Might Makes Right?

Anyone who enjoys mysteries and crime novels has a passion for justice and, when laws are broken, we want to know whodunit and know they have been stopped from committing further crimes and even got their comeuppance. The backbone of justice is our laws and the courts that enforce those laws.

Lately, there have been articles, conversations around tables with coffee and croissants, in articles and online about justice. It's top of everyone's mind these days and, inserted in these conversations is the question about human nature and whether humans are naturally lawless, ruled by might is right, or whether humans gravitate to creating laws because we are driven by fairness and kindness.

A uniquely 2026 thing is the how loud the debate has become about international laws, many brought in after world war two to prevent the rise of countries hell bent on taking over other countries by using force that, eventually, starts wider wars and even world wars. Some are arguing international laws and the courts that enforce them should be eliminated because only might is right rules.

Just last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the imposition of sanctions against the International Criminal Court, by a singularly shocking statement:  "The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC."

This week, the International Criminal Court responded to sweeping U.S. sanctions by stating, "It is an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law."

These sanctions are the tip of the iceberg; what is being attacked, debated, argued about is the very nature of international justice and underneath that, human nature itself.

In January, 2026, Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, took upon himself to describe human nature that defines his country's foreign policy:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

The beginning of time? That's one heck of a statement; how does Miller know what humans have been since the beginning of time? Has he been around that long?  No, he's referring to the belief that humans are designed to claw at each other to climb the evolutionary ladder.

Evolution - explained by those who don't understand it – is seen as the survival of the fittest and the fittest are strong and aggressive so, we are governed by the iron fisted rule that might is right. Evolution has never been that - it is the survival of some genes and the elimination of others, forging the nature of species. Some babies lived long enough to have their own babies, those who didn't survive haven't contributed to the nature of our species. It's a numbers game – those who survive in larger numbers and have more offspring – shape the nature of humanity.

Modern humans have been around for about 300,000 years and our written history is about 5,000 years old, so for much of our history we rely on fossil evidence. Given how long humans existed without written history, those early years have weighed heavily on how are genes were crafted and they are studied by Prehistoric Archaeologists and Paleoanthropologists, using bones, our and the animals we ate, artifacts like tools, clothing, and decorations to piece together who we were. What these scientists don't do is pick a theory out of thin air and pretend it means something. The narrative that the strong survive by aggression and dominance is absolute -  you know where I'm going with this; two words, begin the first one with a b and end the last one with a t. It's made up by people who have never studied or understood our prehistoric past - the past that was long and

In his groundbreaking book The Makings of Mankind, Richard Leaky, the famous paleoanthropologists (yes, the son of famous paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey) presents evidence that cooperation and sharing were crucial for human evolution and not an cute accident. Through carefully documented human remains, he showed that, as our cooperation and altruism increased, so did the numbers of early humans, as evidenced by bones of those who had been injured or disabled even from birth, and who survived because of the care of others. This is when our human numbers increased, skewing our genes to altruism.

Anthropolgist, Sarah blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, shows how cooperation and empathy were necessary for human survival because human babies are immature, requiring long periods of care and those who survive rely on attentive mothers and a bevy of helpers. with scarce resources and threats to their safety; it is not the aggressive that survive but the cooperative - the ones who work together and this is how natural selection sorted us out – those who survived passed on their genes, crafting the human race.

What about the raging strong man beating up others? His survival is neither here not there in the evolutionary scheme of gene survival -  he only matters if he has offspring that survive and if something in his traits helped them survive. Some have argued that fighting off animals that threatened his babies ensured their survival, and eating those animals have fed his babies so yeah, might makes genes survive. A great deal of research has shown that prehistoric humans were sorely lacking in the ability to fend off large animals by themselves and even hunt them successfully by themselves. Picture hand to large paw combat. Picture the same hands trying to strangle an animal. What allowed success in hunting and in defence were tools like spears, created cooperatively, and groups of prehistoric humans hunting together. And let's not forget the baby, who left on their own, would die taking their genes with them. So the baby needs people who care enough, to altruistically watching over them while others gather and hunt for food and collectively defending said baby from being eaten by animals. It all boils down to altruism and cooperation.

What about the "the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”?

Humans haven't been there since the beginning of time and the earliest humans died before telling us much about their existence, so we rely on what they did tell us with their bones and the other evidence of them that remains. All of it points to an increase in survival through cooperation and altruism. If we argue international laws are just the organic outgrowth of human nature, it's best to listen to evidence about how our nature was created rather than make up stuff. Are we a completely altruist cooperative species? Obviously not. Are we a species driven by aggressive genes? Obviously not. Rewriting our history, misunderstanding our evolution, is being used to prop up political actions. We are not a lawless species. We are a species who created laws because of our genes. 

The Great Halloween Specials Gap

It starts each November, the relentless march of Christmas specials. It'll march all the way to January. To be clear, I don't mean movie classics or theme episodes. I mean variety show or cartoon specials done just for the holiday: How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, A Year Without Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and so forth, and so forth. And so forth. We still get new specials each year. Most fade quickly, but the hits stick forever, and the big studios won't stop trying. There's too much money to be made. 

Contrast that with Halloween. It isn't like Halloween is unpopular. I'm writing this before Labor Day, and the stores are already loaded up with decorations and candy. And yet, the years have given Halloween almost nothing by way of enduring TV specials. And franchises have tried: Disney, Bugs and Daffy, Garfield, and yes, the Grinch. 

Of course, one Halloween special has lasted, the one with plenty of merch online and on those aisle shelves: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). It's the exception that proves the specials gap rule. 

And yes, I think about these things sometimes. 

My theory: Christmas comes from a story. A rather famous story, as it happens, and the base themes and characters are baked in and widely known. Centuries of folklore expanded Christmas into a season, with ever-deeper narratives and recurring characters. A team writing a Christmas special need not explain flying reindeer. That team can threaten Santa's workshop or the family gathering from limitless angles. If the script has snow at the end, it's a viable pitch.

Not so with Halloween. Now, we've been scaring each other about ghosts and ghouls since oral storytelling first began, and we've threatened to come back and haunt our families for even longer. The origin themes of Halloween are the coming of winter and the thinning veil between our world and the next. What unites Halloween as a narrative engine are common experiences and common symbols. We've all passed a murky cemetery or felt the unexplained shiver down our spine. These are powerful appeals to our inner fears and primal instincts, not broadcast television-bankable TV specials.

At Christmas, we're all supposed to gather together as a family. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the family will need something to do, usually something to watch together, something warm or at least neutral enough to pause the squabbling. Something that Grandma can't argue is born of the devil.

Something with commercial breaks to sell you stuff. 

This is the exact point A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) tried to drive home, that commercialization ruins the spirit of Christmas. It's my single favorite Christmas special, probably because it nailed this message with humor and innocence. Between sponsor acknowledgements, that is. Coca-Cola bankrolled the whole thing. 

Charlie Brown might have hated it, but Christmas specials are a racket, one that can hawk more than soft drinks. Consumer brands can flog the latest toys, gift ideas for that special someone, and reminders that your neighborhood retailer has your essential this-and-that. And they can do it again next year. 

Halloween is more an event and experience. A popular event, and a lucrative one for many a business, but the customers are buying specific things: fun-size candy, Power Ranger costumes, animatronic hobgoblins, Count Chocula. Even with Halloween's retail boom, the Christmas market operates on a scale geometrically larger in terms of annual U.S. sales. Gifts, travel, decoration, office parties, and the money keeps flowing.

The Great Pumpkin was the third Peanuts special, commissioned only after the franchise scored big with A Charlie Brown Christmas and Charlie Brown's All-Stars. The Great Pumpkin would deliver another hit if it stuck to the formula and made Halloween playfully safe for family hour, a Christmas special in a costume. 

It had to be thus. A ghost story delivers an unsettling lesson, if it delivers a lesson at all. Put in Charlie Brown terms, a proper ghost story wouldn't have a beagle rising up out of the pumpkin patch. It would've been a ghost, and Linus would've either learned to dread the Great Pumpkin and never return, or it would've dragged him down into the vines forever, leaving poor Sally in utter dread. This too cometh your way, home viewers.

That is a flat-out terrible Charlie Brown special, but it has the bones of a solid horror tale. The Halloween spirit never made the jump to broadcast specials, but the time-honored horror story is hardly in ill health. Haunts and monsters continue to thrive in movies, in series television and October bingeathons, in theme parks and around campfires.

Okay, so Halloween specials may not have caught on as with Christmas. We can enjoy the experiences and movies and the ghost hunting shows. And maybe another seasonal classic like The Great Pumpkin might come along some day. As Linus said, there is always next year. Just you wait.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Before Las Vegas, There Was… Newport, Kentucky?

Ah! Prohibition. Fortunes were made on both sides of the law. It gave rise to Elliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover. Every large American city had pockets of Mafia and Mafia-adjacent activity. And it put one Cincinnati suburb on the map. Across the river lies Newport, Kentucky, reachable today by a freeway, the Taylor-Southgate Bridge, and the Purple People Bridge, which formerly carried US 27 and the Louisville &Nashville Railroad. It's now a pedestrian and bike bridge and frequently hosts events.

[Photos sourced from The Northerner to the best of my knowledge.]

But during prohibition, a man named George Remus, called the King of the Bootleggers, ran his criminal empire in Cincinnati from Newport. But a funny thing happened to George. Just as Prohibition came to an end, he got arrested for… Well… Bootlegging.

At the same time, Cincinnati was as mobbed up as any city in Ohio. The city fought back by creating Charter government, run by a city manager. What's a poor mobster to do? They packed up their casinos and dens of ill repute and moved over to Newport, now open territory. Soon, two types of joints opened: knock-out joints, your typical hole in the wall with some rooms upstairs where "hostesses" would entertain gentleman clients, and carpet joints, illegal casinos and, sometimes, brothels that operated in the open and would not be out of place in Las Vegas of the 1950s through the 1970s. One such carpet joint, located between York and Monmouth Streets near what is now the Newport Aquarium, later became a Jeff Ruby restaurant and now a mob-themed event center called The Syndicate. Since Ruby's days as owner, the Syndicate has kept its carpet joint motif. Many celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe frequented the more glamorous establishments. On the other hand, a young blackjack dealer and singer from Steubenville, Ohio, named Dean Martin, dealt at a knockout joint later occupied by a bar owned by Reds legend Tom Browning.

There was no Cincinnati mob to speak of. Newport wiseguys answered to the Cleveland mob, who in turn answered to what's now the Genovese crime family in New York. But others had a hand in the boom times, specifically Bugsey Siegel and Meyer Lansky had money in Newport. It became a proof-of-concept for what they would build in Las Vegas.

But the good times ended in the 1960s. A man named George Ratterman ran for Campbell County sheriff as a reform candidate. At the same time, Robert Kennedy received a mandate from his brother Jack to crack down on organized crime. So RFK (Sr.) set his sites on Newport. The mob, afraid Ratterman would mean the end of the mob in Newport, drugged him and tried to frame him by having a stripper named April Flowers (not her real name) pose with the unconscious candidate in an effort to derail his candidacy. Everyone saw the picture as a fake. By 1970, the operation was in tatters.

A few remnants lingered on after that. Larry Flynt bought a famous strip joint on Monmouth known as the Brass Ass. Flynt later sold it. The Brass Ass became a local tourist trap and only closed last month. The Syndicate, of course, exists as a mob-themed event center after hosting the Rat Pack and the like back in Newport's sin-and-vice heyday. But it's a, like, a respectable joint.

But if you want to know what drove the final nail in the coffin, look no further than the Bevery Hills Supper Club in neighboring Southgate.  The Club was the areas most famous carpet joint, still open long after gambling operations had been run out of Northern Kentucky. If the police raided, the gambling gear would be shoved into another room until the police did their business. And again, celebrities frequented the place as both performers and guests. But one night in 1977, a fire swept through the club, killing 165 people and injuring 200 more. The club was never rebuilt, and a memorial now stands on the site.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the most infamous post-mob vice incidents in Newport. A Cincinnati City Council member drove over the late, lamented Central Avenue Bridge to Newport for a massage. As in one with a "happy ending." He wrote a check. It bounced. It became a running joke in Cincinnati for years. But...The councilman returned to Council next term, got elected mayor, and later became a well-respected anchorman on WLWT. Then he had his own talkshow.

The Jerry Springer Show.

 But his most infamous episode came about because the vice of Newport outlived the mob.

Seriously, Trigger Warnings

In 1989, I started graduate school at a university that I'll call The U because three decades have passed.  Maybe things have changed.  Anyway, there was a serial rapist working the campus, striking at night in certain parking lots and various locations around town where students and teachers lived.  

And quite a few of the graduate level history classes took place at night, including one in a professor's home.  In fact, once a rape occurred less than a block away from that house while we were in class.  So that worked out quite well for the professor, but it made for disturbing walks to and from the car for the rest of us.  

Yes, we female students including me always asked one of the guys in the class to escort us to our cars, and they always cooperated, so leaving class wasn't a problem.  The tough part was parking at night, when you got out of the car with your books and notebooks, trying to breathe normally, keep walking, while looking around like your eyes were on swivels...  One of the parking lots had had four assaults, and that's where I had to park for one class because it was  the closest to the building, and anywhere else would have meant that I'd have to walk through two other parking lots which were just as dangerous, because the rapist struck randomly.  

The administration never admitted that the rapes were going on. They did send out a "safety memo" that women should seek escorts at night, just as a matter of common safety.  No mention of the rapist.  And the campus police (more on them later) were never around at night.  A huge number of students signed a petition asking for campus police to monitor the parking lots - but the university said there simply weren't the resources to do that.  Just seek someone to escort you and stay out of dark spaces.  Ignoring the night classes.  The dark parking lots, where sometimes a light went out and wasn't replaced for a few weeks.  The dark street where the professor lived.  And back then, no cell phones…

Hell, I'm getting triggered just writing this.  Because that was a long stretch to live under constant tension and fear, and even after two years on the streets of L.A. as a teenager.  I guess I'd hoped life would get safer, especially at the posh university I'd been lucky enough to get accepted by.  Wrong.  

So I have a few comments about the Cornell 7 and the handling of Jane Doe's case.

Especially after reading what's been made available of the group text among the guys that started off with “Free p---y” in the house, continued with a discussion where one fraternity brother responded to that piece of information by writing “I f---ing love Chi Phi”; and another either sought or provided clarification, “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” and yet another, “Shop still open?” at 1:42 AM on Oct. 19, 2024.

As Monica Hesse said on WaPo:  

“Shop still open?” is a kind of wordplay that requires a little brainpower, especially when made at 1:42 a.m. Your mind may be fuzzy with alcohol or ketamine, but not so fuzzy that you cannot dig out your phone and add a question mark.

The question mark is needed because you do not know whether the woman — a student, just like you — is still there. You are not there, after all. You are in a different room. You are making a premeditated inquiry as to whether you should bother traveling to another part of the house in order to have sex with a woman you have identified as a shop. You have to think about it. You have to press send.

You do not know whether she is conscious or consenting. You are not texting her to find out. She could probably be a better judge of whether she was conscious or consenting, but you have instead decided to group-text your fraternity brothers, entrusting them to be the judge of whether the shop should be open. If you text the shop, you might learn that maybe it never wanted to be open in the first place.

The presence of a group text is both gobsmacking and banal. It conveys that whatever was happening in that room — however drunk or drugged everyone was in that room — several people still thought to document the evening in real time. To make it a bonding experience. To make it a party. To make sure everyone got to the shop before the shop woke up or tried to hide under covers or started crying or wished to get out of that room or did whatever else it is that shops do.

“Shop still open?” wrote one young man, and another wrote back, “Yeah.” (LINK)

Now let's get to the Tompkins County DA, Matthew Van Houten, who said that his decision not to bring charges was based on the contents of Jane Doe's signed 2024 statement. But he told CBS News New York's Saeidi on Tuesday that he had never seen the transcript of what Jane Doe told campus police before his office decided not to bring charges.

NOTE:  This transcript included the direct statements:

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."*

Anyway, Van Houten said,

"I'm going to follow up on this because this is news to me," he said.

When told Jane Doe had said she was confident she was raped, Van Houten said, "That wasn't information that I had, first of all. Second of all, that is a legal conclusion."

"If she had said those words, we certainly would want to have explored that more," Van Houten continued. "Like I said, that wasn't provided to me." (LINK)

 Now the Cornell Police Department reports ONLY to the Cornell CFO (Chief Financial Officer). And the victim only talked to the Cornell Police Department (remember what I said about university "police departments"?), who condensed 100+ pages of interview to 6 pages that "omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she used. And it was missing her unequivocal statement that she had been raped." (LINK) The Cornell Police Department sent the condensed version to the CFO of Cornell University, and then it was sent to DA Van Houten, who did what is the standard thing you do for the university that keeps the city in business. Bury it.

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."*

Anyway, the Ithaca Police Department NEVER SAW THE STATEMENT, NEVER WAS TOLD ABOUT THE CRIME, AND SO NEVER INVESTIGATED, even though Jane Doe and her family thought they were involved in the investigation.  

PLUS

The night before she was gangraped, a student had overdosed from ketamine at that very Cornell frat house.
A recent campus climate survey at Cornell University found that 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact.

Guess what?  Nothing was done about any of these!  Wow!  What a surprise!  

OK. A couple of suggestions:

(1) Do not let universities and colleges handle their own sexual assault investigations ever again. Ever. Anywhere.  Campus police are basically there to break up street fights and keep things quiet. They ignore the rich frat houses and mop up bad situations. Bury things. They may be called "police departments" but they're not qualified. They certainly weren't back at The U and they apparently weren't at Cornell. 

(2) Ban fraternities.  I don't care how much money they have, or how they're conduits to "good futures".  There's too much bad shit that goes on, from hazings that end up killing students to alcohol and drug overdoses to sexual assaults.  And even though I realize doing this is like closing the barn door after the cattle escape, I really am sick of rapists, alcoholics, and drug addicts reaching high levels of power and influence.  At least the geyser might turn into a trickle.  

"Records show that from 2018 through 2024, more than 1,200 incidents of sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking were reported to Cornell University’s Title IX office, USA TODAY has reported."  Read more at:   (LINK) I'm sure that NONE of them were publicized.  

(3) Quit the rhetoric that it's the woman's fault.  (I know, that's a dream...)  Young men can do stupid things, commit crimes, brag about it online, and the general rap is still, "Do we really want to ruin a young man's life over 20 minutes of action?"   

(Quote from the father of Brock Turner - at the time in a frat at Stanford - who violently raped an unconscious woman and got six months in jail.)  BTW, fun fact - the two men who stopped Brock Turner in mid-rape, chased him down, and held him until the police arrived were Two Swedish graduate students, Peter Lars Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, may praise be to their names forever. So immigrants saved her. None of the frat brothers.  

ANSWER:  Yes, we do want to destroy a young man's life over 20 minutes "of action".  Because certain kinds "of action" destroy a young girl's life forever. 

(4) Recognize that in an authoritarian world, the real definition of power - unprettied, unsoftened - is the ability to do whatever you want and get away with it. And one of the absolute proofs of power, to sociopaths, psychopaths, and pack mobs, is the ability to do anything you want to someone subordinate/inferior to you and get away with it. Especially sexual dominance. That's why rape is a standard weapon in war, gangs, prisons or anywhere else where someone has to prove they're the ones calling all the shots.  

*BTW, when Jane Doe said “I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.” "And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."

This is exactly what Andrew Tate & his scumbag brother, and every other pimp has been doing since the dawn of time: get the woman back to the pad; drug her; rape her; beat her; share her around; humiliate her; repeat.

Drug, rape, beat, abuse, humiliate. That’s the pattern.  Time for that shit to STOP.

The Writing Life?

The rest of my year is shaping up with a lot of writing-related events. Or is it?  

When I attend Left Coast Crime I try to arrange to give a brief talk about the Brubaker case.  (The nutshell version: This guy stole tens of thousands of publications from 100+ libraries and my university was the one that caught him, after more than a year of investigating.) Chris Dreith attended the chat I did this year and invited me to speak, via zoom, to the Sacramento chapter of Sisters on Crime on October 17, 4 PM Eastern time..  It's free to the public, if you are interested.  You can register here.

Then in November I will have a table at Open Book, an event sponsored by Whatcom County Library System.  If I'm lucky I might sell a few books there.  In any case it will be fun. I have attended it twice, but never as an author.  I always learn something there. 

 

 

Every month the Wolfe Pack has a monthly zoom discussion  of Rex Stout's books. This December  the subject is Gambit and I have been invited to talk about it because I wrote an article about it in the long-gone journal The Armchair Detective.  (My only published literary criticism, actually.)

I'm looking forward to all of these events but I recently realized: all of these are writing-related, but none of them are writing.

These days if you want to have what I will laughingly call a career in writing you have to spent as much time promoting your stuff as you do creating it.  The time I am spending perfecting my speech on Brubaker is time I am not spent putting words onto an electronic page.  

When I started planning to write this piece (which, ahem, is also not going to earn me any money) I thought it would be a complaint.  However...

Whenever I give a talk about the Brubaker theft someone always asks: Have you written any fiction about it?  I have always replied: No, I don't want to give that bad man any more room in my skull.

But this week I thought of a way to write a short story based on the theft.  So, sometimes the publicity machine can crank up the writing machine.  And so the great circle of life is maintained.  Hoping you the same.

More Books I Recommend

 How did it get to be October already? The months seem to fly, don't they? Well, having just finished the third quarter of the year, it's a great time to share the mystery/crime books I enjoyed most during the last three months. 

They all happened to have been published this year. While none of them are perfect reads (what books are?), I did enjoy them and do recommend them.

So without further ado ...

 

The Women in White by Sarah Pekkanen

This is a dual-timeline story. The earlier timeline occurs in 1964 at a fictional college (that I understand was based on a real one). This college has a famous professor who is conducting parapsychology research. He finds four women with ESP and runs experiments on them. The professor is sadistic and treats the women poorly, but they all have reason to put up with it. (Being a woman in 1964 wasn't easy.) Then, one day, the four women disappear. 

The second timeline is set in the current day, when a young woman is hired as the caregiver of a recently widowed elderly woman, Betty, who was one of the four test subjects. Betty lives in a house that could have been plucked right out of the 1960s (think no modern conveniences). She doesn't know what she's missing, however, because she's rarely left her home in the last sixty years. Why? And what happened to the other three women? The newly hired caregiver is determined to find out. 

I found this to be an intriguing page-turner. The insights into ESP research was fascinating (and disturbing). The author did a good job of showing how the women became found family for each other and how they coped as the professor used their friendships to manipulate them. I wish the author had shown more of a range in the personalities of the men in the story (though I understand that the story dictated otherwise) and that she'd let the reader know more about what happened to the professor in the end. Nonetheless, this is a strong book. If you like psychological thrillers, I think you'll like this book.

 

A Cute Little Murder by Molly Harper

And now for something a little lighter. This book opens with prologue set fifteen years ago, as two teenage girls who run a true-crime podcast (based on crimes in their small town) are in the midst of busting their principal for a number of felonies. They're their high school's version of Veronica Mars, and the author really succeeded in capturing the vibe.

Then we fast-forward to present day. One girl has grown into a big-league true-crime podcaster. The other has become a forensic accountant. They aren't in touch (it turns out they weren't such good friends after all), until the podcaster needs the accountant's help solving a 1920s cold case in a soon-to-close hotel on a small island in the Great Lakes. As you can imagine, the original case might be old, but that doesn't mean there isn't someone who wants to stop the current investigation.

I found this to be a well-plotted story with fun twists, amusing characters, interesting sleuthing, enjoyable romance, and a good voice. The pacing was a little slow at times in the middle, and the main character (the accountant) reminded herself way too often that she was doing this for the money, but it still was a good read. I wish this were the beginning of a series, but it appears it's a standalone. 

 

The Primrose Murder Society by Stacy Hackney

After her husband goes on the lam for white-collar crime and the government takes her house and money, Lila and her precocious, Murder She Wrote-obsessed daughter, Bea, age ten, need a safe place to land. They find The Primrose, an upscale fifty-five-plus building. They're allowed to move in temporarily, rent-free, because they promise to clean out the apartment of a recently deceased hoarder. 

Then a rich man in the building dies, and he's left $2 million to whoever solves the cold case of his granddaughter's death in that very building. What's a woman in need of cash to do but to take on the case, especially when her daughter keeps pushing her to do it? Heck, Bea would handle the investigation herself if Lila would stop reining her in.

The novel is filled with a strong mother/daughter relationship, fun (if sometimes annoying) secondary characters (the neighbors--including a retired police detective who thinks he wasn't good at his job), a well-plotted mystery, and a bunch of amusing moments with witty dialogue. It's a solid series starter. As one reviewer said, it's a "delightful story about perseverance, overcoming odds, found family, friendship, and believing in oneself." It's this author's first mystery, and she did a good job. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series, coming next spring.

 ************

And now for a little BSP: 

Three weeks ago I wrote about the new anthology Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder!, which I edited with Donna Andrews and Marcia Talley. This fun anthology has seventeen stories involving ghosts, monsters, human bad guys, and, of course, crime. (You can read that blog post here.) On Tuesday, October 20th, at least a dozen of the authors with stories in the book will appear on a zoom where they'll talk about their stories and share tips for writing short stories. 

The authors scheduled to appear are: Donna Andrews, Ellen Byerrum, Barb Goffman (yes, that's me), Kathryn Holland, Smita Harish Jain, Meghan Lewis, Jane Limprecht, Alan Orloff, Pat Remick, Daphne Silver, Robin Templeton, and Marcia Talley. We're still hoping a few more might be able to attend.

The event will begin at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on 10/20. You can register to attend by clicking here. We hope to see you there.

Oops

 

Mistakes, I’ve made few, but then again, too many to mention.  And more, much more than this, I did it any way I could figure out. 

            When people ask me how I’m able to make a certain piece of wood working, the only honest answer is, “A series of mistakes, randomly interrupted by moments of good fortune.”   I think the only difference between a person who succeeds at a craft, and one who doesn’t, is

the willingness to try.  Failure is not an option, it’s inevitable.  A completed project is the result of winnowing the number of mistakes down to a tolerable, and amendable, few.  Thus, making mistakes is not as important as knowing how to reorganize the flaws. 

            For this, the most important ingredient is humility.  When it comes to craft, we are all born sinners.  Accepting this is the road to endurance and faith that persistence, seasoned by patience and presence of mind, will see you through. 

            Some mistakes achieve an unexpected good.  We’ve heard about Velcro, Post-it notes and microwave ovens, but I have experienced a number of occasions when a colossal blunder resulted in a far better outcome.  This usually happens when I’ve made my intended effect impossible, so I’m forced to redesign the whole thing, turning a repair into a pleasing improvisation.     

Architects have known about this for a long time, probably because buildings are so big and take so long to put together that learning how to glorify a goof was an important strategy.   

            Not unlike building a novel.  I’m sure this is how many of you write.  Perhaps it’s the only way to write anything halfway decent. Anne Lamott’s shitty first draft is actually an exercise in dispensing thousands of mistakes that call for ingenious corrections.  Our most inventive writers are probably people who generate mistakes at scale, writing themselves out of one pitfall after another.

           

            The Grand Master of fortuitous mistakes is nature herself.  For every living thing, reproductive success is a numbers game.  The reason an individual produces far more eggs or sperm than needed to complete the transaction is it increases the odds for an acceptable match.  A byproduct of these multitudes is that little errors creep into the genetic scheme. It’s regrettable that the word “mutation” has a vaguely negative connotation.  Truth is, without mutation, we wouldn’t have evolution, since natural selection needs a toolbox of mis-made parts from which to select the preferred attribute for continued survival.   

If you really want to go large on the value of error, whatever existed before the Big Bang contained tiny quantum fluctuations, deviations from the norm.  This meant the universe didn’t start off perfectly configured, but instead, what cosmologists charmingly describe as slightly lumpy.  This meant that when expansion created the universe we ended up with galaxies, stars, and planets, one of which is our current residence.

            This is what I’d call a happy accident. 

            I’ve recently mentioned the delusion of perfectionism.  Nothing is perfect, and if it was, it wouldn’t do us much good.  It would just sit there in a smooth slab of static nothingness.  It wouldn’t grow, change, evolve or adapt.  This doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to make things better. You just can’t make them perfect, and neither should you try.   

            Say what you will about the advanced technology we live with today, it mostly works.  It’s all pretty much based on quantum mechanics, which everyone applies, though no one really understands.   If you could boil down the unfathomable complexity of quantum theory, the remaining nugget would be probability.  Probably.  Outcomes are not predetermined, but rather the consequence of infinite, unknowable and evanescent interactions.  Heisenberg proved that “here and now” is ultimately an approximation. 

            This wouldn’t happen in a perfect world, but lucky for us, irregularity and imprecision makes the whole thing operational.  It’s been built into the system since the first nanosecond.  You might regret a mistake, but there’s no shame in it.  So have at it.  That’s why we have copy editors, imperfect as they are.   

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fraudulent Færies

Subject: A Conan Doyle, circa 1920.
Genuine, for certain real, not fake,
Lumière KinemaColour fauxtograf™
on loan to SleuthSayers, courtesy
British Museum archive collection.

Doyle and Houdini and science and such,
Séance and fairies concern overmuch.

The words physics and psychics come to us from Greek via Latin. The spellings might seem similar, but physics in Greek related to physical things, especially nature, whereas psychics suggested soul. Forgive me, but I'm in the former camp.

My classmate Lela with kindness told me I was a ‘rational bigot’. She’s not wrong and I cherish her evaluation. When it comes to psychic phenomena, I side with the Amazing Randi: provide evidence, unambiguous proof. Unlike, well, the most highly regarded icon in our profession.

Embarrassingly, when it came to spiritualism and the supernatural, the wonderful and prolific Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was dismayingly gullible. He was so unlike Sherlock Holmes that it hardly seems credible he could so superlatively depict his coldly rational protagonist.

I mentioned the magician Randi, but Doyle was, you might be surprised to learn, once a close friend of Harry Houdini. The famed magician went to lengths to dissuade the author from his utter belief in the occult, efforts that eventually broke their friendship.

From the Mouths of Babes

Thus we set the stage for a pair of Yorkshire cousins who, aided by flitting fairies, fooled much of the adult world, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. For proof, they proffered photographs of petite figures hovering in the air.

1^st Cottingley photo

To be sure, young girls have fooled adults before. The Fox sisters, Leah, Maggie, and Kate, introduced the world to séances in 1848. After a hundred eighty years and an eventual admission of fakery by one of the sisters, séances still have believers. Simply visit Cassadaga, Florida, a town of soothseekers.

Much earlier in 1692, the Salem witch trials began with antics and accusations by three pre-teen girls, 9yo Elizabeth (Betty) Parris, her cousin 11yo Abigail Williams, and Ann Putman, age 12. The latter child became a prolific inculpater who, along with a number of teenagers, over time denounced nearly half the village of practicing witchcraft. And adults believed them.

Back in England

5^th Cottingley photo

The Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand carried photographs of fairies photographed by two young cousins in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. There were doubters, but skeptics were few and believers were many.

A few months later, the same magazine published a followup by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was couched as a reasonable exploration of the subject, but it’s clear Doyle not only accepted the evidence of fairies, but also supernatural phenomena in general. (As a side note, Doyle was also taken in by the Piltdown Man hoax.)

Without further ado, here’s the original article and here’s Doyle’s defence.

No fairies were harmed in the making of this article.

Even though I don’t believe in fairies, I’m setting out a dish of cookies. Just sayin’.

Boo-hoo, Wow, and Hooray

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post here at SleuthSayers called "Whoa, Look at THAT," about current YouTube channels showing moviewatchers' reactions--fright, sorrow, delight, shock, etc.--to what they see on the screen, and how those emotion-charged scenes can be an inspiration to us, as fiction writers. After all, we want to make our readers feel those same things. 

Anyhow, since watching a few of those channels told me what movies and parts of movies the "reactors" liked most, I've been doing some thinking about which movie scenes triggered the biggest reactions from me. And the funny thing is, those reactions didn't only happen the first time I saw these movies, some of them many years ago; the feelings are rekindled every time I see them. And I re-watch a lot of movies.

So think of this post as "Whoa, Look at THAT, Part 2." I have listed, below, thirty scenes that always, even now, keep me glued to the screen. I'm sure you won't agree with me on all of them--some aren't even scenes from great or well-known movies--but for me they're all entertaining and bring forth truly strong emotions. 

NOTE 1: I'm including links to the videos, instead of embedding functional clips. Otherwise this post would be a mile long. (Besides, the Blogger program, for some reason, wouldn't allow me to.)

NOTE 2: I'm NOT including the Bates Motel shower scene, Rhett leaving Scarlett, requests for a bigger boat, San Francisco car chases, songs in the rain, napalm in the morning, Sam playing the piano, etc., because most of us have seen those scenes many, many times. Some of the following you actually might not know about. And a warning: big spoilers ahead!

1. Surprise

Poltergeist: TV people

The Usual Suspects: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled

12 Angry Men: It's a very unusual knife

Romancing the Stone: Together, forever

Dead Poets Society: O captain, my captain

The Sixth Sense: They don't know they're dead

Superman (1978): All those powers--and I couldn't even save him

The Natural: Awright, Hobbs, knock the cover off the ball

2. Sadness

Cool Hand Luke: He was smilin'

Somersby: God bless you, Jack

Shane: There aren't any more guns in the valley

Lonesome Dove: Hell of a vision

The Last Sunset: Primroses

Old Yeller: Travis, bring your gun

Dances with Wolves: Do you see that I am your friend?

3. Tension

For a Few Dollars More: Try and shoot me, Colonel

Goldfinger: What kept you?

The Black Stallion: There's some problem with the Mystery Horse

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968): Left early

Star Trek II: Here it comes

Aliens: Punch it, Bishop

Raiders of the Lost Ark: Throw me the idol, I throw you the whip

Once Upon a Time in the West: You bring a horse for me?

4. Happiness

It's a Wonderful Life: Every time a bell rings

Flashdance: What a feeling

Witness: He'll need his city clothes

Forrest Gump: Run, Forrest, run

Rocky: Ain't gonna be no rematch

The Graduate: Elaine!

An Officer and a Gentleman: Way to go, Paula

Something I didn't mention earlier: For me, music plays a big part in how I'm affected by movie scenes. For example, think about how different that final shot in Gone with the Wind would be, as the camera tracks back from Scarlett to show the live oak tree beside her and Tara in the distance, if it weren't for that fantastic Max Steiner score. That, of course, and visual elements like lighting, colors, and camera movement, is something we writers can't create on the page; we have to work a little harder at causing those emotions. But it can be done. I still remember the tears that came to my eyes when the little boy died in the hot car at the end of the novel Cujo (in the movie version, he lives), and when Boo Radley is finally revealed to Scout in the final pages of To Kill a Mockingbird. 

Now, a question for you: Which movie scenes do you recall affecting you the most, emotionally? Happiest, saddest, most surprising, most suspenseful? Are any of them the same as those I've remembered? Have you been influenced by any particular scenes, for your own writing?

I think I'll go see if I can find some more (and yes, Honey, it's still research). 

Go ye and do likewise.

The Strangers Who Came to Dinner

Still life with kibori kuma.
(Japanese hand-carved sculpture of bear with fish).

When we bought this house in the mountains of North Carolina, I foolishly thought that this tiny parcel of land was all ours. Wrong. We were merely the only organisms living on the property dumb enough to pay for it. I learned that the first time a flock of turkeys traipsed through our vegetable garden with thirteen of their waddling poults, pecking at every single one of our tomatoes for whatever sustenance they could provide.

When one of our neighbors attached a night vision camera to a tree in the woods behind our houses, it became clear that when the sun dropped a menagerie held court: opossum, fox, deer, and bears.

The latter have become the unofficial mascot of our city. Local artists have given us and the tourists tons of bear chic decor to fill our homes with. We ourselves display two paintings of bears on our walls. (The bear carving predates our marriage.)

If traffic slows on our approach to the mall, we know chances are good that a black bear is crossing the road. If tourists are standing around pointing their phones at a tree in the downtown shopping district, it’s because an adolescent ursine is napping in its branches. Every summer we hear sad stories of bears euthanized for entering peoples’ homes, or tales of idiots “not-from-around-here” who think it’s a good idea to hug and then selfie with a bear cub on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

“He died for Instagram” is not a phrase I’d like to have on my tombstone.

My backyard, late July 2017, 7 AM.

We know why they’re in our midst. (See our friend Amy Cherrix’s children’s book, Backyard Bears, if you really need a primer.) Every passing second, we humans consume more of their habitat. If you’ve ever watched a Yogi Bear cartoon, you know the other reason. We make it easy for them to get food.

Hardware stores in the region sell bear-resistant trash bins and straps, but the bears have such an smorgasbord to choose from, they can easily find a snack a few doors down from those selfish homeowners who lock up their goods.

And—gotta say it—a warming climate means that the bears are increasingly confused by parameters of their annual nap. How dare Nature wake them on a 70-degree day after three weeks of frigid weather, and not provide them with something to eat? The effrontery! Wait—are there any of those bipedal meat sacks around? These boneheads always leave out something good to eat.

I was one of those dopey meat sacks one year. Normally, I don’t put out trash until the morning of pickup. If I have an abundance, I stash the plastic bags in our locked garage until the designated day. But a three-day weekend altered the trash calendar, and the sanitation department did not, for some reason, phone me immediately to let me know.

I walked out of the house, intending to do some yard work or drive to a store, and discovered a bear rooting through my toppled bin. I closed the front door, and quickly ticked off all the things I was supposed to do to scare bears off.

Timorous beastie flees in the presence of ruggedly handsome writer.
In other news: a great year for lavender.

In the wild, you are supposed to play dead if attacked by a grizzly. If attacked by a black bear, you are advised to loudly fight back. (Who comes up with these suggestions?) Yes, thought I, loud noises could work. After all, every creature in the peaceable kingdom fears human clangor.

I dashed to the kitchen, grabbed a pot and a steel serving spoon, and did my best impression of a clangorous scribe, while hiding behind my cracked front door.

Nothing. The bear did not lift its head, let alone budge.

Maybe I was not loud or annoying enough?

Back to the kitchen. I rooted in a cabinet for the portable Bluetooth speaker we use in the yard. I booted the thing up, and scrolled through my phone in search of Music to Frighten Bears. I nudged the speaker onto the porch with the steel spoon.

Folks, I am here to tell you that bears are not at all terrified of the Hamilton soundtrack.

You know what finally did the trick? Me, standing on the porch, stamping my feet and screaming at the top of my lungs.

It was the last thing I wanted to do, but it worked!

My wife has never let me forget that I attempted to scare off a bear with show tunes. I mean, could I not summon some Whitesnake in a hurry?

Another time, I returned from the market and was getting groceries out of the car when I looked up to discover that a mother and two cubs had just entered my driveway from our backyard.

Mother and I locked eyes, and I swear, my brain played tricks on me.

My first thought was, “Who is this now? Did someone invite themselves over unannounced?”

Yes, for a few moments, I thought I was peering into the pinched, narrowed eyes of an irritated person. That’s how human its gaze was.

After a bit, my brain coughed up another possibility: “Wait, are they dogs?”

Finally, I comprehended the truth. I flung the groceries back in the car, jumped in myself, locked the doors, and prayed that they had not packed their glass cutters.

I waited twenty minutes while they explored the front yard, climbed up and down our front cherry tree, and finally wandered off.

That memory came back to me when I read a review of Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s book, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, about a New Hampshire town that is taken over by a group of freedom-loving activists who ignore such basics as taxes and city sanitation, only to have their Utopia trampled to pieces by black bears. A woman who survived mauling tells the author, “If you look at their eyes, you understand that they are completely alien to us.”

I once thought that. But the longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve become sympathetic to their plight. A painter doing work on our house one year put it all in perspective. He had stepped out our front door to wash his brushes, and beheld the sight of a mother bear strolling up the road with three cubs in tow. A furry parade that did not make eye contact with him.

“Can you imagine the stress that mother is under?” he told me later. “She’s got to find food every day to feed all four of them.”

Our neighborhood keeps a running mobile phone text thread to keep everyone in the loop on bear sightings. Usually, the texts arrive after the neighborhood dogs have raised the alarm, so it’s never a surprise. But we do want to know where exactly the bears were last seen, in whose yard, how many, and how big. For these reasons alone I’m never without the phone in my pocket.

The system is far from foolproof.

There was the morning the dog barked endlessly in the lower part of our yard. When I finally walked over to see what the deal was, I spotted an adolescent bear marching away from us, like a tightrope walker, over the top of the privacy fence. Denise came down to look. I grabbed the dog and pulled him back to the house. In my absence, the bear somehow reversed course, faced Denise, and hissed. She backed away and rejoined the dog and me.

I still don’t understand how he was able to make a U-turn on a narrow fence top. They look blubbery and ungainly, but they’re incredibly nimble.

One night in late summer, my wife alerted me to a bear tearing down our bird feeder. (We have since banished feeders from the yard.) It was dark, and I had trouble seeing the culprit. When I finally discerned his shape, I gasped.

Hoping to explain my behavior, I blathered, “Well, I mean, first I thought it was a chubby man in a black raincoat. Then…I realized it was a bear—and I got scared!”

Thirty minutes later, after the bear left and we removed the attractant, she pounced on my words. “Oh, but a chubby man in a black raincoat…in our backyard, at night, was not at all scary to you?”

In May 2021, when she was out, a mother and cub surprised me in the yard. I scampered into the house and bolted the sliding doors of the den. My guests were not in a hurry to go. In fact, they settled in for a sweet siesta in the shadiest part of the yard. From the safety of an upstairs bathroom window, I filmed the interaction. The footage runs 90 seconds. (I put it on YouTube.) It’s the most tender mother-and-child scene I’ve witnessed outside of a nature documentary. Nat Geo, call me.

All these creatures want is space, peace, and to be left alone.

A hilarious book by William Kotzwinkle, entitled The Bear Went Over the Mountain, imagines a world in which a black bear in the woods of Maine discovers a completely finished book manuscript lying in a briefcase under a tree. Naturally, he lands a literary agent and passes the work off as his own. Zaniness ensues. It’s a clever satire about all the things wrong with publishing and Hollywood. And the bear, long a symbol of strength, protection, and seasonal renewal, becomes instead an unwitting player in a sordid drama of literary fraud.

Makes you think: They already eat our food and make themselves at home in our spaces. Would it really be so strange if they stole our livelihoods? Better them than AI. Vincant ursi.

My neighbor John gets bears who long to style their hair.

 Photo copyright 2026 Gordon John Gilbart.

 

* * * 

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com