop.
In case you missed it, last week Criminal Element took a look at this year’s Academy Awards nominees and ranked them based solely on three categories: murder, mystery, and mayhem. In researching these films, CrimeHQ found a list detailing the 25 deadliest films based on total body count.
The list mixes critically acclaimed films pretty evenly with less distinguished ones, including three Best Picture winners: Braveheart, with 184 bodies, Titanic with 307 bodies, and the winner, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, with 836 bodies!
And in case you were wondering about movies where planets, planes, or cities explode, the count is just reflective of on-screen body counts.
HT: Thanks to Movie Bodie Counts for tallying the totals and to Randal Olson for creating the chart.
City of Darkness and Light by Rhys Bowen, the thirteenth novel in the Molly Murphy historical series, follows the young mother to Paris in 1905, where she loses track of friends and stumbles onto a murder (available March 4, 2014).
Molly Sullivan, nee Molly Murphy, is a fighter. She’s had to be. She escaped from Ireland and is wanted by the law in New York City. She’s become a private detective, facing all manners of dangerous criminals. Now married to police Captain Daniel Sullivan and mother to baby Liam, she winds up traveling to Paris, but it’s not as glamorous as she’d expected. Firstly, she’s escaping the Cosa Nostra gang, who are presumably the culprits behind the house fire that killed her nanny and almost cost Molly her life. Secondly, when she arrives at the rented apartment of her friends Sid and Gus, she discovers them missing. Ever intrepid, Molly sets off to find them, navigating the unfamiliar city and language with her usual plucky courage.
Along the way, she lands in the midst of the burgeoning Parisian art scene. Bowen has great fun with inserting Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Gertrude Stein and Mary Cassatt into the story. Molly’s usual stomping grounds of Greenwich Village are replaced by her wonder at the culture of Paris, though she has little time for sightseeing as while investigating the mystery of her missing friends, she stumbles ontothe murder of a renowned painter Reynold Bryce.
Many people believe that Alice Crimmins got away with the 1965 murder of her two children. But could the Crimmins case have provided fodder for a future child killer?
Alice Crimmins always maintained her innocence, but the police and much of the press believed Alice Crimmins was a slut and therefore a murderer. She was convicted of manslaughter, but that conviction was overturned. She was retried in 1971 and convicted of the first-degree murder of her son and manslaughter of her daughter. In 1973, she was again set free. Upon review, the Appellate Division reversed the murder conviction, and affirmed the manslaughter conviction, but Crimmins never returned to jail. While in jail she had married her wealthy lover, Anthony Grace. She lived with him, and his money, until his death.
Fast forward to October 25, 1994. Susan Smith, then 23, claims that a black man hijacked her car and drove away with her children inside. A nation watches horrified as the grieving mother makes emotional pleas on television for the safe return of her two small boys, three-year old Michael, and 14-month old Alex. Nine days later, the children are found dead, strapped into their seats in the car, lying at the bottom of John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina.
The police arrested Smith and tried her for murder.
Was history repeating itself? Or is it possible that Susan Smith knew Alice Crimmins’s story? A made-for-TV movie called A Question of Guilt based on the Crimmins affair came out in 1978. John Guare wrote a play inspired by Crimmins, Landscape of the Body, that opened in 1977 and has since been restaged many times. Two Small Bodies by Neal Bell was made into a film in 1993.
Did Smith decide that if one slut could murder her kids and walk away with a rich husband, why not two?
Sheer speculation, to be sure, but Smith might easily have seen some of herself in Alice Crimmins. Both were in troubled marriages, both had wealthy men on the side, both had two children cramping their style.
Thirty seconds into the show, and already I’m smiling. The theme music by Angelo Badalamenti is a slow, sugary mix of synth and strings that’s, well, goofy. Along with the green neon credits, the music practically screams 1990. But what the hell, there’s no shame in screaming 1990. (The beginning of Casablanca screams 1942, etc.) These credits go on for a surprisingly long time, though, and the longer they go on, the more interesting the music becomes. Or perhaps a better way to put it is to say that by the end of the credits, I’m not so sure they scream 1990 anymore. Yes, they seem very much of their time, but there’s also a deliberate oddness to them, an almost stubborn insistence on pathos that I am shortly to learn will be a consistent quality throughout this pilot episode.
We begin with the discovery of a dead girl, naked and wrapped in plastic next to a river in the logging town of Twin Peaks, Washington. Ah ha. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” The line itself floats up from the past like a question from a game of Trivial Pursuit.
Thank goodness she has a tote bag!
This bounty of Good and Evil from our sweepstakes found its way to winner Pat D., who was nice enough to send us a picture!
We're sharing it with you, too, so you'll see CrimeHQ delivers. And, no, we simply can't imagine why people who read crime stories have developed such suspicious minds.
Last episode, we saw the true detectives' fiery breakup. Maggie dealt Martin a dose of his own unfaithful medicine, we met founder of the Wellspring schools Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle, and modern-day Rust and Martin met after leaving the interviews with Gilbough and Papania. Rust talks Martin into a discussion over beer, and Martin follows Rust's truck… but only after checking the cylinder of his revolver.
The episode's title, “After You've Gone,” plays on the break-up angle. We meet the former detectives in a roadhouse. “Angel of the Morning” by Juice Newton plays on the juke, a bittersweet love song that references freedom and bondage:
There'll be no strings to bind your hands/not if my love can't bind your heart
Cohle is now a bartender and Martin is a private dick, rather fitting, since that's what he thinks with. They verbally spar like exes. “I don't dwell in the past,” Martin says. Rust counters. He goes on to give his old partner a hint of what he's found about the Dora Lange case, and Martin is about to walk away when he lays it on the line: “A man pays his debts. We left something undone.”
Beware: spoilers and the spoiled will follow.
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