Thrillers Resonate This Political Season

Recently, Russian digital hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee were revealed, raising the specter of foreign government interference in U.S. elections. That's a plot you'd expect to find in a Cold War-era political thriller, not 2016 news stories. So this very unusual political season has inspired me to take a closer look at political thrillers. An example is the just released novel about ISIS terrorism in France from bestselling political thriller author Daniel Silva. In The Black Widow, the spy hero is poised for promotion to chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service but takes on one final operation after ISIS detonates a massive bomb in Paris, and the desperate French government asks him to eliminate the man responsible before he can strike again. But the classic political thrillers emerged after World War II when the West faced a nuclear-armed world divided by Cold War ideologies and post-colonial chaos. Among the best-known works is Richard Condon's 1959 The Manchurian Candidate about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into becoming an unwitting Communist assassin controlled by his domineering mother, who seeks to make her husband, a McCarthy-esque senator, into a puppet dictator. In 1955, Graham Greene's prescient The Quiet American depicts French and British colonialism in Vietnam being uprooted by American involvement during the 1950s, revealing a blind American "exceptionalism" that fails to see disaster looming. Colonialism's poisonous roots in the Muslim world are exposed in 1972's Edgar Award-winning The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, about a mysterious professional assassin contracted to kill French President Charles de Gaulle by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organization upset by France's Algeria policy. More recently, America's racial politics are the subject of A Certain Justice by John Lescroart, published in 2006: When an angry white mob in San Francisco murders an innocent black man, the only man who tried to stop the killing is framed and goes on the run amid riots, political posturing, and pressure on police to subvert justice. Of course, money is at the root of political evil, and in 2001's The Constant Gardner, by famed British spy novelist John le Carré, a British diplomat's search for the truth about his activist wife's murder in Africa uncovers an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucrats and pharmaceutical industry money. For Amazon's latest political thrillers, see https://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/7538395011/ref=zg_bs_tab_t_bsnr

Physical Challenges Can't Stop These Sleuths

If you like triumph-over-physical-adversity tales, you may want to check out mystery writing's long tradition of physically challenged detectives. There are many reasons for authors to create sleuths who are blind, deaf, paralyzed or otherwise physically limited. By literally handicapping crime-solving via a detective's impaired ability to personally gather clues from crime scene inspection or interrogations, an author boosts the puzzle-solving challenge. The social stigma often faced by people with physical issues also creates reader empathy and increases reader satisfaction in the protagonist's ability to overcome and triumph. Authors usually offset a character's physical disadvantage by honing intellect, senses, instincts or determination to a point beyond the skills of ordinary sleuths. A disability, because it can be misread as incapability, can even give a surprise edge in outwitting arrogant suspects, deceptive witnesses or uncooperative authorities. Among the well-known detectives in this group is bestselling author Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic New York City detective. NYC culprits also find a nemesis in George Chesbro's dwarf criminology professor and private-eye Robert 'Mongo' Fredrickson. Proving lack of sight is not lack of insight is Jane A. Adams' Naomi Blake, a blind ex-policewoman in the Midlands of England, while reading lips doesn't hinder reading clues in Penny Warner's Connor Westphal mysteries about a deaf newspaper journalist in California. For a list of more mysteries featuring physically challenged detectives, go to

https://beyondrivalry.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/crime-fiction-book-list-disabled-isnt-unable/

Mystery on Board: Cruising Into Murder

It's vacation time, and maybe you're longing to sail away from it all. You may even be one of the folks actually taking a cruise ship to exotic destinations. But what if there is a murderer hunting among the passengers trapped on that floating hotel? If you don't mind a frisson of anxiety with your real or imagined cruise adventure, add some of these noted mystery authors' tales of shipboard murder to your reading list. A well-known classic is Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, in which her Belgian sleuth Hercules Poirot plans a leisurely cruise down the Nile but ends up sifting through suspicious passengers and false leads to solve the murder of a wealthy young woman. Bestselling suspense author Mary Higgins Clark also penned a thriller with a cruise setting. In Clark's You Belong to Me, a killer stalks lonely women on board cruise ships as a radio-show psychologist rushes to catch the murderer before he can literally stop her dead. Famed New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh even introduced her mystery series' police detective Roderick Alleyn to the high seas in Singing in the Shrouds, sending Alleyn on a ship voyage in pursuit of a serial killer. But the King of Ocean-Liner Fiction is Conrad Allen. Allen's eight mysteries in the "Murder on the..." series are all set aboard pre-World War I cruise ships, starting with Murder on the Lusitania, and feature a husband and wife sleuthing team. For an updated ocean liner tale, fans of the "Murder, She Wrote" mystery series will appreciate Murder on the QE2, by Donald Bain and "Jessica Fletcher," as Jessica, invited aboard as one of seven guest lecturers, tries to solve the murder of a fellow speaker. For more mysteries with cruise ship settings, see http://www.cozy-mystery.com/blog/mystery-books-that-take-place-on-cruise-ships-mystery-books-at-sea.html

Dreaming Up Dreams in Your Writing? Be Wary

Because all people experience dreaming, it is tempting for authors to include a "dream sequence" in works of fiction. Some reasons for fictional dreams include illuminating a character's suppressed anxieties or desires, creating a foreshadowing or mood, or inserting an explanatory flashback. In general, writing critics discourage the urge to insert dreams because botched efforts are so common. You've no doubt encountered fictional dream descriptions that bore and impede rather than propel the story, that annoy as obviously hokey manipulations, or that confuse by their ambiguous truthfulness and significance. Most writers can't match great literature's dream usage. For example, Homer's epic Iliad uses a false dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon to spur the attack on Troy. Many of William Shakespeare's plays include vivid dreams, such as Macbeth, Richard III, The Tempest and, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Emily Bronte's gothic Wuthering Heights, characters are guided by their dreams. Russian greats Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment rely on dream motifs, too. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland uses a dream setting to play with logic and satire. James Joyce's Ulysses has dream sequences that inspire Freudian and Jungian analysis. Note how assumptions about dreams have changed in the West, from the ancient belief that dreams come from outside supernatural sources, to Romantic personal inspiration and revelation, and finally to the modern focus on science and psychological insight. No matter what theory of dreaming is used, writers must make sure a believable dream sequence is relevant to character and integral to the plot. Here are some dream facts to consider: https://www.verywell.com/facts-about-dreams-2795938

Add Mystery & Thrills to Your 2016 Beach Reads

It's time to pack for that summer vacation, including, of course, a couple of mysteries or thrillers to get the heart pounding and the blood chilled despite the lazy, sunny days ahead. Here are some reviewer-favored suggestions that you may also want to add to your beach reading list. John Hart, who has won two Edgar Awards back to back, returns with the crime thriller Redemption Road, in which damaged yet courageous North Carolina police detective Elizabeth Black, who is white, faces a media a circus and the prospect of criminal charges after gunning down two black men sexually abusing 18-year-old Channing Shore in an abandoned house. North Carolina features again in All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda, a noted YA author with an adult fiction debut: A prep school counselor makes a return visit to her North Carolina hometown--and the unsolved disappearance of her best friend after their high school graduation a decade earlier. Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy, another Edgar winner, evokes Southern gothic tradition with her tale of two families, first in 1936 and then in 1952, and an evil passed down the generations in a small Kentucky town. The Girls in the Garden by New York Times best-selling author Lisa Jewell leaves the South and takes us to a midsummer night's party for neighbors on a communal garden square in London. But the secure urban oasis is shattered when preteen Pip discovers her 13-year-old sister lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a rose garden, drawing the reader into a mystery about the dark games children and adults play. Memory, madness and lies also bring danger to psychiatric ward resident Dr. Zoe Goldman in Little Black Lies by Sandra Block. Goldman is dedicated to helping patients but she is also wrestling with her own demons, seeking to piece together the truth of her mother's death from nightmares about a fire and her adoptive mother's dementia-tattered memories. For more Publishers Weekly "best summer reads" in the mystery category, check out
http://best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/summer-reads-2016/mystery#book/book-1

The 'Bad Seed' in Fact and Fiction

Psychopathic villains--manipulative, aggressive, remorseless and unemotional--abound in murder mysteries, but when those psychopaths are children, an element of horror enters. Remember Rhoda, the too-perfect little girl murderess in the 1954 novel The Bad Seed by William March? Or Kevin, a school massacre perpetrator, whose mother suspects his evil capacity long before his final horrific acts in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. Agatha Christie's Crooked House also featured a deadly child in scheming 12-year-old Josephine Leonides, who kills her grandfather because he won't pay for ballet lessons--and almost gets away with it. Author Jonathan Kellerman, a clinical child psychologist who writes New York Times best-selling mysteries featuring psychologist sleuth Dr. Alex Delaware, gives support to fictional "bad seed" characterizations. He notes in his nonfiction Savage Spawn, inspired by the spate of 1997-1998 schoolyard shootings, that “psychopathic tendencies begin very early in life, as young as three, and they endure.” Though research shows psychopathy is 50% genetic, biology is not destiny for our complex human personalities, and nurture can guide nature. Budding pre-psychopaths can be tempered by a non-aggressive environment and by a parenting style that is neither too permissive nor too authoritarian while providing structure and limits, according to psychology experts. After all, children with psychopathic traits do not all become killers; many grow up to use the daring, charming and manipulative aspects of their personalities as successful business tycoons, political leaders or sports stars. Still, the fictional tales of young murderers are not just fantasy and are reinforced every year by headlines about preteen killers and school shootings. We need to be alert to signs in children that presage criminal acts--violence toward people or animals, lack of guilt or remorse, social isolation, defiance and sensation-seeking--and commit to timely intervention. For more on youthful violence prediction and intervention, see http://crimefeed.com/2016/01/predicting-violent-criminal-behavior-how-to-spot-the-warning-signs-intervene/

Dark Mysteries Lit by Las Vegas Neon

Last week I took relatives visiting from abroad to Las Vegas--because foreign tourists see its neon-magicked, cigarette- and alcohol-hazed glamorization of fantasy and vice as a top American entertainment experience.  The glitz of Sin City long ago ceased to enthrall me, but I admit that the "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" world is a perfect setting for mystery novels that I do enjoy. For example, 2015 Edgar Award-winner Chris Albani's The Secret History of Las Vegas: A Novel offers an original plot in which a near-retirement Las Vegas detective and a South African doctor studying psychopaths join forces to solve a spate of murders implicating a pair of conjoined twins. Dark Eye by William Bernhardt features psychologist Susan Pulaski, a Las Vegas police consultant whose life has spun out of control after the death of her cop husband, ending with an LVPD pink slip and a trip to detox. As a serial killer begins decorating Sin City with the horribly disfigured bodies of once beautiful young women, Pulaski is trying to regain her job and reputation, and stop a madman. She gets surprise help from a 25-year-old autistic savant whose unusual perspective forces her to see the crimes from a bizarre–but ultimately insightful–viewpoint. For a different Vegas journey, try Ron Chaney's Tony Hillerman Prize-winning The Ragged End of Nowhere, which stars a former CIA agent seeking his war veteran brother's killer in the Vegas criminal underworld, a case complicated by allegations that the victim was in possession of a stolen ancient relic. For more mysteries set in Vegas, check out http://www.indianprairielibrary.org/books-movies-more/book/1199-all-time-faves-what-happens-in-vegas-mysteries-set-in-las-vegas