Using Real Life in Fiction

As writers, we often mine our lives for bits and pieces we can incorporate into our stories, from setting them in places where we have lived to basing murder victims on despised employers. Sometimes, though, our lives provide much more than incidental inspiration.

I’ve had two stories published this year that draw heavily on events and experiences from my youth, and both were written in response to convention anthology calls for submission.

“GLASS BEACH”

Work on the first story—“Glass Beach,” published in the January/February 2026 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine—began when I read Bouchercon 2020’s call for submissions for California Schemin’, in which each story has a California theme.

I spent a great deal of my childhood and teen years in California and, when no story ideas sprang immediately to mind, my wife suggested I write about my childhood. So, I wrote a paragraph about how my stepfather spent his free time:

Glass Beach, abutting MacKerricher State Park near Fort Bragg, California, is a tourist attraction visited by tens of thousands of people each year, but it wasn’t always. It started life more than a century ago as the town dump, and, in the early 1970s, not long after the dump officially closed, my stepfather played a key role in transforming it into the attraction it became. He spent weekends combing the beach for scrap metal and sorting what he found into cardboard boxes kept in the trunk of his 1966 Chrysler New Yorker.

This is true, and this paragraph became the opening paragraph of the story. Later, I added the second paragraph, and this is where a true story about my teen years starts being fictionalized:

The extra money my stepfather earned selling the scrap metal allowed us to eat a little better and dress a little better as he struggled to pay off my mother’s medical and funeral bills. I was a teenager then, plodding my way through high school, and I had no appreciation for all that he did. A stocky ex-Marine thirteen years older than my mother—thirty-three years older than me—he belonged to a generation I neither comprehended nor respected, and it was clear he felt the same about mine.

Though my mother died during my senior year of high school and I lived with my stepfather for several months after her death, “Glass Beach” begins the summer before the protagonist’s senior year, his mother having passed away during his junior year. But the relative ages of the characters match that of me, my mother, and my stepfather, and my stepfather was a “stocky ex-Marine.”

And there the story sat until well past the deadline for California Schemin’. I had a beginning, but I had no story until one day I decided the protagonist and his stepfather uncover something at the dump that ties into a long-ago crime. The two of them—along with the protagonist’s best friend and his best friend’s widowed mother—must deal with the consequences of that discovery.

Throughout the rest of the story, I write about Fort Bragg, California, and my high school years as filtered both through a memory that may have grown foggy with age and the need to create a compelling piece of fiction.

When I finally finished the story, I had missed the anthology deadline by more than a year. I ultimately placed “Glass Beach”—after revising the end based on suggestions from Linda Landrigan—with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

“UNDER THE PROCTOR STREET BRIDGE”

Work on the second story—“Under the Proctor Street Bridge,” published in Time After Time (Thalia Press), March 2026—began after I read the call for submissions for Left Coast Crime’s 2024 anthology A Killing Rain, which was to include stories set in and around Puget Sound.

I lived in Tacoma, Washington, beginning the summer before sixth grade and continuing until part way through ninth grade. I returned after my mother’s death to live with my grandparents for a year before moving to Illinois.

So, I again wrote about my childhood. Similar to how I began “Glass Beach,” I placed the events in a historical perspective:

There is so much I know now that I didn’t understand during the summer of 1971. I was thirteen then, soon to start ninth grade at Mason Junior High School, and I spent most days with Tommy O’Connor, the third of seven children—and the only boy—living in a three-bedroom house across the street from the home I shared with my widowed father. The Vietnam War was winding down, Richard Nixon was running for re-election, and many teenaged veterans were more than a year away from voting in their first presidential election following the July passage of the 26th Amendment.

I didn’t pay much attention to the news, and Tommy’s mother wouldn’t let him and his sisters watch it for fear they might learn what their father was doing halfway around the world and why people spit on him and other soldiers when they returned home.

Like the protagonist narrating the story, I was thirteen in 1971 and soon to start ninth grade at Mason Junior High School. One of my friends lived across the street with six siblings (though not all girls as in the story), and his father served in Vietnam.

So, the first two paragraphs are mostly true and truth is mixed with fiction throughout the rest of the story. For example, I often found bicycle parts under the Proctor Street Bridge, and I built Frankenstein bicycles from them. But bicycle parts aren’t the only things the protagonist and his friend find under the bridge.

(Only years later did I realize that the parts I found likely came from stolen bicycles, which helped inform “Under the Proctor Street Bridge.”)

This time, I finished the story before the anthology’s submission deadline, but it didn’t make the cut. It did, however, meet the needs of Time After Time, an anthology of mysterious tales inspired by history.

OTHER EXPERIENCES

Other stories mine my experiences—the Morris Ronald Boyette private eye stories, for example, take place in Waco, and many of the settings are real or fictionalized versions of real places—but no stories draw as much from my life as do “Glass Beach” and “Under the Proctor Street Bridge.”

* * *

Boots, BBQ, and Bloodshed, which I edited for Sisters in Crime North Dallas, releases July 1.

Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked gets new life in a July 1 rerelease by Audecyn Books.

Immortality Writ Small

          In 1978, my late father-in-law gave my wife a dehumidifier for the old house she bought in Hartford, Connecticut.  At issue was the damp basement, an environment well suited for growing mildew, colossal spiderwebs, or even some varieties of edible fungi.  The dehumidifier was a well-used appliance even then, so conservatively, already about ten years old. 

        Last week, after giving us years of continuous service (I’d let it rest for maybe four months during the cold weather) it gave up the ghost, and I think the ghost itself has probably died of old age.

        I have a bench grinder that I often use to clean metal parts and sharpen tools.  I inherited it from my grandfather, who told me when I was a little kid that the motor was over a hundred years old.  I’m now 75, so do the math.

 

        They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. 

        As much as I appreciate this kind of durability, an important act of mental hygiene when you hit 75 is to avoid fetishizing monuments of the past.  Not completely, of course, but one should heed Springsteen’s cautionary tale, Glory Days, and not be left “with nothing, mister, but boring stories.”

        Speaking of stories, they can also take up residence in the same quadrant of the brain that stores superannuated pop songs, appliances, cars and amber-tinted memories of that first slow dance (in my case, to Don’t Worry, Baby. Not forgetting that.) 

        It’s common sense that impressions of any art form are more fixed when exposed to fresh, unsullied brain cells.  It’s more of a jolt, unregulated by accumulated experience, conscious evaluation and creeping cynicism.  This is why I think of stories by Hemingway, JD Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Thurber, Edgar Allen Poe and Guy De Maupassant as STORIES, and everything that came after simply earnest efforts at achieving that transcendant perfection.

        

M. Maumpassant

        This isn’t good.  In fact, it’s a type of psychological hardening of the arteries.  But once again, the mystery genre stands ready to provide an artery-cleansing antidote.  It’s possible you could read every story published annually by Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery Journal, hundreds of short story blogs and countless anthologies, but you’d have to forgo all other pursuits.  I’ve never come close to this, but what I have read are uniformly excellent renditions of the form.  You certainly don’t have to restrict yourself to short-listed Derringer entries, though doing so would likely knock you into Barb Goffman and Art Tayor, brilliant purveyors of both the brief and startlingly fresh.  I assume they’re nagged by the same electronic nuisances as the rest of us yet somehow find a way to conjure the mental state that embraced Chekov, Mansfield and Jorge Luis Borges. 

        When I was an advertising copywriter the assignment I most dreaded was Bumper Sticker, quickly followed by Billboard.  Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s freaking near impossible to get right.  We’d often have pages of input, with various supporting documents, and were asked to distill it all down to a tiny little chain of compelling words.  I wanted to say, oh no, please, how about that 12-page brochure with lots of captions and ant type?  (I used to force junior copywriters to study haiku – no better way to pack a lot of meaning into very compact quarters.)

All-time bumper sticker champion.

        Starting a novel feels so much better.  All those pages of story development stretching out before you.  A thousand-word limit?  Not so inviting.  This is why my admiration for you serious short story writers is, well, limitless.  You set yourself a much more difficult task requiring tremendous discipline and control over all the elements of plot, description and character development.  As with haiku, every phrase has to contribute to the whole, its extraction leaving the structure teetering, like knocking out a lolly column. 

        As with ancient bench grinders and short stories, only time will determine ultimate durability.  I can’t know, but I choose to believe that the best of the mystery writers we’re enjoying now will find their work set in all caps in the minds of future septuagenarians. 

The Beat of the Drums, Loud and Bold

During my daily walks, plus drives in my car, I've long been in the practice of listening to either audiobooks or podcasts. I've talked before in this column about my audiobook preferences. In terms of podcasts, I lean toward comedy (How Did This Get Made?), true crime (My Favorite Murder), or film (Team Deakins). Generally, I'll listen to a few episodes of something, get a little restless, and move on to something else.

(As an aside: Apple stopped making iPods in 2022, years after phone apps had made them redundant and functionally obsolete. The term "podcast," though, clearly isn't going away anytime soon, and will long outlive the device the format was originally named for. Language is weird.)

For the last several months I've been bingeing a podcast starting from its very first episode, and for once I haven't been tempted to switch to something else, even briefly. The podcast is A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and it's exactly what it sounds like: a history of rock, with each episode centered on a specific song. It's researched, written and narrated by a British man named Andrew Hickey, and I've found it so enjoyable, admirable and educational that I wanted to use this column to recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in the topic.

I'd advise starting from the very first episode, which concerns the 1939 recording "Flying Home" by the Benny Goodman Sextet--a choice which should give you some indication of the wide-ranging scope of Hickey's project. While individual episodes can certainly be listened to with pleasure, Hickey is telling a single, overarching story here, and it's worth listening from the beginning in order to fully appreciate all the threads he's weaving together in complex and ambitious ways. In Hickey's telling (punctuated in each episode by carefully selected snippets of the dozens of songs he discusses), the history of rock is much more richly layered than the simplistic, conventional idea that "the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll." Indeed, he argues that the influence of the blues has been greatly overstated, for reasons having to do with reductive notions about race, and that rock's more important roots are in jazz, swing, gospel, country, western (not the same thing as "country," as Hickey carefully explains), and r&b.

The sheer depth of Hickey's research and storytelling is staggering (especially considering that, in addition to the regular installments on the "official" list of 500, he's produced hundreds of bonus episodes for Patreon backers about additional songs). Every episode integrates detailed biographical information about the people who made the music, extensive analysis of the influences and ideas that went into the song itself, and commentary on the historical and cultural moment, with special attention to the racial tensions that are so important to the story. Hickey is going way beyond Wikipedia here--in fact, he frequently points out places where Wikipedia has something flatly wrong. I'll confess that the music theory sometimes goes over my head (I can barely tell a major key from a minor one, and when Hickey starts talking about things like chromatic scales or the mixolydian mode I'm simply lost), but I've never once been bored.

Hickey has a gift for illuminating his vast cast of characters and their nuanced, shifting identities and relationships. I've learned about Little Richard's struggles to reconcile his sexuality with his deeply felt religious faith; that the Everly Brothers, despite their gorgeous harmonies, loathed each other for much of their lives; that the young Aretha Franklin was so painfully shy that she had difficulty making eye contact with anyone outside her family. Perhaps not surprisingly, I've learned that many of the most influential people in rock history--especially the men--were essentially monsters in their personal lives, treating women, children and associates in abominable ways. Once in a while Hickey discusses a figure who, he notes with some surprise, nobody has anything bad to say about (Fats Domino and Cass Elliot, for example), but, unfortunately, abusers like Ike Turner, exploitative opportunists like Alan Freed, out-of-control drunks and addicts like Gene Vincent, and raging egomaniacs like Jan Berry (of Jan & Dean) are far more common.

Really, there's no end to the fascinating tidbits Hickey includes. Sam Phillips, of Sun Records, was such an idealist that he tried to place a phone call to Fidel Castro during the Cuban missile crisis, convinced that a reasonable discussion between two rational men could resolve the whole silly misunderstanding (he ended up talking to Raul Castro for an hour). The OPEC oil crisis led record companies to make LPs thinner to save on material, which in turn made it more likely that the needle would skip, which in turn led to less use of bass and an untick in lighter tones--hello, yacht rock. There are endless examples of how seemingly dry topics like musicians' union rules and copyright law have completely changed the course of popular music. And if you're looking for crime connections, you'll find no shortage of murder, extortion, assault, robbery, financial fraud and drugs--to say nothing of the huge role the Mafia played in the music industry for decades.

With so much to cover, the episodes have ballooned considerably. They started out being around thirty or forty minutes, but I've just listened to episode 150, on "All You Need is Love," which weighed in at some four hours and covered, among other things, the creation and social impact of satellite communications, the growing influence of Indian music in the West, the development of the avant-garde London art scene, the nearly fatal consequences of the Beatles snubbing Ferdinand Marcos, John Lennon's lifelong struggle with depression and why he switched from contacts to glasses, the many studio innovations of George Martin, the tragic and somewhat mysterious death of Brian Epstein, the television show The Prisoner, and the first signs of the tensions that would ultimately see the Fab Four break up. I loved every minute.

Sadly, Hickey has been experiencing health problems which have greatly slowed the pace of releases. The series was weekly when it began, in 2018, but the most recent episode--#183, on "Pinball Wizard"--came out in March, and it's not clear when the next one will be released. Even if no more are ever made, though, what Hickey has already produced is an astounding work of popular history well worth your time. And as a bonus, because he relies on Patreon backers, the podcast itself is ad-free. Those of you who have wearied of podcast hosts looking for elegant ways to start talking about mattresses or online therapy services will understand how welcome that is.

I think part of what I find fascinating about the series is how it makes the familiar new again. You've heard "Johnny B. Goode" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Louie Louie" and "The Twist" hundreds of times, maybe thousands. They seem etched in stone, their forms so fixed as to appear inevitable--of course that's what they sound like. Hickey's stories demonstrate just how easily they might have sounded completely different, or never have happened at all. He lets you listen to the songs with fresh ears and discover them all over again.

Maybe somebody should put together A History of Crime Fiction in 500 Stories. Cain and Abel would make a great first episode.

So what are your favorite podcasts?  What's your favorite rock song? The best concert you've ever been to? And what's a topic you'd like to see treated in this kind of detail?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Speaking of crime stories, just a quick mention of two new publications. The July/August issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine includes my story "Hunters," a wicked little tale of family bonding, birdwatching--and MURDER! Given the recent printing problems with the magazine, I'm not sure when physical copies will be out, but the digital issue is available now.

Over the last couple of years, my fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman has invited me to write some holiday-themed stories for Black Cat Weekly, including yarns about Christmas and Talk Like A Pirate Day. The latest, "It's Flag Day on Fairview," came out in issue #249. I had a lot of fun with this one, about a neighborhood rivalry that gets way out of hand.

And finally, I wanted to express my gratitude to Jon Larsen at Thrilling Detective and Vicki Weisfeld at Crime Fiction Lover for their recent thoughtful reviews of my collection Crime Scenes. It's not easy getting attention for short story collections these days, so I'm very appreciative for their time and insightful comments. It's always gratifying to know somebody enjoyed your work!

How To Get an Experienced Author to Help You

My 21st book has just come out, and I've been doing the rounds of Author Events, as provided by my publisher.  This weekend I will be in Kingston (4 hours away, so a major gig requiring hotels) on a Women of Crime panel.  I love meeting crime writers and readers - they're my tribe.

However, for the umpteenth time, I've been faced with the following.  A man in his sixties came up to me at a signing, shoved his manuscript in my face, and said I had to read it - I'd love it.  And he would let me read it for FREE.

He did not, to my knowledge, buy one of my books.  Nor had he read any.  It was enough that I was a well-published author.  Surely I would read his first attempt - which was brilliant - and recommend it to my agent.

Needless to say, I smiled wearily, and told him that alas, all requests for endorsements and blurbs go through my agent or publisher.  They decide how my time should be spent.

He seemed a little shocked.  And he moved away without buying a book. 

This got me thinking about how aspiring writers, who are obviously eager for connection and endorsement, should go about networking.

1.  If you want a more established author to take notice of you, read their books!  In particular, give them good reviews.  Respond 'Like' to their posts on Facebook, etc.  Comment, when you can.  Follow them religiously. Go to their events, if they are local.  Then you can point to this, when you meet them in person.    

In a perfect world, we would give our time freely.  But ours is a world where there is a constant tug on our time, especially time we aren't paid for.  Established writers simply can't respond to every demand for attention, from complete strangers.

So that's the key.  Don't start out as a stranger when you approach us.  Establish a relationship on social media; be a supporter of our books.  Buy our books!  Then we will be more likely to say,  "Oh, so *you're* Jane Doughy!  I'm happy to meet you in person."

 2.  This excellent advice came from Vicki Delany, maybe 20 years ago.  "If you want a more established author to invite you to participate on a panel, make sure you invite them to join you in one of your events first.  It should be obvious!"

It's true.  This happens more with men than women, I find. Male writers have begged me to include them in my local events, and have yet to reciprocate.  I wish it weren't so.  I hate breaking things down by gender. 

But this advice is true for any aspiring writer or newly published author.  I actually sat down with one new author who asked me, "How do I get to be on one of your Women of Crime panels?"  And I said, "Invite me to do an event with you first."  It was like the light dawned in her eyes.  She was most appreciative.

But will it happen?  I don't know.

The truth is, I enjoy helping new writers.  I taught aspiring writers for over 20 years at college.  I want to encourage new writers; I even put money behind it and sponsor the Best First Novel award for Crime Writers of Canada.  But you can't help everyone.

And that's why I thought it might help to write this column today.  Give yourself the best chance possible!  Become known to your favourite local authors. 

We want to know you too.

Compared to Agatha Christie by The Toronto Star, and “Christie-meets-Wodehouse” by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Melodie Campbell is the winner of 10 awards. Her publications include 21 novels and over 60 short stories. The Pharaoh's Curse Murders, from Cormorant books, has just been released.  http://www.melodiecampbell.com

 

 

 

 

 

  

Hostile Books

 We've all had them, the books we just couldn't pick up. For whatever reason, it's a book everyone says you have to read that you just can't get through. Sometimes, you give them another try. Why's this a bestseller? Why is this a classic? 

I've run into it with Russian novels. I've found them hard to read in print. Then a friend of mine, who knew a Russian speaker and an actual Russian, said they don't really translate well. So I listened to Crime and Punishment on audio. Made a huge difference.

But what of books you just couldn't finish no matter what? I went through a list of classics that included Don Quixote and The Magic Mountain. It also included a book that gets highly praised: Portrait of a Lady. 

The book begins with Henry James doing his own literary criticism. Um...Aren't you supposed to let other people do the critiques? But Henry just had to provide a few pages reviewing his own book. Okay, fair enough. Stephen King sticks this stuff at the end of his because who wants to read the author's self-indulgent prattle? So I skipped it and moved on to the novel proper.

I'm aware books written before 1900 have a slower pace than those written since World War II. Hemingway made his reputation trimming the fat from his prose almost to the point where you wish he'd put words back in. (That said, The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and To Have and Have Not are masterpieces. Fight me.)

But Henry James spends twenty-five pages where bankers spend the whole time looking down on the common folk. By Page 10, I'm wondering why I'm supposed to be reading this. By Page 20, I hate everyone on the page so far. By Page 25, I throw the book across the room. 

But wait. This is a classic. Hey, I slogged through Moby Dick, and I'm glad I did. That story is imprinted on modern storytelling. It's in the DNA of two Star Trek movies. (First Contact is explicit about it when Lily yells at Picard. "Captain Ahab has to go fight his whale!")

So I did like I did with Crime and Punishment. I went audio. Now, I know there are people who think audio is cheating. Since they're wrong, I'm going to ignore that. Anyway, I made it a little farther before I realized the William James was the smarter brother. Without him, Freud's cigar would just be a cigar. (Wait...Freud did say that. Um...He'd have never invented his famous slip?) I not only hated the bankers, but the titular lady did nothing for me, either. I felt like my time was being wasted. 

I'd gone through this before. In high school, we had to read The Scarlet Letter. Also in high school, we read the Cliff's Notes to The Scarlet Letter because most of us hated that book. No Moby Dick. No Tom Sawyer, by America's greatest writer. We did somehow manage Tale of Two Cities. But The Scarlet Letter? By about halfway through the book, I was praying time travelers would gift the local indigenous tribe with a small thermonuclear device, maybe a neutron bomb. Now, let me qualify this by saying Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America's greatest short story writers. That said, I don't like this one. But I love Stephen King, and I'm still angry about Cell.

 Currently, I have one book I've attempted to read over the years with little success on audio. When The Bonfire of the Vanities came out, I attempted to read it. Again, like The Scarlet Letter and Portrait of a Lady, I had to wade through characters I'd generally avoid in real life. Both times I attempted to read it, all I took away before I put the book down was that New York in 1985 was a miserable place to live. Wolfe's other famous book, The Right Stuff, had that can-do, go fever zeitgeist of the early space program. The Mercury Seven were fun to be around even at their worst. The only thing missing was Yuri Gagarin, who'd have fit right in with them.

I'm attempting Bonfire on audio. I think part of the problem is the inciting incident comes about 15% into the narrative. The paperback listed on Amazon is 702 words, so about 108 pages or so. The average novel is around 300 pages, so by page 100, we all know the characters and several major events have happened. It doesn't help the book as an early eighties Rolling Stone hip vibe, something I have even less patience with now than I did at the age of 20. I'm sticking with it, mainly because I listen to it in 100-page sips. I still don't like the people in this book, but eight years of Game of Thrones and five seasons of Succession have awakened my inner schadenfreude when these people manage to screw themselves.

 

Six Degrees of Separation... or Less

I am constantly fascinated about how few steps it takes to connect between people.  For example:  

June 23, 1993 - Lorena Bobbit got fed up with being abused by her husband John Wayne Bobbitt and cut off his dick with a Ginzu carving knife (turns out Ginzu knives really were as sharp as they were sold to be - truth in advertising lives!).  

John Wayne Bobbitt, with his newly reattached penis* formed a band, The Severed Parts, which went nowhere, and appeared in two adult films, John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut and Frankenpenis. 

*And watching newscasters around the world trying to say the word "penis" on prime-time news in the 1990s was one of the main hilarities of that simpler time - now, of course, 'Anything Goes'.

In 2003, Bobbitt proved that he was one of the world's slowest learners when he was arrested for battery on his new wife.  And he hired an entertainment lawyer, Paul A. Erickson, who booked him on a worldwide "Love Hurts" media tour.

Paul A. Erickson highlights:  Ran Pat Buchanan's Presidential campaign in 1992, and advised Mitt Romney in his Presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012.  In 2016 - he claimed he was on the Trump Presidential transition team. He also sent an email during the 2016 NRA convention to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump with the subtle subject: "Kremlin Connection".

Also in 2016 - Was successfully sexpionaged by Russian "gun rights advocate": 

Maria Butina -  Red sparrow financed by Russian billionaires Alexander Torshin and Konstantin Nikolayev, both friends of Putin, to create a "pro-gun" organization whose chief purpose was to infiltrate Russian opposition groups and, later, the NRA. She succeeded in doing both.  LINK 

2015 - Invited to the South Dakota TARS (Teenage Republicans) Camp in the Black Hills by Dusty Johnson then working for Vantage Point Solutions in Mitchell, SD:  

Johnson raved about her and introduced her to everyone he could, especially in the NRA...  

In December, 2015 then-NRA Vice President (later President) Pete Brownell and former NRA President David Keene went to Moscow with Maria Butina, Torshin, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.  BTW, Butina and Torshin were made life-time members of the NRA.  

2016 - She did what any good Russian agent in a spy novel would do: She sexpionaged Paul Erickson and lived with him for the next to years, but... [sob]

"But this relationship does not represent a strong tie to the United States because Butina appears to treat it as simply a necessary aspect of her activities. For example, on at least one occasion, Butina offered an individual other than U.S. Person 1 [Erickson] sex in exchange for a position within a special interest organization. Further, in papers seized by the FBI, Butina complained about living with U.S. Person 1 [Erickson] and expressed disdain for continuing to cohabitate with U.S. Person 1 [Erickson]." Dakota Free Press

2018 - Butina pled guilty to to infiltrate the US conservative movement as an agent for the Kremlin and to working with Erickson to forge bonds with NRA officials and conservative leaders while under the direction of Torshin. 

2019 - Butina was released from prison, and returned to Russia where she was welcomed as a hero by Vladimir Putin.

Where are they now?

(in alphabetical order)

John Wayne Bobbitt is currently living quietly in Florida, and has been married and divorced 3 times since that fateful night.  Hope springs eternal.  

Maria Butina is a deputy of the Russian Duma, and sits on the Committee on International Affairs as well as the Commission on Investigation of Foreign Interference in Domestic Affairs of Russia.  And if that doesn't make you laugh, nothing will.

Paul A. Erickson - 2019 - Tried and convicted for an oil development scheme and wire fraud and money laundering for Compass Care, a senior living company he founded.  In 2021 - Went to prison for same and was pardoned by President Trump on his last full day in office, January 19, 2021.  

According to AI and my own exhaustive search - like D-Day in "Animal House" - his current whereabouts are unknown.

Dusty Johnson is South Dakota's sole US House Representative, and lost his bid this May to replace Larry Rhoden as Governor of South Dakota. His future is unknown.  

Anyway, from John Wayne Bobbitt to Vladimir Putin in way less than six steps… you can't make this stuff up.

Moonlight Mile

 

My sis sent me a copy of Lehane’s Moonlight Mile, which for some reason I hadn’t read, and although it’s a very good book, it left me for some reason unsatisfied, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.  I might have been asking it to be a different book than it was. 

Moonlight Mile came out in 2010, which means after The Given Day, the first of the Coughlin trilogy, and before Live by Night, the second novel, which picks up Joe Coughlin’s story as a Florida bootlegger.  Moonlight Mile is the last of the Kenzie/Gennaro series, so far, and it’s also a sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone, published twelve years earlier.  I had the nagging feeling Moonlight Mile was kind of an orphan. 

I mean Lehane no offense, but of course if it were me, and he made a similar comment about something of mine, it would get my back up.  We can’t know what impels a writer. 

In any case, we’re revisiting unfinished business.  Gone, Baby, Gone ends on an ambiguous and very uncertain note.  Moonlight Mile is, quite explicitly, a reading of that moral temperature.  I can’t say much about the plot, which takes off at right angles from Gone, Baby, Gone – not without giving too much away, if you’re unfamiliar with the previous book.  We are back in the world of human trafficking, heartless as before, although not quite as horrific.  And maybe the stakes simply don’t seem as high.  There was an edge of nausea in Gone, Baby, Gone that’s just not present, here.  A sense of the absolute is missing. 

It’s not too much to say that evil itself has often been Lehane’s theme.  Sometimes it’s frighteningly specific, and sometimes it’s a planetary influence, felt but unseen - Mystic River makes your skin crawl on both counts.  It may be an odd complaint, but Moonlight Mile didn’t creep me out enough.