Long Ago and Far Away

I wrote a while back about the Secret Mall Apartment on Netflix, mostly about the social conditions behind it.  And I only briefly mentioned my memories of weird living with fellow artists and the assorted art, all-nighters, constant talk, crazy schemes, weekend parties, home movies, endless music, artwork, and all the general insanity that goes with it. 

Memories are kind of like seeing your
image reflected in the water, aren't they?  

Back in the mid 70s I shared a house in Atlanta with 5-6 other people. (It varied:  My boyfriend and I moved in together, but broke up six months later, and about time, too.  Similar things happened to others.) We each paid $25 per month, and we sometimes had trouble making that. Every room in the house except the kitchen, bathroom, and living room (and a lot of people crashed on the couch) was turned into a bedroom. 

After the break up, my room was the back porch, which had wrap around windows and a gas space heater I lit with a match. I loved it. It was, for me, the equivalent of Tarzan's treehouse, my private sanctuary. I made a desk from a door on boxes with my typewriter and paper and a broken down chair; a mattress on the floor; a makeshift closet; a huge row of books, and FREEDOM!!!!! 

On a tight budget. 

Did I mention poverty? We were all broke, all the time. Like the Secret Mall Apartment artists, none of us were above moving through a restaurant and pocketing the leftovers as we went. We shopped at the day-old bread store (5 loaves for a buck), which also carried such delicacies as dented cans of tunafish (I still can't stand the smell of tuna), smashed boxes of Kraft Mac'n'Cheese (we used water instead of milk in it), and other yummy treats. The only thing I still like from those days is oatmeal. 

I got all my clothes at GoodWill or a couple of the vintage clothing stores in Little Five Points. Including my wedding outfit: a WW2 wedding suit in tattle-tale grey, complete with a half-moon hat with a veil for $15. We had a 1930s-40s themed wedding and we all looked GREAT. 

When we did splurge on dining out, we went to Doby's on Ponce de Leon and got a vegetable plate (4 veg, cornbread) or breakfast or 1 meat, 2 veg, cornbread or biscuit for about $1.75-$2.25. We were indeed the working poor, working all the time, part-time or full-time jobs at all hours of the day or night and then came home to work on our own stuff. I could type 90 wpm, so I worked as a secretarial temp around the city as much as I could during the week and filled in on weekends or slow work times at the corner market a couple of blocks down the road. We ALL did shifts at that market. 

It's because of that last gig that I watch Kevin Smith's Clerks with great nostalgia. And it was just as crappy a corner market as Kevin's Quick Stop Groceries:  No fruit, no veg, just chips, crackers, jerky, pop, etc. If you lived on their food, you'd die. Unless you were pickled in alcohol, which some were. Every Saturday, the local delivery truck dropped off two cases of Polly Peachtree aftershave. The first time that happened, I had no idea why these suddenly appeared, but I found out on Sunday morning: Georgia was a blue-law state, and while no alcohol could be sold on Sundays, the aftershave was 51% alcohol. So all the winos showed up in a long, long line. They bought two bottles: they'd drink the one and puke it up, drink the second and keep it down... 

The liquor and cigarettes were kept behind the cash register. Next to the door there was a bin by the door of paperbacks with their covers ripped off. It didn't take long for me to find out that they weren't just bargain basement fiction, they were detective / spy / porn novels that were so bad they defied belief that anyone had ever written, much less actually sold any of them. But they gave me hope that I'd get published, too, because I sure as hell knew I could write better than THAT. 

There was also a gang that ran the neighborhood, and they strolled through regularly, shoplifting. One night it finally happened: one of the guys on night shift got a gun poked in his face. He emptied out the cash register (none of us were going to die for the owners, who were barely paying us minimum wage), came home, and we all agreed we had to find other work. 

We also made home movies, but get your mind out of the gutter, they weren't the dirty kind. One of the guys had a Super 8 film camera, and he and I cowrote parodies like "Combination Reefer Madness/First Date" (with me as the ingenue), "Dung Stew" (Kung Fu was big at the time), etc. Everyone had a part, including the dog - "Ringo the SuperDog!" - who rescued me on the railroad tracks early one summer morning... 

Meanwhile, I was teaching myself writing by writing like a maniac and reading a stack of books every weekend. I had a guitar and wrote songs and poetry and eventually my first short story. 

One of the guys painted this great mural on his bedroom wall, so that became a thing. Murals went up everywhere, now waiting to be discovered by some future art historian. There was a lot of experimenting in mediums, styles, genres, etc. 

There were fights and diatribes, discussions and debates. People walking out, coming back a couple of days later and everything picked back up. Everyone had something to say, and we said it endlessly, especially with enough beer or wine or weed in us. And we were young enough to stay up all night, show up at work the next day, and come home and (occasionally) do it again.  That or crash so hard we looked like we were dead.

Yes, there was a lot of sex. Or hope for sex:  once a couple of the guys had somehow gotten a date with two student nurses, and went out and rented a porn flick to show them - you can't fix stupid. (Pro tip: probably shouldn't START a date with porn.) But then years later, a friend of ours invited us over to his apartment to join him and his date to see a French film that had just come out: Betty Blue. Turned out it was a first date, and it opened with about 5 minutes of hard-core banging. It's a guy thing, I guess. 

And there was also falling in love.  The real stuff:

Allan and me, 1978 - madly in love and ignoring everyone else at the party.  

Six months later we were married... and still are.

Told you.  Half-moon hat with a veil…

Independence Day

 

Once upon a time there was a storyline, an agreed-upon narrative.  We may have had different ideas about America, but I think we made some basic assumptions.  Of course, that’s hindsight.  Looking back, with a more jaundiced eye, we see it colored by class, and race, and money.

I spent part of every summer at my grandmother’s place on Salters Point, in South Dartmouth, below Cape Cod.  On the 4^th of July, old Major Codman blew on a conch shell, and all the kids lined up in costume, for the Horribles Parade.  I quite honestly hadn’t thought of that in many, many years – it just popped into my head, unbidden.  I remember my sister, one year, with an old 78 tied on her head, and a smooth beach stone taped to it, probably six or seven years old, going to the parade as Rock’n’Roll. 

Some years later, driving down from Canada, I crossed into the U.S. and found myself along coastal Maine, another place I’d spend summers, with each of the small seaside towns having at least hung bunting up, for the 4^th, but more usually decorating the volunteer fire department’s pump truck, for a one-vehicle parade.  I got as far as Hancock, where there’s a small village square on Route 1, actually a triangle, where the old Bangor & Aroostook crosses the highway, and in that grassy triangle is a modest obelisk, inscribed with the names of Hancock boys who went to war in 1941.  My uncle Charlie’s name is on there, and his close pal Hugh Joy; they came back, after the war, and started a garage and repair shop together.  The names of the men from Hancock who didn’t come back are marked with a small star.

I lived in Provincetown, out at the end of Cape Cod, for almost fifteen years.  They had a pretty sizable parade for a town of three thousand people.  (That’s the number, year ‘round - in the summer season, July and August, it seems like ten thousand people.)  Anyway, the fire trucks and the EMT’s and the cops, and school floats, and the VFW, and a marching band, and drag queens and local businesses and just people playing dress-up.  It’s colorful, and fun, and expressive.  I like to think it celebrates an America we’re all a part of. 

Going back, again, to when I was growing up, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, of my childhood was perhaps a parochial place, the college presence well-established, but not so you really noticed.  I didn’t.  Harvard Square, for me, was about the Brigham’s ice cream and the Woolworth’s Five and Dime.  Woolworth’s had a lunch counter, and notions – thread and buttons and needles, potholders and aprons – and in the back they sold goldfish and guppies, and you could carry one home in a plastic bag (very carefully), to put in the aquarium. 

I clearly remember the narrative changing.  Down in Greensboro, North Carolina, four young black college students sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and when they ordered donuts and coffee, were refused service.  This turned into a nationwide boycott, and in Cambridge, we stopped getting hot dogs at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. 

Four Young Men in Greensboro

Salters, and Hancock Point, and Provincetown, these places conjure up what we imagine to be small-town virtues, and even the Cambridge that I grew up in seemed pretty small to me.  I don’t think that means unsophisticated, but in our minds, at least, it probably stands in for less complicated or adversarial.  The world is confusing, and threatening.  We can take refuge in easy answers, or simple storylines, a sanitized, imaginary past. 

I want to think we’ve outgrown that, that generic refuge.  I want to believe we can tell ourselves more complicated or ambiguous stories.  America is large, it holds multitudes.

EMERGENCY: Sherlock Holmes 2.0

 

Wedding Words

 

My word count is down this week. In my defense, I’ve been distracted by Independence Day, the World Cup, and celebrity weddings.

Jeff Belmonte Creative Commons

My invitation to Taylor and Travis’s wedding is, I’m sure, lost in the pile of unsorted mail on the dining room table. If they’re reading this, I’d like to publicly apologize for missing the fete. I’m glad it went off without me. I’ve been by Crate and Barrel to buy a gift, but I couldn’t find Kelce or Swift listed in their registry.

In truth, the celebrity wedding I’ve been thinking about was Dua Lipa marrying Callum Turner. She sings. He acts. I confess that I am unfamiliar with either artist’s oeuvre or even their career highlights. What caught my attention was a story describing how they met.

I clicked on a Huffington Post article about the newlywed couple. (It’s one of things I’m prone to do when avoiding work.) In addition to details about their splashy multi-day Italian wedding festival, the story related their first encounter. Turner reports that the pair were seated next to one another at a mutual friend’s birthday dinner. They discovered they were both reading the same book. They had both, in fact, just finished the first chapter.

“So we’re on the same page,” Turner claims to have said to his future wife.

A good line nestled in a charming story—this meet cute could kick off a movie on the Hallmark Channel. (In my fantasy version, they bonded over my book. In truth, the pair were both reading Trust, by Hernán Díaz.)

The HuffPost article went on to discuss the role of reading generally in dating profiles. Reading as a social cue for potential partners is not limited to Turner and Lipa. On a dating profile, when one is seeking a possible connection with similar interests, emotional maturity, and a splash of intelligence, the books people choose may provide some of the best evidence.  The idea—what you read says a lot about you—may not be a startling psychological insight. But it was good to see that reading played an important role in a social media culture. The article felt less like celebrity trivia and more like a validation of life choices.

Apparently, it is not just what people read. The habit of reading is also attractive. As generations become defined by shorter attention spans, the notion that a person can unplug from devices and focus their attention on a three-hundred-page book signals that this potential mate possesses patience and curiosity; quiet markers of desirable traits in a serious relationship. In short, reading can make you hot.

As I mentioned earlier, by reading the piece, I learned that Dua and Callum got hitched. Congratulations and best wishes. But the article’s real benefit to me was that it added to my growing realization of reading as a shared event. I spent most of my reading career thinking of it as a solitary activity. I retired to a quiet space to work through a book on my own. Writing, however, began to reshape my thinking. In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King observes that a character begins in the writer’s mind but is finished in the reader’s. When readers talk with me at book clubs about my stories, I hear the details they’ve filled in about my principal characters. They’ve sometimes taken them places I never imagined. Together, we’ve created something. These discussions helped me realize that readers and writers are participating not in two solitary activities but rather in a single communal experience. As I’ve grown, I view writing/reading less as monologue and more as conversation.

The HuffPost article develops this idea. Books spark dialogue and arouse our brains. They help bring people together. As readers and writers, we help build community. So read a story, then tell someone about it. You never know what might happen next.

The HuffPost article can be found here. The Latest 'Green Flag' For Modern Daters? Reading. | HuffPost Life

 

BSP: Black Cat Weekly ran my story, “An Alien Idea,” in the June 28th issue. My story, “Thou Shalt Knot,” appeared in Boots, BBQ, and Bloodshed, the SINC North Dallas anthology on July 1st. If anyone marries because of these stories, please let me know.

 

Until next time.

"Patience"

Diversity may be a toxic word in some circles these days, but mysteries continue their quest for variety and novelty in both sleuths and situations. Detectives are alcoholics and depressives; they suffer everything from paralysis to Alzheimers to Tourette's. They have dependent relatives, obstreperous children, difficult partners, and addictions both novel and traditional.

Lately, they have also been on the autism spectrum. Professor T can be enjoyed in either of his Dutch or British incarnations, while the French Astrid, an autistic librarian involved in crime solving, now appears in an English language version as Patience Evans, in Patience (PBS). 

In a novel twist, Ella Maisy Purvis, who plays the title character, is herself autistic, and one of the recurring events in this six part series is Patience's meetings with other neurodivergent people in her support group. Although the series has been criticized for a rather stereotypical picture of high functioning autism, Purvis makes Patience a fine performer, charming and effective.

And this cannot have been as easy as it sounds, given that her character is easily overwhelmed by noise, confusion, or congestion. Lacking a sense of humor, she is brutally candid and painfully honest, a difficult person all round, especially since she has a fabulous memory for forensic details – and is not shy about correcting other people's errors. Combine all this with a compulsive work ethic and you do not have an easy colleague.

But her extreme, if awkward, talents make her increasingly valuable to DI Bea Metcalf ( Laura Fraser) a driven, if slightly disorganized York city detective. Soon DI Metcalf is venturing down into the vast, and restricted, documents library and returning not just with useful information but also with Patience, who is master of the domaine in nearly every sense.

Indeed, her lair in the depths of the public safety complex is as distinctive as Sherlock Holmes' cluttered rooms in Baker Street. I suspect the brass has no idea that she converts a number of expensive flat files to hold her constructions of cases, complete with documents and photos. They certainly will have missed the enormous glass fronted cage for her pet mice. 

Of course, if a series has a great brain, the plots must be complex, the criminal's MO unusual, the fatal dose, unexpected. Patience, the series, goes all out in this regard, constructing complicated puzzles that may stretch credibility but not the talents of Patience, the character. The solutions she devises are admirable, but the really attractive features of this series lie not in the complicated plots but in something more fundamental: the portrait of a young person venturing out into the world.

In this case, a world she certainly never made. The noted autistic animal husbandry specialist, Temple Grandin, once described her life as being "like an anthropologist on Mars'. Purvis gives a similar sense to Patience's life. Not conventionally brave like the classic detective, her courage comes from her sometimes painful confrontations with daily life. A poignant desire to prove herself  useful propels her into situations that frighten and puzzle her but which slowly increase her confidence and her understanding of strange 'normal' people.

If the series sometimes requires a suspension of disbelief, Patience's character, and her efforts to master a world that she finds continually baffling, ring true. Ironically, a series with baffling crimes and a relatively high body count turns out to celebrate the heroism of ordinary life.

####

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

 

BAM!

© 3DKiwi incredibly detailed DIY orrery

Bricks and Mortars

What? You haven’t heard about Reckless Ben and the Lego legacy larceny?

I’ve intended for weeks to write about a series of crimes in Oregon and Utah. They didn’t begin with Reckless Ben Schneider, but the scene involves alleged crooked franchisors, alleged crooked cops, and, dare I suggest, an alleged crooked judge. All of them are dumber than a box of plastic blocks — which, ironically, started the whole farce. As SleuthSayers states and prudence requires, I must insert the word alleged liberally.

And by plastic blocks, I mean bricks, the official Lego term for those small and incredibly expensive plastic chips embraced by children of every age. “Legos for adults” is a thing now, especially sets priced in the hundreds of dollars and brilliant user designed mechanical computers, calculators, clocks, calendars, and complex devices by frustrated engineers.

Legos are powerful. When a certain public official proposed seizing Greenland, Denmark snorted and uttered one word: “Lego.” Immediately the U.S. saluted and stood down as the plastic barons continued taking over the planet.

Following the plot of nefarious doings is difficult, so I’ve included a handy chart of the bad guys and the good.

We begin with Gary Mansell, an ill and elderly man in Virginia who’s facing his remaining time on this mortal coil. His hobby became an investment obsession, and he purchased Lego sets until he had amassed the largest private Lego Star Wars collection on the continent. He planned to cash in his gazillion sets to help finance his grandchildren’s education.

Toward that end, his son Bryan took on the task of liquidating the collection and arranged with a Keizer, Oregon Bricks and Minifigs (BAM) store to sell the collection on consignment. Store franchisees Chrystal and Benjamin Gorman initially estimated a worth in excess of $200,000, although some say less. However, with certain individual sets running as high as $10–15k and some minifigs valued in the hundreds, $200,000 doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Every month, the Gormans sent checks to the Mansells… until they didn’t. When Bryan investigated, he learned the Gormans had been unceremoniously booted out and new franchise owners had been appointed: Brandon Best, who claimed he didn’t know nuthin’ about birthin’ no babies, and Josh Johnson, who told the Mansells to get lost or he’d call the cops.

Enter Reckless Ben, who operates YouTube and Patreon channels. Ben helps people recover loss of money and loss of dignity. He agreed to help the Mansells. That’s when the game changed. Reckless Ben might look like he’s seventeen (he’s actually thirty) with hair styled by fanjets, but he’s phlegmatic and very, very creative.

Thus began ducking and weaving. Corporate Bricks & Minifigs has a reputation for bullying, discouraging legal action by threatening to drag out litigation until they financially drain the opposition. Ammon and Matt McNeff didn’t do themselves any favors by not doing the honest thing: We don’t know nuthin’ about missing Legos, and anyway they aren’t worth what the Mansells claim, and they violated our consignment policy, if the Legos exist, which they don’t, and if they did, they don’t deserve them back, and…

But worse than the McNeffs was Josh Johnson, the new franchise owner who lives not in Oregon but in American Fork, Utah, population ~33,500. Much of the drama centered around Ben attempting to serve papers on Johnson, who went out of his way to avoid service. Some reports suggest Johnson is an attorney, and if so, knowingly lied about court documents being fake and that he could refuse service. Even though the cop verified Ben was telling the truth about the legitimacy of the papers, the lawfulness of the process server, and the fact that Johnson could not refuse service, Johnson racked up sufficient lies to get the American Fork police to arrest Ben, claiming his family lived in fear of their lives.

This type of public corruption isn’t a matter of bribery, but “You ain’t from around here,” a willingness to accede to a lying local rather than do the correct and legal thing for an outsider. At one juncture, a cop tells Ben, “We do things different here.”

Thus, day after day at the behest of Johnson, American Fork police tailed Reckless Ben, stopping him multiple times on false pretenses — such as running a stop sign when police cameras clearly show a full stop. It appears Lt. Quinn Adamson so roughly handled Schneider that he apparently dislocated Ben’s shoulder. In another incident, American Fork police claimed Ben was transporting heroin and spent three hours taking apart his car. When Johnson claimed the missing Legos were actually stolen by Ben, police raided his B&B and arrested everyone inside. Throughout, police kept muting their microphones as they scratched their heads trying to find reasons to arrest Ben. However, in court, a recording appears to reveal a judge colluding with a prosecutor looking for a way to jail Ben.

The saga is extensive and entertaining, thanks to the humor and imagination of Reckless Ben. The case came to me early on, thanks to John Bryan, “The Civil Rights Lawyer” (TCRL), and shortly thereafter by other attorneys I follow such as Legal Eagle. Soon it seemed every outraged lawyer was commenting, and the case swept into other channels before making the leap to The Wall Street Journal. The Dadvocate dedicated one of her slots to the story from an entirely different viewpoint, altogether avoiding mention of cops and lawyers.

In one dirty trick, Bricks & Minifigs, used to getting their own way in court, sent a takedown notice to Patreon, demanding Reckless Ben's account be shut down, content removed, and defunded. Here’s how that went:

Monday Update

After this story went to press, another thread came to light. After BAM seized control of their shop, the Gormans claimed in the dark of night, Brandon Best returned with a U-Haul truck and carted off the creme of the crop. McNeffs denied it, Johnson denied it, and Best insisted he arrived and left in a rental car. Security cameras picked up nothing. Only a neighboring shopkeeper thought he saw a U-Haul the night of the seizure. No one gave the Gormans’ cry much credence.

And then, in a episode out of a crime thriller, someone leafed through security recordings and zoomed in on the window of a neighboring storefront. There in the reflection sat a U-Haul box truck.

So push aside your 2500 piece Lego rendering of Hogwarts, grab a bowl of popcorn, and google Reckless Ben, Legos, BAM, and/or American Fork. It’s good for an afternoon’s entertainment in the guise of crime research. At least that’s what I claim.

Treasure Island

  

A few days ago my fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken posted a column about two stories he'd recently had published that drew heavily on his own life experiences. I suspect all of us have occasionally used our  personal experiences to provide story material--and I seem to be doing it more often in recent years. Maybe because I'm getting older, and spending more time with my own memories. (Notice I didn't say daydreaming.)

Seriously, though, sometimes it does pay to write what you know--and what we know best are things that have happened to us.

One example of that was my story "Ship Island," which appeared this past Sunday in Issue #252 of Black Cat Weekly, and which, coincidentally, was Michael's pick-of-the-week.

Ship Island

My first idea for that story came from a booksigning I did long ago in the town of Biloxi, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I met a lady there whose family had for many years run a passenger ferry back and forth to Ship Island, one of the barrier islands several miles offshore. I talked with her a long time, and found her tales interesting and delightful. I've always loved the Coast anyway, and had once lived down there for seven months, in an apartment on the beach, during my stay in the Air Force. I'd even been to Ship Island myself, on several occasions.

Anyhow, when I returned home from this signing, I did some research on the island and its history, and decided it'd be fun to write a mystery story about it, and specifically about Fort Massachusetts, a 19th-century brick fort that's still standing, on the west end of the island. It's a fascinating place to visit.

Fort Massachusetts

I was already thinking, at that time, of doing some kind of story about a pair of lifelong rough-around-the-edges friends who reminded me a bit of Texas author Joe Lansdale's wonderful characters Hap and Leonard--and, as sometimes happens, these two guys I had created in my head wound up being the heroes of my newly-conceived Ship Island story. The plot is more than a little weird: They find, tucked away in a recently-deceased relative's possessions, a rough map pointing to a fortune in Spanish gold, supposedly buried long ago inside a Civil War-era fort on one end of an island off the Mississippi coast, and decide to secretly sail to the island, dig up the hidden gold, and become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Their grand adventure, however, turns out to be harder and more dangerous than they'd figured, since they soon discover they aren't the only ones with a map to the treasure.

Writing the story itself turned out to be not hard but easy--in fact, it was one of the easiest and most enjoyable stories I've ever written, and I think much of that was because of my own still-vivid memories of the island and the fort and the trip there and back. Also, I was comforted by the fact that most of the things I was describing were real and accurate because I had seen them firsthand. I wrote the whole story in one long sitting.

Fast-forwarding a while, I eventually sold that story to Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and when that magazine gasped its last breath and put all four feet in the air before "Ship Island" could be published, editor Michael Bracken suggested it for a future issue of Black Cat Weekly. (Thank you, old friend.)

Other stories that have relied a great deal on my own past were "Calculus 1" (The Saturday Evening Post), based on a cool but ill-advised college prank; "Jackpot Mode" (Strand Magazine) about an ATM system I worked with during my years at IBM; "The Winslow Tunnel" (Amazon Shorts), based on one of our family vacations; "Knight Music" (Woman's World), from my memories as part of an amateur band; "Cargo" (Black Cat Weekly), about a particularly strange night during my Air Force years; "The Jumper" (Crimestalker Casebook), based on yet another misguided college experience; and many others.

Now, my questions for today. Have any of you, my fellow writers, incorporated your own memories in your short stories or novels? If so, did you find it hard to fictionalize those incidents, and maybe make the events more interesting than they were in real life? Did you have fun doing it? How often do you seem to use your past experiences as story fodder? I know some of you have responded to similar questions asked in Michael's column the other day, but I'd love to hear more examples.

Meanwhile, if you see this issue of Black Cat Weekly, I hope you'll like my buried-treasure story.

And--before I forget--HAPPY 250th BIRTHDAY, US of A!

On Rereading

My guest today is Tom Milani. He's been generously filling in for me while I've juggled several deadlines. I always enjoy his thoughtful pieces, much like his today on rereading. He has me reflecting on the books I return to and why. I suspect you will, too. Here's more from Tom.

On Rereading

by Tom Milani

I like to reread books from certain authors. Knowing the plot and characters allows me to focus on things 

I may have missed the first time through, and I get something new each time I reread. There’s also comfort in the familiar. As I told another writer, it’s like watching a favorite movie (e.g., Collateral) a second or third time: it never disappoints.

Here I want to talk about two of the authors I regularly reread, what attracts me to their writing, and what I think they do particularly well.

George Pelecanos

For any crime writers in the DC metropolitan area, George Pelecanos needs no introduction. Author of over twenty novels, screenwriter on numerous shows (most famously The Wire), he’s firmly established in the crime fiction community. Pelecanos writes about the working class, people living in neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park and often east of the Anacostia River, markers of economic and racial divides. He also peppers his books with local music references and venues, which adds a bit of nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the area. For me, his principal themes are what being a man means and the value of blue-collar work and public service. He does all this while telling fast-paced, compelling stories.

Several of his novels have recurring characters—Derek Strange, Dimitri Karras, Marcus Clay—so reading those books is like being among friends, or at least people you know well. One of my favorites of Pelecanos’s books is probably one of his lesser-known works. A Firing Offence and Nick’s Trip, his first two novels, are first-person PI stories featuring Nick Stefanos. Shoedog, his third novel, is a multiple-POV standalone. Then came Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, his last first-person PI novel (though not his last PI novel). For me, it’s his best title and also one of his darkest books.

It begins, “Like most of the trouble that’s happened in my life or that I’ve caused to happen, the trouble that happened that night started with a drink.” 

Nick Stefanos wakes up after having driven blackout drunk to the banks of the Anacostia River, only to find a murdered teenager. By the end of the novel, some justice has been served, but it’s the roughest kind, and Nick is back where he began: “Inside, the room was silent, bathed in blue neon. I went behind the bar. I poured myself a bourbon and pulled a bottle of beer from the ice.”

Elizabeth Hand

A multi-genre, multi-award-winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written four mysteries featuring anti-hero Cass Neary. In these four novels, Elizabeth Hand balances deep dives into photography, mythology, and history with Cass Neary’s dissolution and longing, her addiction and trauma, all while telling compelling stories. Cass’s fifteen minutes of fame began with Dead Girls, her book of photography published after she gained notoriety from her art show of the same name. 

Cass describes how she chooses her subjects: “I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they’ve been, what’s destroyed them, even after they’re dead.” Cass herself is also damaged, perhaps from the death of her mother, perhaps from the benign neglect of her father, but comes unglued after a sexual assault.

All this backstory, found in Generation Loss, plays a role in the three succeeding books in the series: Available Dark, Hard Light, and The Book of Lamps and Banners, but it’s the last one in the series that I want to focus on. The first few sentences establish the mood for the novel and provide enough detail so that even readers who haven’t read the previous books can form a solid picture of Cass’s character: Much of the tube was still shut down. Another car had plowed through a Go Happy London! tour group the day before, this time near Tower Bridge. I’d taken the night train from Penzance, nodding off between shots of Jack Daniel’s before trying to resurrect my amphetamine jag with one of the Vyvanse I’d stolen a few days earlier.

The novel’s title is a reference to an ancient text of the same name, “rumored to have been written by Aristotle for his student Alexander the Great. Aristotle supposedly illustrated it, and there were handwritten notes to Alexander as well, and references to other people Aristotle knew. Eudemus. Plato.” The physical text has power, people around it die, and people who want to own it will kill.

But there’s more. Tindra Bergstrand, a gifted programmer, is developing Ludus Mentis, an app to heal. As she tells Cass, “But once I get the bugs worked out, the app can be used for all sorts of things. Trauma, insomnia, ADHD. Regulating mood disorders without drugs. Addiction. Libido. Everything.” The bugs are the problem, bringing trauma to the surface, rather than healing it, but the code embedded within the ancient text is the solution: 

Whoever wrote it had figured out how a combination of lights and symbols can change the way we think. Their book drew on knowledge that had already been around for thousands of years, things the ancient Egyptians knew, and the Sumerians, the Minoans. So “lamps and banners” is just shorthand for what we call code.

Cass’s skepticism informs her actions at the end of the novel. I hope Elizabeth Hand writes another Cass Neary mystery; the last lines suggest she might: 

Gryffin watched me as I stood, his expression almost wistful. 

He raised his glass to me and nodded. “Stay out of trouble.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said, and headed for the door.

What books do you like to reread, and why? Let me know in the comments.

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Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and online. His stories have been shortlisted twice for a Derringer, been an honorable mention for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025 and selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and for The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, will be reissued by Open Road Media this fall.