The Darkest Crime

I managed to collar some of my favourite writers for an interview.

Melissa Yi: What attracts you to writing crime? In other words, "But you look so normal!"
Rebecca Cantrell (New York Times bestseller): Don't I just? That's how I lure them in...readers, I mean. I love writing crime because I have an overblown sense of justice and, despite having heard many warnings to the contrary, I want life to be fair.

O’Neil De Noux (winner of the Shamus Award and the Derringer Award): Grew up reading a lot of crime fiction. My father was a police officer, my brother was a cop, two of my cousins were cops. I became a cop, served as a road deputy (patrol officer), organized crime intelligence officer and homicide detective. I also worked as a private investigator for eight years. I always knew I’d write and took notes throughout my career. In the middle of it, I started writing novels.

Annie Reed (finalist in the Best First Private Eye Novel contest sponsored by St. Martin’s Press and the Private Eye Writers of America): I love stories that impose some sort of order on chaos. Since mysteries/crime fiction has to be resolved by the end of the book, they're perfect for me. Plus, I love figuring out puzzles. And, you know, I'm the quiet one in the corner that your mother warned you about. *g*

Dean Wesley Smith (USA Today bestselling author): I love the puzzle aspects of mystery and crime. I never know who did what when I start off, so I get to entertain myself as my characters solve the crime. So I love to read mystery, I love to write it as well.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch (New York Times bestseller who is also an Edgar and Shamus Award nominee): Oh, my, such a convoluted question. I used to work part time for a forensic psychologist. I would administer his Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Tests to the criminals (and others) who came in, as preparation for court. (I met a number of murderers and arsonists. The murderers didn't scare me. One arsonist scared the crap out of all of us.) One day I took the MMPI myself, and scored exactly the same as both the cops and the criminals. Now, I remember when the first cop scored similarly to a criminal; my boss told me that was common. Cops and criminals are two sides of the same coin. But I scored high there too. I showed it to him (fearless person that I am.) And he said that I scored that high because I lived "outside the norm" which is what it measured. But I wonder. Maybe I'm just predisposed to seeing the dark side of human nature--and being fascinated by it.

Reader: Wait a minute, Melissa. How did you meet such illustrious authors, along with Anthony Award finalist Libby Fischer Hellmann and New York Times and USA Today bestselling author J.F. Penn?

Melissa Yi: Er, I hang around with famous people all the time.

Reader: <cough, cough>

Melissa Yi: Shh! They were just about to tell me about some of their favourite books!

Rebecca Cantrell: My main character, Joe Tesla, has agoraphobia and can't leave the tunnels under New York. In this book, I got him a submarine and let him explore the ocean with his service dog.
Did you know dogs can scuba dive? I didn't before I started this book.

Melissa Yi: I didn't, but dogs are pretty amazing.

Annie Reed: Parents walk a tightrope trying to figure out how much freedom to give their kids while trying to keep them safe from the creeps and predators in this world. The internet makes it so much easier for the bad guys to get their hooks into unsuspecting kids, and it's not always obvious who the bad guys are. I had to walk that tightrope with my own daughter when she was in her teens. We got lucky. A lot of families don't. That's the reason I wrote PRETTY LITTLE HORSES.

O’Neil De Noux: GRIM REAPER was my first novel, written at a dark time not long after I left the homicide division. It has a lot of anger in the book – showing the pressure and often numbing effect of witnessing repeated violence. It’s raw. It’s the most realistic book I’ve written.

Dean Wesley Smith: Actually, the series is close to my heart. Having retired detectives working on cold cases in Las Vegas has numbers of elements I love. First off, retired humans feeling worthwhile by helping put to rest mysteries that have left families always wondering. And Las Vegas is my favorite place on the planet. So all win for me.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: The opening to Spree, that van on that highway, was a vehicle I had actually seen. I hate that highway in Nevada. The remoteness scares the crap out of me. And I knew that van had a story. I wrote the story very fast, and it surprised me, so I figure it'll surprise readers too.

Reader: Hang on. There's something familiar about all these books. Melissa, didn't you write a book about a hit and run?

Melissa Yi: Yes, NOTORIOUS D.O.C. Eight years after a woman is killed in a hit and run, her mother is still searching for justice, and Dr. Hope Sze is the only person crazy enough to take on her case. After I gave birth to my son, I read the first draft of the novel and said to myself, This book is about a mother's love for her kid. I threw away the first version and wrote a whole new and more powerful story.

Reader: I know what this is. This is a Storybundle!

Melissa Yi: Wait a minute. Who's running this interview?

Reader: I'm serious! I know what this is. You pay as little as $5 for five stellar crime books, or if you beat $15, you unlock another five bonus books! But it only lasts for two more weeks. I even found the link: https://storybundle.com/mystery

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: You left out two things: the way it introduces readers to new writers and the way that it brings in charities. I really love the charitable aspect. This bundle's charity is AbleGamers, which I think is extremely worthwhile.

Annie Reed: As a reader (and a bargain hunter), I love getting a bunch of great fiction at an insanely low price, and at the same time being able to support a wonderful charity. As a writer, I'm thrilled to be included with a group of awesome writers, some of whom are new to me, and I can't wait to read their work!

Melissa Yi: Okay, you've outed us. How did you get so smart?

Reader: When you read, it's a chicken and egg sort of question.

Melissa Yi: “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

Reader: Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird. Which is not part of this bundle, but it should be.

Melissa Yi: Amen, brother. Amen.

Hiding the Ball

by Steve Liskow

If you read or write police procedurals, you probably know far too much about fingerprint patterns, blood spatter,

decay rates, DNA matching, ballistics and digital technology. Modern law enforcement relies on forensic evidence to solve crimes, and it works, which is all to our benefit. But it reduces the human (read, "character") factor in modern stories. I can't avoid them altogether, but I try to rely on them as little as possible.

Why, you ask. OK, I'm not a Luddite (although I do write my early notes with a fountain pen) but...

Readers want to participate in your mystery. The stories from the Golden Age--back before you and I were even born--required that the sleuth share his or her discoveries with the reader so we could figure out the solution (or, more typically, NOT) along with him. That's why so many of the classic stories of Agatha Christie, Nero Wolf and their peers had a sidekick as the narrator so he didn't have to give the sleuth's thoughts away. It also explains why those stories are so convoluted and complicated. The writers did what attorneys now call "hiding the ball," burying the real clues in mountains of red herrings, lying witnesses, contradictory information and complicated maps, not necessarily drawn to scale.

The Ellery Queen series featured the "Challenge to the Reader" near the end of the book, stating that at that point the reader had ALL the necessary information to arrive at the "One Logical Solution." It was a daunting challenge that I think I met only once or twice. Agatha Christie said she did her plotting while doing household chores. I'd like to see the banquets she prepared to come up with some of Poirot's herculean feats.

If you withhold the clues and pull them out at the end like a rabbit out of a top hat, readers accuse you of cheating. I still remember an Ellery Queen novel that solved the murder of a twin brother by revealing at the end that there were actually triplets. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

You need to put the information out there where readers can see it, but without making it too obvious.

Magicians accompany their sleight of hand with distractions: stage patter, light and smoke and mirrors, scantily clad assistants, and anything else that will make you look that way instead of at them while they palm the card or switch the glasses. And that's how you do it in mysteries, too.

There are a few standard tricks we all use over and over because they work.

The first is the "hiding the ball" trick I mentioned above. If you describe a parking lot with twelve red Toyotas, nobody will notice one with a dented fender or an out-of-state license plate. The B side of this is establishing a pattern, then breaking it. Often, the sleuth believes that oddball is a different culprit and not part of the same case, but he finally figures out that it's the only one that matters and the others were decoys.

You can also give people information in what retailers used to call a "bait and switch." Stores would advertise an item at a low price, then tell customers that item was already sold out and try to sell them a more expensive version. You can give readers information about a person or event, then tweak it later so it points somewhere else. The classic police procedural The Laughing Policeman hinges on a witness identifying an automobile parked at a scene...then years later realizing that a different car looks a lot like it. Oops.

You can give information and later show that the witness who mentioned it was lying. The trick here is to plant a reason for the witness to lie early in the story and leave the connection until later on. If the reader sees the reason with no context, he'll overlook it until you make it important again when you pull the bunny out of the derby. This is one of my favorites.

I also like to focus on a fact or circumstance that's irrelevant and keep coming back to it. Later in the story, your detective can figure out that it's meaningless...OR realize that he's look at it from the wrong angle. My recent story "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" has PI Woody Guthrie and his musician companion Megan Traine trying to clean up a music file so they can identify the voice that's talking underneath the singer. It's not until late in the story that Guthrie realizes the voice doesn't matter--at least, not the way he thought it did, because the speaker isn't the person everyone assumed it was. That story appears in the July/August issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, along with stories by known accomplices John Floyd and O'Neil De Noux.

The "how could he know that?" clue gets lots of use, too. Someone makes a comment, suggestion, or observation and the sleuth doesn't realize until later that he couldn't have known the murder weapon or condition of the body unless he was there. If you haven't used this one at least once, raise your hand.

Its second cousin is the condition or event that didn't happen, the old case of the dog that didn't bark in the night, first used in "Silver Blaze," an early Sherlock Holmes story. Its fraternal twin, which makes a handy red herring in the age of technology, is a missing computer file. Since it's missing, we don't know what's on it...or if it's even important. The sleuth can spend pages or even entire chapters worrying about that missing file folder or computer. In The Kids Are All Right, I had two murder victims whose computers were found with the respective hard drives removed. The implication was that missing files would implicate the killer. But can we really be sure?

Now, what's your favorite way to deal off the bottom?

The Wickedest Woman in the World

Ever see the movie Gaslight? Based on the play by Patrick Hamilton, the British version came out in 1940 followed by the North American version in 1944. Gaslight, as you know, entered the vocabulary meaning psychological torture against another made vulnerable by love. Dante should have created a subcircle for those who destroy people who love them. We’ll come back to playwright Patrick Hamilton shortly.
Distaff Defense

When a client is a woman, defense teams try to jury-select as many men as possible. Men tend to be far more sympathetic toward a woman killer than do other women. It’s been said women aren’t as easily fooled by their own sex.

Sometimes I’m susceptible, I admit it, but I like to think logic and rationality provide the best hope to resolve cases. For example, a careful look at the evidence– at times presented in twisted ways to the jury– suggest Casey Anthony did not kill her daughter. More likely, chlorine findings intimate the little girl drowned in the family pool and Casey panicked.

On the other hand, who can doubt Jodi Arias didn’t murder her boyfriend? Yet, even after her admissions, some guys continued to contend it was all a mistake. Fanboys insisted she ought to be pardoned or at least paroled. Neither Arias, Anthony, nor anyone else should face execution, but come on guys, grow brain cells.

Death by Unseen Hand

Now we have Michelle Carter. Over time she encouraged and manipulated a vulnerable boy into suicide. This boy trusted her; he deeply believed she held his best interest at heart. In actuality, she held his life in her hands and she, intoxicated with the power and drama, crushed it like an empty cigarette pack.

This past week, she was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and released by the judge on bail pending sentencing… if any.

Impassioned articles calling for her unconditional release have appeared across the spectrum. Editorials argue she’s “a young, impressionable girl,” she’s a child, she’s an innocent, she didn’t mean it and besides she’s just too cute to kill.

The judge was astonishingly sympathetic toward her, but that didn’t stop critics insisting he should have dismissed the charges or thrown out his own verdict. Some have followed lawyer Joseph Cataldo’s lead by suggesting she is the victim, brainwashed by a suicidal boy.

Cataldo, along with conservative outlets such as National Review and Hot Air, further argues her whispers of death should be protected by the First Amendment. By that reasoning, a spouse who hires a hitman to kill their mate could claim protected free speech. Once on that slippery slope, what would preclude a mafia don from claiming orders of murder-for-hire to underlings should be protected too?

Murder by Suicide

The main difference is Michelle Carter cut out the middle man and nagged her mentally enfeebled ‘friend’ to just ƒ-ing kill himself. After coming up with the idea of carbon monoxide poisoning, she dreamt up further ways for him to kill himself– hanging and bagging. For the drama, you know, the ooh and ahhs of classmates and the warm glow of hugs and Twitter attention and that lovely feeling of power over life and death.

One major assertion claims she can’t be a killer because she wasn’t present. Again, the spouse-hiring-hitman argument could be applied, but it’s simpler than that: She was in his head. Instead of commanding her own finger to pull the trigger, she commanded his. In his susceptible state, the lad followed through, an instrument of his own demise.

Give a Girl Enough Rope…

Michelle Carter’s plotting reminded me of another classic play and crime movie again by Patrick Hamilton, the same playwright who wrote Gaslight. Film fans will recognize Rope as the innovative Hitchcock suspense. Inspired by a true story, students experimentally kill a friend, arrogantly believing they’ll get away with it.

In a nutshell, that sums up Michelle Carter’s approach. The difference is she strangled no one; instead she manipulated her friend into killing himself.

That anyone could reach that depth of evil beggars imagination. Clearly she knew exactly what she was doing. Over hundreds of text messages, she cajoled, threatened, urged and persuaded her friend to take his own life. She gaslighted him.

Part of me argues she was only 17 then, intelligent but immature, that she lovingly practiced assisted suicide. But then I reread the transcripts of their cell phone records. She lied to the boy’s mother, his sister, her own friends, the police, and the boy himself. She admitted he’d be alive if it weren’t for her.

She’s young, so she has plenty of time for redemption. That’s more than she gave her friend, Conrad Roy.

Children shouldn’t be tried as adults, and that includes her. Nonetheless, a possible sentence of zero time would be a terrible miscarriage of justice.

What is your take?

Cellular Text Transcript

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Talk/Don't Talk

Everybody seems to like dialogue. It can do a lot of things for a story, writingwise: advance the plot, deepen characterization, "show" rather than "tell," improve the pacing, etc. Besides, its just fun to read. I think it was Lawrence Block who said nothing engages a reader like listening to the people in a story talking things over.

It's also fun to write. And it's easier to write, I think, than plain old description and exposition, because when my characters speak I can hear them in my head.

Enrolling in discourse

The truth is, most of my short stories are heavy on dialogue. I've even begun a few of them with the intention of writing the whole thing in nothing but dialogue. One such story, "Careers," was published in AHMM years ago and another, "Doctor's Orders," at Amazon Shorts--the first was 1000 words in length, the second 6000--and I can still remember the fun I had writing those. It'll probably be no surprise to you when I say that many of my favorite genre writers--Harlan Coben, Joe Lansdale, Nelson DeMille, Stephen King, Lee Child, Greg Iles, Janet Evanovich, Steve Hamilton, Carl Hiaasen, Robert B. Parker, Jack Ritchie, Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake--are/were absolute wizards in the use of dialogue.

Some movies that are almost all-dialogue come to mind: Sleuth, Twelve Angry Men, The Hateful Eight, Proof, The Breakfast Club, and Glengarry Glen Ross, to name only a few. Several of these were originally plays, which makes sense.

BUT . . .

(You knew there had to be a but in there somewhere, right?)

. . . there are also some well-known stories that don't include much--or any--dialogue.

Personally, I've only created a few (none of them well-known) that are seriously short on dialogue. One of my stories, "Bennigan's Key," a 5000-worder published a few years ago in The Strand Magazine, has no dialogue at all. But since it was prose, I was at least able to use unspoken thoughts (sometimes called "internal monologue"). The same could be said about Jack London's short story "To Build a Fire."

The sound of silence

In movies, the no-dialogue approach is harder to pull off. After all, a screenwriter can't tell you what the characters are thinking. He or she has only two ways to convey information to the audience: action and speech. And if no one's speaking . . .

Even so, here are some excellent films that contain little or no dialogue: Life of Pi, Quest for Fire, The Bear, Cast Away, Gravity, All Is Lost, The Revenant, Apocalypto, Walkabout, and The Gods Must Be Crazy.

One of those--All is Lost, a 2013 film with Robert Redford as a lone seaman who battles the elements--contains only one spoken word: a common and graphic expletive, uttered after a frustrating setback. And despite the fact that nothing else is said during its almost-two-hour run, the movie manages to hold the attention of the audience throughout. An impressive feat.

NOTE: It occurred to me only after jotting down those little-or-no-dialogue movies that all ten of them involve characters who spend the whole story walking around (or running around or floating around) in the Great Outdoors. I suppose a lot needs to be happening around them, to have any kind of interesting plotline.

Speaking your mind

Can you think of other movies, or stories or novels, that tell the entire tale using no dialogue? If you're a writer, have you published anything written that way? How hard was that to do? Have you written any plays, or other kinds of fiction, that use almost nothing but dialogue? If you had to pick one of the two extremes--all or none--which would you prefer?

"Let's hear it for a lot of talking," Dialogue Dude says.

Quiet Dude makes no reply…

The Purple Side of Blue

Shell shock is what they called it during the wars of the 20th Century when combatants who survived shelling suffered serious psychological effects. Today it is called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We all know it effects police officers and other first responders as well. It comes in many shades.

When I was a homicide detective We experienced what we call 'the purple side of blue' - a bruising of a police officer's psyche after repetitive exposure to extreme violence perpetrated on others. It effects police officers and their families. It is another brutal, lingering residue of the job.

I cannot even list all the horrendous things we witnessed - from infants beaten to death to children shot in drive-by shootings to stabbings to mass killings. It cannot be forgotten. Some try to numb the effects with alcohol or sex or whatever. It makes officers vengeful and their families stunned as the officer morphs from the smiling rookie who came out of the academy with visions of saving lives and catching criminals into a sulking individual with demons crawling inside their mind, reminding them of what they've witnessed. Again. And again.

Every cop I know who has been in law enforcement a while suffers the purple side of blue. Every one. Some more than others.

I've written about the subject, illustrating it in my police procedurals, rather than telling about it. Probably why my most realistic homicide novel, GRIM REAPER, has the word 'fuck' in it 344 times in a 208 page book. You see, on my first day as a homicide detective, my partner Marco Nuzzolillo (best detective I ever worked with) took me to witness 10 autopsies of murder victims. From that bloody day, I worked case after case where a human died at the hands of another human.

Not long ago, I was asked by a deer-hunter friend if I was a hunter.
"I used to be."
"Did you hunt deer?"
"No. I hunted humans."
Pause.
"I hunted humans who killed humans."

I am old now and have an excellent memory. I recall, with unfailing clarity my childhood days weilding wooden swords made by my father as we were the knights of the round table, days swimming in Lake Garda, nights chasing lightning bugs, getting into watermelon fights, looking at girls differently as I grew up, wondering why I noticed their lips and the flow of long hair and their smooth jawline and soft necks. I recall every broken heart, every scintillating thrill of love, recall the births of my children. I remember the bad times too, the failures in life we all experience, but we concentrate on the good times, don't we?

Sometimes, in the middle of remembering a day at the old zoo with a pretty girl, I can see her face and the beauty of that summer day and how I felt. Then I get a tap on my shoulder and turn to see it is nighttime and the bodies of two teen-aged girls lie next to the muddy Mississippi, their hands tied behind them, bullet holes in the back of their heads and I see their autopsies in flashes. I remember brushing a finger over their wrists, touching them, connecting with them, secretly telling each who I was. I was the man who was going to catch who did this.

My partners and I solved that murder case. Took 13 months, but we did. Closure? Not for me. I still see those young, dead faces under the harsh light in the autopsy room. Snapshots of carnage. Closure? Yeah. Right.

A better writer once wrote:
"Never send to know for whom the bells tolls; It tolls for thee." John Donne

Damn, this article is depressing. It is a wonder we can stand it all. Maybe that is what makes us human. We can stand anything.

www.oneildenoux.com

When Is A Novella Not a Novella?

by Brian Thornton

"[A]n ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic."

                                                                                                                              – Stephen King

"[O]ne of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel."

                                                                                                                             – Robert Silverberg

Both King and Silverberg were talking about that most difficult to quantify of literary vehicles: the novella. In keeping with the nature of the animal we're discussing here, I have to say that, fresh from writing my first novella, I think both of these contradictory statements by a couple of top-notch writers are spot-on.

I feel qualified to weigh in on this issue because, as I've chronicled in this space: I recently finished my first novella. It was both maddening and liberating.

"So what?" I hear you say. "Sounds like writing nonfiction/novels/short stories/poetry/haikus/limmericks/name your poison to me."

Yes, but as King avers above, the novella is a particular (peculiar?) animal. This is in large part because no one these days seems all that sure what exactly a "novella" is.

"That's easy," you say. "It's a work of fiction that is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel," you say.

Okay.

So what is a "novelette"? It too is longer than a short story, and shorter than a novel.

While working on my novella, I figured I'd better decide just what the hell I had on my hands, and what I intended to do with it.

You see, I didn't set out to write a novella from scratch. I set out to expand an already successfully sold and well-liked short story into something longer form.

Gee, guess which turns out to be harder!

Anyway, after much research, I have NOT been able to rectify this question. According to one "reliable" source, anything above 50,000 words is a novel, anything between 30,000 and 50,000 words is a novella, and anything below 30,000 is a short story!?!

Um. No.

30,000 words is NOT a short story.

I like the following rough formula, which is supported by, among others, SFWA (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America):

Flash fiction: 1,000 words or below.
Short story: 1,001 to 7,500 words.
Novelette: 7,500 to 17,500 words.
Novella: 17,500 to 40.000 words.
Novel: 40,000 words and above.

Some people find these distinctions pointless. I think they're very important now, more than ever.

Why? Because the ebook (and sites like Amazon and Smashwords) has helped resurrect the novella as a viable literature form. King rightly complained (back in the day, before the internet, et. al.) that novellas were tough to sell (which was why he bundled up four of his in the collection "Four Seasons" and sold them under a single cover).

But, like the short story, the novella has begun to experience a renaissance in electronic format. Having it featured available for a single click and at costs anywhere from free to $1.99 is making a whole of writers a whole lot of money.

And good for them!

What do you think? Hit me up on the comments section, and share your thoughts on the utility and relevance of the novella!

(Tune back in two weeks from now, I'll juxtapose the experience of expanding a short story into a novella into that of writing a novella from scratch.)

Michael R. Davidson's THE DOVE

by David Edgerley Gates

1987, the Cold War. Reagan is president, Gorbachev is General Secretary. The Russians are mired in Afghanistan, ground down by attrition, death by inches. What if there's a way to bleed them out faster?

CIA's chief of operations at the Paris station is approached by French security, We have a potential KGB defector, in Moscow, they tell him. But for us it's a Denied Area. We don't have the resources to operate there. You do. Harry Connolly, CIA operations, knows Rule One: There are friendly countries, but no such thing as friendly intelligence services. What do the French want in return?

It turns out the French want the product. They've just been beat out of the biggest arms deal in history by the British, a total of 20 billion pounds sterling, to the Saudis, and the French smell a rat. The defector in Moscow has inside information on the arms sale.

The defector has access to the material because his skill set is technology theft. KGB has a compromised asset inside the Saudi deal, but more to the point, CIA could use the defector's knowledge to map Soviet weaknesses. Where are the gaps, what's on their shopping list, which specific technology problems are they targeting? 

And we're off. Paris to Moscow, Paris to DC. London to Riyadh, London to Geneva. Harry has good tradecraft, and he begins to pull the threads together. Everybody's got a piece, from the fixer for a Saudi Prince, Mohammed Attar, to the British procurement minister James Abbott, to banker and bagman Wafiq al Salah, to the Novosti correspondent Nikolay Kozlov, a KGB spook under journalistic cover, and the hapless defector-in-place Stepan Barsikov, giving classified information to the West because he's defeated at love. The journey crosses personal landscapes as much as physical distance. And interestingly, not everybody learns everything. There are things left hidden, or unspoken.

And the last question, the historical one, about the end of the Soviet Union, did they fall or were they pushed? It's perfectly plausible, as The Dove suggests, that the Russians could be goaded into overreach and overspending. Imperial ambition, with an economy on the edge of collapse, and political hardening of the arteries, the Old Guard unable and unwilling to accept reform, meant the system was on life-support, and ready to collapse of its own weight. They were perched on a narrow ledge. Gravity did the rest. Oh, and maybe just a small thumb on the scale.

https://www.amazon.com/Dove-Michael-R-Davidson/dp/0692877142/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497302186&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+r+davidson


This is a review I posted on Amazon for The Dove, with the tagline "authentic and thought-provoking." I've got a couple of things to add. They're in the nature of personal observations, what you might call editorial asides.

First off, it's probably obvious I have a weak spot for Cold War spy stories, having written a few myself, and Michael Davidson knows the territory. This is probably the place to note that Davidson is former career CIA.

Second, although I wouldn't presume to call us close friends, Michael and I are Facebook pals, and we've had the occasional private e-mail conversation. Fair disclosure.

Third, it should be said that Michael and I aren't entirely on the same page, politically. I think he's somewhere to the Right of Attila the Hun, he thinks I'm somewhere to the Left of W.E.B. Du Bois. (I'm exaggerating. A little.) The point here, specifically referencing The Dove, is that it's an article of faith among Reagan's admirers that he brought the USSR to its knees by forcing them to spend money they couldn't afford on advanced weapons systems, to keep pace with American technological developments. This isn't unfounded. I'd be likely to give some credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Polish pope, or Lech Walesa, and fissures in the empire - the Causasus, the rise of radical Islam, falling oil prices - but let's be fair.

It's interesting to me that two guys with an intelligence background, Michael's far more extensive than mine, can agree to disagree on a fair number of things, yet not lose sight of certain homely truths. Neither one of us trusts the Russians worth a rat's ass, which is the inner unreconstructed Cold Warrior for you, in full plumage, and we both have an old-fashioned regard for keeping faith, for honorable service, for duty. There are worse things.