The Best is My Guest

This is my seventeenth review of the best short mysteries of the year. 

If you mention this list, and I hope you do, please refer to it as something like "Robert Lopresti's best short mysteries of the year list at SleuthSayers," NOT as the "SleuthSayers' best of..." because my fellow bloggers are ruggedly independent and may well have opinions of my own. 

18 stories made my list this year, a tie for the highest with 2017. 11 were written by men and 7 by women.  And that brings up a question that has been bugging me for a while: men have always outnumbered women on my best-of list. Does that coincide with the number of stories I read or is something else going on? So last year I kept track of the gender of the authors I read.  These charts tell the story. You can decide what the results mean.

As long as we are looking at statistics, two sources were responsible for half the winners:  Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, with 5 stories, and Level Best with 4, Wildside scored  2.

5 stories were funny, 4, historic, and 4 had science fiction/fantasy elements. 3 were by foreign authors and 3 by my fellow SleuthSayers.

One author made the list twice this year, which I believe has happened only 4 times before.  And one author has achieved a record-breaking score of 6 appearances.

Okay, let's get started.

Andrews, Donna, "Dirty Deeds,"  in Malice Domestic: Mystery Most Humorous, edited by John Betancourt, Michael Bracken, and Carla Coupe, Wildside Press, 2025.

The protagonist  is trying to be a dutiful niece, but Aunt Josephine is not making it easy.  Niece wants her to get rid of most of the stuff that is cluttering her house in a dangerous way. She should be glad when a nosy neighbor tells her a junk removal firm has just arrived at the aunt's house, but  Dirty Deeds is not any of the companies the niece helpfully researched... 

Beck, Zöe "Abreast Schwarztonnensand," in Hamburg Noir, edited by Jan Karsten, Akashic Press, 2025.

The publisher sent me a free copy of this book. Beck is making her second appearance on this list.

This story  is written as a film script, dialog with occasional description. 

Kai-Uwe is a billionaire and the owner of a Hamburg family business. He has been cruising on the Elbe River in his yacht and has run over a man in a sailboat.  The story consists of  the man and his cronies discussing ways to avoid all responsibility, legal and financial, for the accident. 

Beetner, Eric, "The Cutting Room Floor,"  in Hollywood Kills, edited by Adam Meyer and Alan Orloff, Level Short, 2005.

Scott is editing episodes of a reality show.  Its success has been based on one of the contestants. Violet is blunt, rude, short-tempered. She "didn't come here to make friends." She was "a bad bitch and I know it, honey." She was ratings gold. 

But all bad things come to an end and she was getting kicked off the show. Who would have guessed that she wouldn't take the news well? 

Benedetto, J.F. "Never Bet Against Death,"  in Crimeucopia: A Load of Balls, edited by John Connor, Murderous Ink Press, 2025.

Tien-Tsin, China in 1901. The Boxer Rebellion has failed and Europeans and Americans have the run of the place. One of those Americans is Hezekiah Sauer, ex-cowboy, retired Marine, now a traveling man. 

An Englishman, a baronet no less, invites Sauer to watch a game of Ts'uchu or cuju, a ball game played by - gasp - women. The game is interrupted by the murder of a Russian consul and the Russian army officers who arrive to investigate enlist Sauer's aid.

Coward, Mat, "Come Forth and Be Glad in the Sun,"  in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2025. 

These two mark Coward's third and fourth appearances on my best list.  

"Of all the people we have ever kidnapped, you are by far the rudest."

Gemma and Nathan, sister and brother, are the victims.  Nathan is the genius who never found anything to do with his life. Gemma is the grouchy businesswoman who runs an escape room business.

The kidnappers  are "permanent security consultants" but their boss is getting old and it "had been ages since they'd last been required to consult anyone concerning their security and their baseball bats and steel-capped boots were growing old with neglect." 

Coward, Mat, "Splash,"  in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January/February 2025.

Whatever happens -- environmental crises, pandemics, economic collapses -- rich people always end up richer, with the sole exception of those events which involve rich people having their heads chopped off.  It is largely for this reason that I am strongly in favour of rich people having their heads chopped off on a pretty regular basis.

And so we meet Pewter who has the unlikely occupation of helping the disgustingly rich (not to be confused with the merely rich or the insanely rich) find new ways to spend their money.  No doubt encounters with his clients led him to his opinion of decapitation.  But that isn't why he becomes a serial killer...

Hatcher, Alice. "Into the Weeds,"  in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January/February 2025.

Mark Rousseau  is the only cop in a small town.  He laments that "There's a certain kind of loneliness that comes from living in a place where you know everyone, but where most people associate you with the worst day of their lives."

An interesting observation, but the real star here is  Mrs. Stockard, eighty-five years old and, well: "People who don't know any better -- tourists -- would probably call Mrs. Stockard 'spry' or 'feisty'. I would call her 'mean.'"

She interrupts the cop's breakfast to tell him she struck a man on a back road that morning. Not her fault, of course. He "walked into my truck... Am I talking too fast for you?"

Kudlacz, C. J. "Paradise by the Dashboard Light,"  in Bat Out of Hell, edited by Don Bruns, 2025.

Ten miles to Canada and Jacob Mills has an empty gas tank, a flat tire, and his stepfather's body in the trunk.  Oh, it's also snowing.   And he's vague about who killed Clint, largely because of his concussion.  

Mallory, Michael, "The Eyes That Won't Die," in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January/February 2025.

This marks the third appearance here by my fellow SleuthSayer.

It's 1946 and Jim Beckley survived the war but, like many of his comrades, he is having trouble with the peace.  He is living with his wife (who he only met three months before they married) in a hastily built Quonset hut village for ex-GIs and their families.  Memories of people he killed are haunting him and no one seems to understand.  Jobs are hard to find and so, for Jim, is the gumption to hunt for one. 

When the ex-GI living in the other half of his barrack is murdered and dumped in the street, Jim is  suspected of the murder.  

Mansfield, Nina, "Wax On, Wax Off," in  Malice Domestic: Mystery Most Humorous, edited by John Betancourt, Michael Bracken, and Carla Coupe, Wildside Press, 2025.

Our protagonist is "Andrea Kalinski, PTA treasurer, locally known mommy-blogger, and founder of The Ageless Change, a recently launched skin-care line that targeted menopausal women." 

Unfortunately for her the Body Hair Acceptance Movement has moved into power and twenty-eight states have banned "unnatural hair removal for profit."  

Andrea is forced to go to an illegal waxing parlor to prepare for her work-and-recreation trip to Brazil, but someone gets killed.  "I hadn't signed up to investigate a murder. I wanted to battle an unjust law and wear a thong at Ipanema Beach."

Narvaez, Richie, "The Skies Are Red,"  in On Fire and Under Water, edited by Curtis Ippolito, Rock and a Hard Place Press, 2025.

The second appearance here for Mr. Narvaez.

This is an oral history of  a TV series that never aired, told in fragments of interviews with the cast and crew.  Criminal Takedown: Climate Change Cops was supposed to be the latest hit spinoff from that hugely successful television empire. 

This particular show was the brainchild  of Sal Cassady, who had made it big in hippy movies and was a dedicated environmentalist.  He thought that he could change hearts and minds by approaching the issue of climate change through the classic crime format.

Didn't quite work out.  The interviews show us a toxic combination of Hollywood ego, corporate doubletalk, denialism, and just bad (hah) chemistry. 

Phillips, Gary, "What Ned Said,"  in Hollywood Kills, edited by Adam Meyer and Alan Orloff, Level Short, 2005.

I learned a new term from this story: grief tech, the use of advanced to technology to help with the mourning process. 

In this story it refers to Ethereal Essence, a company  which uses videos, text messages, and other mementos to create a virtual reality experience between the mourner and the deceased.  The mourner here is Clayton and the deceased is his old friend Ned.  They have a terrific session together - right up to the end when Ned tells his pal that he had been murdered.

Ross, Stephen, "Murder in F Sharp,"  in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025.

Ross is a fellow SleuthSayer.

My name is Thomas Phipps, and I discovered a dead body today.

Thomas is sixteen and he doesn't have to investigate the murder because he has a strong suspicion about who did it.  Anyway, his bigger problem is that  his father wants him to keep taking classical piano lessons but Thomas wants to learn jazz.  

Simmons, Shawn Reilly,  "Level Up," in The Most Dangerous Games, edited by Deborah Lacy, Level Short, 2025.

 I have a story in this book.

Natalie is a PhD student in Medieval Literature.  No surprise then that she is in desperate financial straits.  The big surprise is when she receives an invitation from DARE+ that begins:

Congratulations! You've been selected for an exclusive opportunity to earn real money through fun challenges.  Based on your profile, you could earn up to $500 in your first week. Interested? 

What could possibly go wrong?

Spencer, David,  "The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea," in Every Day A Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Song of Stephen Sondheim, edited by Josh Pachter, Level Best Books, 2025.

Teaser is a master thief and he has scuba dived to a private island to steal an ancient Japanese artifact.  His backup team, Pran and Gadge, are following him on radio.  In a story like this the reader usually contemplates one question: Will the gang triumph or will things fall apart at the last moment?

But halfway through the story there is a plot reversal.  And suddenly the action is quite different and so are the stakes.  

Tashiro, Tia. "The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe,"  in Clarkesworld, #220, January 2025.

College student Tom Monroe has just been murdered, and he finds it very inconvenient, but no worse than that. You see, ihs parents are very rich and have supplied him with a medtag which alerts the authorities when he dies and they have the money to have him revived.

Someone killed Tom in order to steal his money which is protected by voice and fingerprints.  His memories of the previous two months are cloudy, due to the revival process.  Can he figure out how this happened?

Van Dessel, Jessica, "The Violent Season,"  in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2025

Helen wants a divorce.  Ed is reluctantly willing to go along, so she has "the look of defiant guilt that is displayed by people who are about to get their own way."  (Ooh, that's good.) 

Problem is it is 1956 and in New York the only grounds for divorce are desertion or adultery.  Ed is willing to provide the latter.  Well, he doesn't actually want to commit adultery but he has contacts who will put him in touch with a woman willing to pretend in front of a camera.

Pretty messy stuff but it gets worse when somebody ends up murdered.  And just when Ed thinks he has that problem solved, along comes...

Walker, Joseph S. "The Right Size of Favor,"  in Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun, edited by Michael Bracken, Down and Out Books, 2025.

Joe is, of course, another SleuthSayer. This is his sixth appearance on my best of the year list, which makes him the World Champion, so far.

My name is Josh Branson. I'm a seventh-grade English teacher, and I'm married to [private eye] Hard Line Graham's daughter.  I didn't get a summer school assignment, and Hard Line doesn't like people sitting around, so he told me I'm working for him.  He sent me here because he owes somebody a big enough favor to help Brenda Roman, but not a big enough one to show up himself.  I have precious little idea what I'm doing and I'm frankly terrified.

Brenda Roman is the county coordinator for a national charity fundraiser.  Someone is demanding a share of the money raised for charity: a protection racket.  Our teacher-turned-P.I. has no trouble finding the gangsters but they may not be so easy to deal with: "Christ, this guy's huge. He looks like he bullies offensive linemen for their lunch money." 

And that's all. Congratulations to the winners. The checks are in the mail. See you next year!

 

 

Senior Sleuths and Sinners

Senior sleuths may be all the rage thanks to The Thursday Murder Club series and Only Murders in the Building, among others. But authors have been making use of older sleuths--and older sinners--for a long time. (Paging Miss Marple.) 

 

I tackled this topic back in 2017. Given the increasing popularity of senior characters since then, this seems a good time to rerun that column, with minor edits. I hope you find it helpful.

Looks can be deceiving.  No one knows that better than people who try to slip something past you. Con artists. Murderers. Even wide-eyed children and little old ladies. When you appear nice and innocent, folks will let you get away with murder.

 

I've written before about using teenage girls as protagonists. They work well as evil-doers or crime-committers because no one suspects them. They're young and peppy and can come across as sweet if they try. They're also fearless and their brains aren't fully developed, so they'll do stupid things few adults would. Today, I'm going to focus on the other end of the age spectrum: the senior set. (I know some people don't like that term, but I mean no animus, so please bear with me.)

Imagine you come home to find your house burglarized, with your files ransacked and your computer--with all your notes--stolen. In real life, you'd call the cops, never thinking you personally could find the culprit. It could be anyone. But things are different for fictional Amateur Sleuth Sally. 

Sally knows she's been investigating the arson death of poor Mr. Hooper, who owned the corner store. So with the neighbors leaning on their porches or whispering in small groups on their lawns, watching the police spectacle (it's a small town, so there's spectacle), Sally goes outside and studies her prime suspects in the arson murder and her own burglary: those very same neighbors.

Is the culprit Oscar, the grouchy guy in the green bathrobe across the street who puts out his trash too early in the morning? Sally heard he owed Mr. Hooper money. Or is it Maria, the skinny lady who works at the library? She lives two doors down, and Sally has heard she spends time with Mr. Hooper when Mrs. Hooper is away on business--or at least she used to until Mrs. Hooper put a stop to it. Or is it Mrs. Hooper herself, the betrayed spouse? Sally has lots of questions and suspects, but she never stops to think about kindly Katrina, the grandmother who lives next door. Surely a woman who bakes cookies and serves as a crossing guard couldn't have done in Mr. Hooper.

You all know. Of course she did. And Sally Sleuth's failure to recognize that appearances can be deceiving will almost be her undoing. (Almost. This is a cozy novel I'm outlining, so Sally must prevail in the end.)

But things don't always tie up so neatly in short stories. In short stories, the bad guy can win. Or the ending can really surprise you. Or both. And kindly Katrina could end up pulling one over on Sally Sleuth. I've made use of this aspect of short stories in several of my own.

In my 2017 story "Whose Wine Is It Anyway?," seventy-year-old Myra Wilkinson is in her final week of work. She's retiring on Friday after working for forty-five years as a law firm secretary, forty of them for the same guy, Douglas. But as her final day looms, Myra isn't as excited as she anticipated because Douglas has chosen Jessica, a husband-hunting hussy, to replace her. Jessica doesn't care about doing the job right, and this is bothering Myra to no end. Then something happens, and Myra realizes that Douglas has been taking her for granted. So she comes up with a scheme involving Douglas's favorite wine to teach Douglas a lesson and reveal Jessica for the slacker she really is.

The beauty of the plan is no one will see Myra coming. On the outside she's kind and helpful. She calls people "dear." As one character says, she's "the heart of this department." Myra's nice on the inside, too, but she also has sass and a temper, which come into play as she hatches her scheme and it plays out.

Another great thing about Myra is she's known Douglas for so long that she knows his weaknesses, and she makes use of them. (This reminds me of a wonderful scene from the movie Groundhog Day. Bill Murray's character says of God, "Maybe he's not omnipotent. He's just been around so long, he knows everything.") The older a character is, the more knowledge she'll have--information she can use against others.

Towanda!

An older person like Myra also might be willing to throw caution to the wind, seeing she's made it so far already. (That reminds me of a wonderful scene from the movie Fried Green Tomatoes in which Kathy Bates's middle-aged character is cheated out of a parking spot by two twenty-something women, one of whom says, "Face it, lady, we're younger and faster." Kathy Bates goes on to repeatedly ram her car into the the other woman's car, then says, "Face it, girls. I'm older and have more insurance." Granted Kathy Bates's character wasn't a senior citizen, but she had reached the point where she wasn't going to just take things anymore.)

Anyway, what happens to Myra, Douglas, and Jessica? You'll have to read the story to find out. You can find "Whose Wine Is It Anyway?" as a standalone e-story at Barnes and Noble (click here) and Amazon (click here). The story originally appeared in the anthology 50 Shades of Cabernet. It was a finalist for the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards for best short story in 2018.

 

Getting back to seniors, I had fun writing another senior character in a story that came out in 2016, "The Best-Laid Plans." Eloise Nickel is a mystery writer, a grande dame of her profession, and she's being honored for her lifetime achievement at this year's Malice International convention. (Does this convention's name sound familiar? Good.) It's too bad for Eloise that the convention's guest of honor this year is Kimberly Siger, Eloise's nemesis. Then, to make matters worse, a few weeks before the convention, Kimberly insults Eloise in Mystery Queen Magazine. Eloise isn't going to take that, so she plans to make Kimberly suffer during the convention. Because she's known Kimberly for many years, Eloise knows Kimberly's weak spots. And because she's thought of as a nice, aging lady, she figures no one will suspect her of any nefarious doings. Do her plans work out? Read "The Best-Laid Plans" to find out. This story, published in the anthology Malice Domestic 11: Murder Most Conventional, was a finalist for the Agatha Award in 2017. The anthology remains available in paper and digital formats from a lot of retailers.

So, fellow mystery authors, when you're thinking about your next plot and want a bad guy or gal who can hide in plain sight, think about a senior citizen. The same goes when you're devising your sleuth. A bad guy may not spill his guts if thirty-something Sally Sleuth is nearby, but he certainly might if Grandma Greta is. He thinks she's so innocuous, he won't see her coming--until she pulls a gun on him.

Do you have a favorite character--good gal or bad--who's a senior citizen? Please share in the comments. We can never have enough good short stories and books to read.

Intimations of Immortality.

               I used to know how to set the points and plugs on an internal combustion engine.  I worked on main frame computers from a dumb terminal.  I used an operator to place a long-distance call.  Every few months I had to chisel the ice out of a refrigerator freezer.  Changed the ribbon on the typewriter, threaded film onto little sprockets, found my way around the country by asking directions at the gas station.

All these life skills are now totally obsolete, along with hundreds of others, as a result of advancing technology.  About which I am not the least bit mournful.  I partly wish I could clear some of that antediluvian junk out of my memory so I can fit in more durable information, though I’m glad I got to do all those things, since they represent interesting threads of experience that help stitch the whole thing together. 

This bolsters my belief that there is no such thing as useless information.  I once edited mind-numbingly dense technical papers for a big hydrocarbon processing company.  I don’t remember a single thing I read, corrected for clarity or reassembled to provide a more convincing argument, but I remember how I felt performing the task.  Tired and drained, but also satisfied with myself for having accomplished something about which I was startlingly unqualified.

There’s a silver lining in having worked through the various phases of technological development.  These tasks leave behind tools and skills that can be repurposed for emerging challenges.  Every time I repair something around the house, I use hacks and work arounds only learnable tearing apart car engines and old radios.  The most satisfying is when I can fix something designed to simply toss out and replace.  I feel like I’m sticking it to the obsolescence man. 

            I have difficulty with the word nostalgia.  I think it’s because of the sentimentality and fruitless yearning nestled in the definition.  While I feel enriched by memories of past experience, I have no desire to return to those moments.  The fact is, you can’t go back again, and I don’t want to.  I just don’t want to forget, distort into oblivion, or disrespect, the memories. 

Aside from the people you love, the experiences you have are the only truly meaningful value in having lived.   If you’re a writer, it’s your toolbox, your chef’s knives, color palette, chromatic scale, source code and cheat sheet.    

            Luckily, most acquired knowledge isn’t as perishable as the technological.  The trouble here is accessing it, especially when the content piles up and gears in the retrieval mechanism wear down.  I use this as an excuse for holding on to mountains of books, a trillion nuts/bolts/screws/thingmajigs/tools/spares (ad finitum), bins of curling photographs and old friends.  Also, I may have the short-term memory of a drunken gnat, but I’m great at dredging up the particulars of a high school keg party or a day wandering around Fiesole looking down on the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore di Firenze rising up out of the fog.  The sight of Jimi Hendrix lighting his Stratocaster on fire under the blue lights and strobes at the Electric Factory.  Looking behind me and seeing the dinghy we were towing behind a sailboat rise up ten feet above my head.

Since the brain isn't a digital recorder, I’ve come to learn that many of these remembrances are approximate representations of what actually transpired.  They’re more like 8mm movies with the disclaimer, "Based on the experiences of Chris Knopf, as told to whoever was still around to listen.”

But so what.  Once they’ve been fed into the fiction-writing machine, the provenance is of little importance.   

 

From the Wall O' Inspiration

I do most of my writing– and most of my work– since my day job is teaching online classes--sitting at a computer in my home office. I do have a laptop, but given my preference, I like a setup that feels more substantial--a big honking PC with a couple of screens, external speakers and a full-size keyboard. By today's standards I guess that makes me a bit old-fashioned. Of course I got through college using an actual honest-to-gosh typewriter, so this still feels pretty fancy to me.

Because of some peculiarities in the design of my house, sitting at the computer means I'm facing a wall that's about a foot behind my primary monitor. I'd prefer to be facing a window, but hey, I'm not the one who designed the wiring in here. Just above the level of my head (when sitting), the wall slopes sharply inward, following the roofline. So I don't have room for, say, a poster with a kitten clinging to a branch and telling me to "hang in there."

What I do have are three pieces of paper that I've taped to the wall in my eyeline. Most of the time, of course, my gaze just kind of skims past them, since they've become a part of the scene I just take for granted. Once in a while I do take conscious notice of them, though, and hopefully they provide a bit of inspiration or encouragement that's almost as good as the kitten poster.

Harlan Ellison producing

The first is a quote from Thomas Carlyle, though I got it from an essay by Harlan Ellison, the writer who made me want to be a writer. It reads:

PRODUCE! PRODUCE! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up! Up! Whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; FOR THE NIGHT COMETH, WHEREIN NO MAN CAN WORK.

Cheerful, right? To put it in modern terms: get yer ass in the chair, kid, and your fingers on the keys.

The second scrap of paper is a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke, though again I cribbed it from a secondary source– in this case, the ending of Taika Waititi's 2019 film Jojo Rabbit. And it reads:

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.

This went up on the wall in the opening months of the COVID pandemic, when the world seemed like a pretty dark place and a reminder that it wouldn't be that way forever had daily value. These days, of course, all I have to worry about is creeping fascism, AI, and the possibility that we're about to invade Greenland, so everything is peachy.

The final piece of paper is the simplest. It's a single word, rendered in plain font:

REFINE

I put this up most recently, because it's a principle I've been thinking about a lot: refinement as a mode of living. It's long been part of my writing; I favor something of a sparse style, and there's nothing I love better than revising a piece of writing by carving away everything that is unneeded. I've been thinking that this isn't a bad way to approach most days: removing the things that aren't of value, that contribute no meaning. Doomscrolling, for example. Mindlessly surfing through YouTube. Distractions. "Refine" is meant to remind me to, whenever possible, make choices and take actions that are essential to the things I want to accomplish. I don't often actually accomplish it, of course, but it's something to aim for.

As for the desk itself, mostly it's cluttered with papers and mail I haven't yet dealt with--another thing I need to refine. There is, however, a small collection of rocks and shells from various trips I've taken, to remind me there's a world beyond that wall I'm facing. And there are also two Lego minifigures, there to remind me that what I should be doing is writing a crime story: Lego Shakespeare, and Lego Detective (complete with magnifying glass and red herring!).

So those are the things I've chosen to try to provide me with a bit of fortitude as I craft my little tales. What about you? Do you have inspirational images or words on your walls? How did you choose them, and what do they mean to you?

---

The Case of the Crumbling Platform

Bow before your lord and master!

image by crstrbrt, licensed from Depositphotos

I never knew my grandfather but I spent nearly sixty years of my life in the company of his son. I am sure that if the elder had lived beyond his forties, he would have spent his last days riffing on the same theme junior did: “The world is crap, and getting worse.”

This is commonly regarded as a thing older people say. And if you wrote such a character, you would redraft him or her, or bend over backwards not to have that fictional being come off like a stereotype.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, who writes tech articles, bestselling wonky nonfiction and delightful science fiction, we now have a word that nails the moment we’re living in: enshittification. When he coined the word in 2022, Doctorow—a longtime Internet policy wonk—used it to describe what he saw as the gradual if inevitable worsening of Internet-based platforms.

But the word took on a life of its own. American and Australian lexicographers in 2023 and 2024, respectively, named it their word of the year. And when Doctorow published a book on the topic in late 2025, he applied the word broadly to a variety of industries well beyond the web. Why is this happening? He explains:

“[T]he digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.”

I admit that the chief pleasure I took from this book was realizing a) No, I am not going crazy, and b) I am not turning into my progenitors.

Doctorow describes the process deftly. In its first stages, a company dreams up a great idea and bestows it on the world. The thing works so easily and often satisfies a need people didn’t know they had:

• Google gave us a search engine that was better than, say, Altavista or Ask Jeeves.
• Amazon gave us a frictionless shopping experience with superb customer service.
• Facebook gave us a free way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and relatives.

In Stage I, Doctorow says, these services give themselves wholeheartedly to their users. The firms work hard to attract, please, and keep users. They become indispensable to peoples’ lives. The only platform of their kind worth using.

As soon as they demolish the competition and achieve a monopoly…as soon users feel that they simply cannot live without the service they provide…the firms flip the switch. The end user is no longer king—advertisers are. (In the world of Amazon, the “advertisers” are small or large businesses who have chosen to sell their wares on the platform.)

Companies advertise on these platforms, and when they do, the ads perform insanely well. So well, in fact, that small and big firms alike hire staffs to manage, say, their growing FB ad empire. It doesn’t matter that this is a field of advertising that has existed for three minutes on the Geologic Time Scale. It’s so easy to find customers that you have to be an idiot not to sell via Google, FB, and Amazon ads.

About a decade ago, I met and chatted up a self-published mystery writer who swore by Google Ads. He loved the platform because as ugly as those boxy ads were in the early days, they were easy to craft, fairly inexpensive to run, and they resulted in sales of his fly-fishing mystery series. What’s not to love? Finding new readers was as easy as, ahem, shooting fish in a barrel.

Then, just when advertisers feel that they simply cannot live without this advertising source, the platform embarks upon Stage III: Corporate profits and shareholders are the only thing that matters. End users and advertisers can go pound sand. A single tweak, and ads stop working overnight. Advertisers must spend and spend and spend to figure out how to attract customers with the new algorithm. 

As an end user, you know what Stage III enshittification feels like. We’re living in it.

FB users have no idea what’s up with their friends and family because they have to wade through so many ads to see the posts they came for in the first place. You are told that you must pay up if you want anyone to actually see what you have posted.

Amazon buyers can’t figure out which products are cheap, popular, or highly rated (depending on their preferences) because every search they do presents ads for products only tangentially related to the thing they’re looking for.

I’ll let a friend who runs a website aimed at book lovers describe what the current Google environment has done to his business:

“Google has given up on its search engine, stuffed it with even more ads, and shifted to ranking only the largest websites ahead of independent publications. We are better off than most independent websites because of our size, but we have lost 70% of our traffic from Google. And given Google’s monopoly, that is a huge hit. This is affecting every website you can imagine, and one recent report found that 400 independent news publications have lost 50%+ of their traffic from Google. Google is no longer helping people find good content and has destroyed how the web works.”

He notes that the AI-generated answers at the top of Google’s search are “scraped” from the content of other creators, who have no recourse given Google’s power. Some creators are fighting back in lawsuits, but seriously, how likely is it that they will prevail against a behemoth? He, like many creators, is shifting to designing a dedicated app so he can attract and cater directly to his clientele.

Doctorow explains why Google has intentionally enshittified its search engine. The current model forces users to search a second, third, or fourth time, tweaking search terms each time. By design, as users spend more time in Google’s environment, they are obliged to view more ads and gobble up more of advertisers’ precious budgets.

Of course FB, Google, and the ’Zon aren’t the only offenders out there. I have focused on these three because so many of us know what they are like. Doctorow’s book pivots from giants like Apple and Twitter to a slate of other corporations. 

In these pages, I learned…

• why Amazon drivers are so miserable and drive so recklessly. They are on such tight delivery schedules, and spied upon by cameras in their vans, that they barely have time to stop and use a restroom. (I’ll spare you the humiliating details of how they manage to relieve themselves.) “For a man with a dick-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos sure has an abiding hatred of our kidneys,” Doctorow quips.
• that the private contractors in China that manufacture Apple phones have installed netting under their high-rise windows to halt worker suicides.
• about car manufacturers who now insist that in order to “unlock” the premium features of your new vehicle, you must pay a monthly subscription fee to access features you enjoyed “for free” when you bought your last car.

This last example illustrates Doctorow’s opening thesis that digital circuitry allows firms to control a product long after it leaves the factory, and long after you supposedly “bought” it. It’s why Hewlett Packard knows when your printer has run out of ink, or how they can program your printer to die when it’s time to have you buy a new one. It is why supermarkets that use digital price tags on their shelves can raise or lower prices on a whim, not unlike Uber’s “surge” pricing. (Such an easy way to raise prices on staples like milk, water, and toilet paper minutes after weather forecasters announce the possibility of a big winter storm!)

Digital price tags look like this.

By now, perhaps you are wondering why you would ever want to read this book. I assure you that there is hope: when Adobe, the design software giant, thought they could steal their subscribers’ work to train AI, designers switched to rival software in such numbers that Adobe backed down. A similar fracas ensued when Unity, a provider of software used by millions of independent digital game developers worldwide to create 3D video effects, demanded a royalty each time these designers’ games—which Unity did not create—was downloaded by the end user. Game designers rebelled, and Unity’s board booted the executives who had created such an embarrassing public spectacle for the firm. Doctorow assures us that, at least in Europe, legislators are fighting monopolies that lead inevitably to such outrageous expressions of capitalism. (US legislators pioneered such laws, but apparently cannot be bothered to enforce them.) Lastly, Doctorow notes with some glee that underground software designers are hard at work creating freeware to circumvent how ’Zon tracks its drivers.

By the time these anecdotes arrive, at the end of the book, each comeuppance feels like sweet, sweet karma. They are a reminder that the digital products, the underlying mechanisms, are not the problem. It’s the cynical human profit motive that perverts them. 

While reading Enshittification, I was reminded of the time I ran into a sales clerk taking a smoke break outside her place of employment, the local Best Buy, the US’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer of consumer electronics.

I introduced myself and reminded her that she was the person who had helped us pick out the washer, dryer, and range we bought when we first moved into our new house.

She puffed away and smiled. “How are they holding up?”

Fine, I said, but why did she ask?

“Used to be, you’d buy one of those things and they’d last forever. I knew when they started rolling out washing machines with… motherboards that they wouldn’t last. Fridges too. We never got claims on the old ones.” She paused. “Did you get the extended warranty, hon?”

* * *

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

"We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident"...

Some things never change...  

I clearly remember the assassination of JFK in 1963, especially the shock and the tears, the flags at half mast, and the endless television coverage, so that we all got to see quite clearly when Jack Ruby ran up to and shot Lee Harvey Oswald to death and the two detectives escorting Oswald simply made a lot of faces while it happened.  Nobody stopped Ruby or even tried.  Even as a child, it occurred to me that someone might not have wanted all the evidence to come out.

Things got worse.  Vietnam was going on, nightly on TV.  The My Lai massacre:

• Võ Suu's photo of the Saigon execution of a Viet Cong leader.  
• Buddhist monks burning themselves to death in protest, and the nightly battles and death counts on TV. 
• 1968, the Battle of Bến Tre, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."  
• The 1970s, the little Vietnamese girl running naked and screaming down the road because the napalm had burned all her clothing off of her.  

Vietnam had the 4th highest death toll in US war history.  Not to mention the troops who came back with PTSD, permanent mental and physical wounds, and addictions like you wouldn't believe.  Nightmares every night…

Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) 

demonstration during the 1976 US Bicentennial 

celebration in Philadelphia

And back at home, Birmingham's Bull Connor unleashing firehoses and police dogs on protesters: 

http://apushcanvas.pbworks.com/w/page/125950658/Birmingham%201963

And the pictures of the aftermath the Birmingham 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which these four little black girls were killed. 

 https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-birmingham-news-6000-mourners-jam-r/138782787

BTW, the FBI did do an investigation into that bombing, and came up with the names of four white KKK men who committed the crime.  J. Edgar Hoover  promptly blocked any impending federal prosecutions against the suspects, refused to disclose any evidence his agents had obtained with state or federal prosecutors, and then sealed the records in 1968. The files weren't reopened until 1977, when the first conviction was made by Alabama AG Bill Baxley.  The other three were tried by Federal Attorney Doug Jones in 2001 and 2002.  Justice can take a long, long time.*

1968 was a hard year.  Besides Vietnam, Robert F. Kennedy Sr. and Martin Luther King, Jr. were both assassinated, followed by the incredible amount of police violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  And it wasn't just the police:  Mayor Robert Daly, who ran Chicago with a strangulating hand, had 12,000 police, 5,000 National Guardsmen, and 7,500 regular army troops out in the streets, and he unleashed them to do anything they wanted. And they did. There were protesters rioting, but even the news said the police were rioting, too. A very young Dan Rather got sucker punched and dragged by security guards on the floor of the Convention.  (Link)  To which Walter Cronkite tersely replied, "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan."

And then on May 4, 1970, when the National Guard shot four students dead at Kent State in Ohio.  Four unarmed students, two of whom were walking to class, nine wounded, all unarmed…

"I survived the Kent State shootings. 

Why use force against college protests?"

The lies:  

• The chief military officer of the National Guard claimed that there had been a sniper firing on them, which is why they retaliated. 
• The guardsmen claimed they feared for their lives, but none of the students had weapons, and none of them were closer to the guardsmen than 71 feet. 
• Someone gave the order to fire.
• Initial newspaper reports had inaccurately stated that several National Guard members had been killed or seriously injured. 

A subsequent FBI investigation concluded that the Guard was not under fire and that the guardsmen fired the first shots. And while many guardsmen claimed to have been hit by stones that were pelted at them by protesters, only one Guardsman, Sgt. Lawrence Shafer, was injured enough to require medical treatment (he received a sling for his badly bruised arm and was given pain medication). In 1986, Shafer identified the person that he shot as student Joseph Lewis. Shafer nailed Lewis in his gut and in his leg.  

Kent State Victims

• Allison Beth Krause: A 19-year-old freshman from Pittsburgh, PA, she was participating in the protest and was shot in the chest.
• Jeffrey Glenn Miller: A 20-year-old sophomore from Plainview, NY, he was participating in the protest and was shot in the mouth.
• Sandra Lee Scheuer: A 20-year-old honors junior from Youngstown, OH, she was walking to class and was shot in the neck.
• William Knox Schroeder: A 19-year-old sophomore from Lorain, OH, he was an ROTC student walking to class and was shot in the chest/back.

Nine other students were wounded during the shooting. They were:

• Alan Michael Canfora: A junior who was hit in the right wrist.
• John R. Cleary: A freshman who was hit in the upper left chest.
• Thomas Mark Grace: A sophomore who was hit in his left ankle.
• Dean R. Kahler: A freshman who was shot in the back and permanently paralyzed from waist down.
• Joseph Lewis Jr.: A freshman who was hit twice, in the right abdomen and lower left leg.
• Donald Scott MacKenzie: A student who received a neck wound.
• Matthew J. McManus: A student (listed in one snippet, but specific wound details are limited).
• James Dennis Russell: A senior who was hit in his right thigh and grazed on his right forehead.
• Robert Follis Stamps: A sophomore who was hit in his right buttock.

"Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down

Should have been gone long ago

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?"

— "Four Dead In Ohio", Neil Young

"Afterwards a Gallup Poll showed that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard, and 31 percent expressed no opinion."  (LINK)  

None of this stopped me from joining in a couple of anti-Vietnam War protests.  But I knew what the risks were.  I still know what the risks are.  I just have too much arthritis to get out there.  

Meanwhile:  On social media, and this is a direct quote:  "Well, yeah, you can assemble peacefully but you can't protest!  Protest is unconstitutional!"  

Oh, p*** off.  Protest is not only constitutional, but it's the foundation of this country.  What do they think the Boston Tea Party was?  And I'll bet they never heard of the Boston Massacre, the Pine Tree Riot or the First Continental Congress which basically told the British Crown to go stuff itself.  

And the Declaration of Independence is a supremely radical manifesto saying:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."  READ THAT CAREFULLY.

BTW, also in the Declaration of Independence is summary from "The Crimes of the King":

• "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
• He has made judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended legislation:
• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
• For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
• For imposing taxes on us without our Consent:
• For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:"

Read the whole Declaration of Independence HERE.  It's worth a careful read.  Our Founding Fathers were, by the standards of their day and apparently ours, radical.  

Meanwhile:

 

The (hopefully) good thing that's happened out of this is that ICE Agents have received updates on what is and what is NOT legal procedure  (LINK):

 

****************** NEWS ALERT UPDATE *********************

"ICE memo allows agents to enter homes 

without judge’s warrant, legal group says"

"The memo, allegedly signed by Todd M. Lyons, acting director of ICE, tells personnel that they only require a Form I-205 to force entry into a private residence. A Form I-205 is signed by an immigration enforcement official and authorizes an arrest following a final order of removal, which is typically issued by an immigration judge.

The whistleblowers believe new ICE recruits have been directed to follow this policy “while disregarding written course material instructing the opposite,” the disclosure says.  

They were aware of multiple DHS employees who had faced retaliation for expressing concerns about the memo and one instructor who resigned rather than teach it, it says." (LINK)  

^* Doug Jones is currently running for Governor of Alabama. God bless you, Mr. Jones.

Circle of Treason

Aldrich Ames died the week before last, and I hope he’s rotting in Hell. For those of you who don’t know who Ames was, he was a career CIA guy who sold out to the Russians late in his tenure, and the dozen or more assets he gave up to KGB were executed. He did it for the money.

I wrote about him, and CIA’s internal manhunt, in a recent Substack column, linked below.

A chronology of what he did and how they caught him, and the poisonous legacy he left.

https://gatesd.substack.com/p/rock-paper-scissors

The story of the counterintelligence team’s mole hunt is very well told by Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille in their book, Circle of Treason.

Grimes and Vertefeuille were the lead investigators on the case, having worked together in the Soviet/Eastern Europe Division. They were well aware Moscow was rolling up CIA assets at a blistering pace, and their job was to plug the leak.

This, in itself, is fascinating inside baseball, at least for a spy groupie like me, but a couple of things stand out particularly.

One is that Ames was so careless. He was profligate with money, and tracking the cash is how Grimes eventually put him in the headlights. He was tripped up by his own arrogance. Another detail that caught my eye is that, at one point, Ames suggested to KGB that they could frame Jeanne Vertefeuille as the double agent. They’d given up Edward Lee Howard, a couple of years before, to protect Ames, but in that instance, Howard had already been burned.

What was attractive in making Vertefeuille the patsy was that because she worked in counterintelligence, she had access to secure, compartmentalized materials, and there was a certain circular logic to pinning it on her, the spy-hunter being the spy. At the least, it would sow doubts, and compromise her investigation. If later on, she accused Ames, it would look like sour grapes.

L. to R: Sandy Grimes, Paul Redmond,
Jeanne Vertefeuille, Diana Worthen, Dan Payne

If you remember, in le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor – spoiler alert - one the central narrative conceits is that Karla has instructed Bill Haydon to beguile George Smiley’s wife Ann into the sack (not that it takes much), so that George’s credibility is fatally weakened.

Karla knows Smiley is the chief threat to his mole inside the Circus, the canniest, most deliberate, and least assuming of Control’s senior deputies. But if Smiley were to suspect Haydon, and pursue it, he’d be accused of nursing a grudge, his suspicions dismissed as personal enmity.

This, to me, is an interesting meta synchronicity.

Not so much life imitating art, as that it’s so oddly private a gesture. It’s a recurring theme, in all of le Carré’s books, that the most personal, secret undercurrents are a malleable resource, to be manipulated, and put to use. Charlie, in The Little Drummer Girl, is an empty vessel, a mirror of desire, but she’s not allowed her own privacy, she can’t keep anything hidden from her handlers. Karla, in the end, gives himself up to Smiley – spoiler alert, again – but the leverage Smiley uses is the safety of the guy’s crazy daughter, whose life in a state facility would be unspeakable. (And in a twist of the knife, when they meet, Karla drops a cigarette lighter inscribed, from Ann, at Smiley’s feet, the same lighter George had handed him in a cell, twenty years before.) The most directly personal of the novels, from le Carré’s own point of view, and by his own admission, is A Perfect Spy, a brutal portrait of his dad, Ronnie. The hero of the book, Magnus, is a trickster, a shape-shifter, who can’t accommodate all the different shapes and faces and suits he’s worn, the only way he can represent himself to the world, all of them convincing, none of them authentic. Magnus is, perhaps, an avatar of the author, who was known to disguise himself.

I’m not suggesting Aldrich Ames was in any way interesting enough, or had the depth of character, to be reflective, or self-aware.

I just don’t credit him with the imagination. But like many narcissists, he would have thought he was the hero of his own movie. Trying to shift the blame for his criminal delinquency to Jeanne Vertefeuille has elements of dramatic irony, and maybe he saw it as a cute plot twist, but I don’t think he gave it all that much thought. It was just another throw of the dice.

We want, sometimes, to imbue these people with more class or grace than they deserve. Billy the Kid was morally vacant, and probably a mental defective. The romance is all in the telling. Ames is a generic cheap date, his soul for sale, and the Devil already has buyer’s remorse.