October 2022

caconym (n.) “a name rejected for linguistic reasons, bad nomenclature in botany or biology,” 1888, from caco- “bad, ill, poor” + -onym “name” (from PIE root *no-men- “name”). (etymonline)

Local Stuff

Why Seattle libraries had 130-plus closures this summer

New Black-owned Central District bookstore celebrates Black culture

‘Riverdale’ actor Ryan Grantham gets life in prison for killing his mother

High-level gangster vanishes while on parole in B.C.

Walls of Books fills the bookstore-shaped hole in the hearts of Issaquah readers

How a Powell’s Books outpost ended up in Condon, population 760

Odd Stuff

James Patterson’s ‘Blowback’ asks, ‘What if we elected a psychopath?’

Food Delivery Robot Casually Drives Under Police Tape, Through Active Crime Scene

Five Ways to Break Up, According to Michael Mann’s Films

The Mystery of the Headless Goats in the Chattahoochee

Words of the Month

threap (n): An argument or disagreement, often un-resolvable. (Says You!, #1016)

SPECTRE

Amazon keeps growing, and so does its cache of data on you

Amazon’s eastern Oregon expansion sends carbon emissions soaring

California sues Amazon, alleging antitrust law violations

Speedreaders Lose, Authors Win in New Amazon Ebook Policy Change

Words of the Month.

opisthography (n.) “the practice of writing on the back of anything,” 1715, from Greek opisthographos “written on the back,” from graphos “writing” (from graphein“to write” (see -graphy) + opisthen “behind, from behind, at the back,” from opi, a variant of epi “on it, at it” (see epi-). (etymonline)

Awards

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize named 11 recipients this year, awarding a total of $1.1 million.

The Griffin Poetry Prize has created the largest international prize for a book of poetry.

Here are the finalists for the 2022 Kirkus Prize, one of the world’s richest literary awards

Here are the bookies’ odds for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

Words of the Month

scrawl (v.) From the 1610s, “write or draw awkwardly and untidily,” a word of uncertain origin, perhaps from a specific use of Middle English scrawlen “spread out the limbs, sprawl” (early 15c.), which might be an alteration of sprawlen (see sprawl (v.)) or crawl (v.). Some sources suggest a contraction of scrabble. Related: Scrawled; scrawling.

The noun in the sense of “piece of unskilled or inelegant writing” is by 1690s, from the verb; the meaning “bad style of handwriting” is by 1710. (etymonline)

Book Stuff

Books at One expands to Dublin; Murder One and Capital Crime launch; Colm Tóibín premiere

A Conservative Publisher Wants to Be the Answer to Liberal Children’s Books. There’s Just One Problem. “The books aren’t bad, necessarily. They’re just not for kids.”

Books newsletter: Proust in Dublin; Culture Night; Catholicism debate; Yeats sculpture unveiled

New UK PM Truss urged to invest in libraries and abolish tax on audiobooks

Is climate-change making it too hot for many of the nation’s libraries?

The Shopkeeper Sleuth: Cozy Mysteries Featuring Crime-Solving Business Owners

Impossible Murders In Crime Fiction

Deanna Raybourn: On Writers and (Characters) of a Certain Age

The New James Bond Novels Are Fun, Progressive, and Totally Thrilling

What Women Mystery Writers and Female Sleuths Owe to Nancy Drew

A publisher abruptly recalled the ‘2,000 Mules’ election denial book. NPR got a copy.

Laurie R. King On Returning to Her San Francisco Roots During Lockdown

Boerne book festival kicks off spooky season with monsters and mysteries

A Deep Dive Into the History of Bibliomysteries

The State of the Crime Novel: A Roundtable Discussion with Crime Authors – part 1, part 2

S. A. Cosby: Interview and Cover Reveal

A recent episode of NPR’s Marketplace, reported on the continuing difficulties publishers are having getting books manufactured

Tom Hanks announces ‘wildly ambitious’ first novel

**Fall Bookmarks Perfect for Leafing in Your Current Read**

10 Shadowy Meetings of Crime and the Occult

Horror Fiction In The Age of Covid: A Roundtable Discussion

The Unstoppable, Fearsome, Delicious Allure of the Witch

On Theda Bara and the Origins of the Vamp

Miss Christie!

Rhys Bowen: Miss Marple is Agatha Christie’s best character. A new book reminds us why.

Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley review – in search of the elusive author

Author Events (in person)

Tues, Oct 18: Candace Robb signs her new Owen Archer, A Fox in the Fold: Third Place/Ravenna, 7pm

Other Forms of Entertainment

Library Sitcom ‘SHELVED’ Could Be The Show We Need

Indiana Jones 5: Is it really over for Harrison Ford as an action star?

Scenes from a Marriage: Watching the “Thin Man” Movies as a Set

James Bond Producers Are Focused on Figuring Out a Villain Before Casting the Next 007

Porfirio Rubirosa: the Dominican man who inspired James Bond

When Hollywood Was Punished for Its Anti-Nazism

Yes, There’s a Wonderful New ‘Fletch’ Movie Starring Jon Hamm. Not That You’d Know It Exists

8 True Crime Podcasts You Need to Listen to This Fall

The Many Crime Stories of Robert De Niro

Words of the Month

chirography (n.) “handwriting, the art of writing,” 1650s, from chiro– “the hand”+ –graphy “writing.” Chirograph “formal written legal document” is attested from late 13c. in Anglo-French, from Latin chirographum, from Greek kheirographia “written testimony.” Related: Chirographer; chirographic. (etymonline)

RIP

Sept. 3: Award-Winning Underground Comics Writer/Artist Diane Noomin Dies at 75

Sept. 4: Sterling Lord Dies – Literary Agent For Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ Was 102

Sept. 7: Best-selling horror writer Peter Straub has died at 79

Sept. 11: Spanish novelist Javier Marías dies in Madrid hospital aged 70

Sept. 12: NSA analyst jailed for life for selling US secrets to Soviets dies aged 80

Sept. 13: Ken Starr, the prosecutor on the Clinton Whitewater investigation, has died at 76

Sept. 14: Earl Silbert, first prosecutor in the Watergate case, dies at 86

Sept. 14: Irene Papas, celebrated Greek actress from ‘Guns of Navarone’, ‘Zorba’ to ‘Iphigenia,’ and ‘Z’, has died at 96

Sept. 16: Henry Silva, Bad Guy in ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and Many Other Movies, Dies at 95

Sept. 17: Maximilian Lerner, Whose Espionage Skills Helped Win a War, Dies at 98

Sept. 19: Lily Renée Phillips, Pioneering Comic Book Artist, Dies at 101

Sept. 21: John Train, Paris Review Co-Founder and Cold War Operative, Dies at 94

Sept. 23: Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel dies aged 70

Sept. 23: Louise Fletcher, Oscar Winner for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ Dies at 88

Sept. 29: Leonard Cole, Who Detailed Secret Army Germ Tests, Dies at 89

Links of Interest

Sept. 1: The nation’s poorest state used welfare money to pay Brett Favre for speeches he never made

Sept. 1: A Gang Called Drug Rich Is Robbing Celebrities All Over Atlanta

Sept. 1: What Canada’s Largest Art Heist Reveals about the Art World’s Shady Side

Sept. 4: The Fiery Godmother Who Avenged Her Husband With 29 Bullets

Sept. 5: Man Headed to Prison for Dumping Toxic Pollution Into Ocean

Sept. 6: How Eliot Ness Wound Up Hunting a Serial Killer in Cleveland

Sept.7: Suspect Nabbed in Half-Century-Old Cold Case Killing of Maryland Cop

Sept.7: Police Arrest Woman Who Faked Her Own Kidnapping to Extort Her Mom—for the Fourth Time

Sept. 8: County Official’s DNA Found at Site of Vegas Journalist’s Grisly Slaying

Sept. 8: MAGA Pastor Settles After Being Accused of Scamming Old Lady

Sept. 8: How Murdered Journalist Jeff German’s Colleagues Hunted Down His Alleged Killer

Sept. 9: CT Scans Reveal Gnarly, 1,000-Year-Old Mummies Were Murdered

Sept. 13: Looted coin worth $1m returned to Israel after years-long hunt

Sept. 13: A Sensational Murder Trial in the Newly Founded New Yorker

$ept. 14: ‘Santa came today’: Brett Favre texts show his role in Mississippi welfare scandal

Sept: 14: Arnold Rothstein: New York’s First Criminal Genius

Sept. 14: Missing people, buried bones at center of Oklahoma mystery

Sept. 15: Was This Letter Written by Sherlock Holmes?

Sept. 15: He Killed a Stranger He Thought Was a Werewolf. A Judge Just Banned Him From Social Media

Sept. 1`6: The Treasures Within the World’s Greatest Wine Library

Sept. 16: What Do We Really Know About the History of the Printing Press?

Sept. 19: 4 Library Collections Filled With Culinary Treasures

Sept. 20: Adnan Syed: Conviction overturned in Serial podcast murder case

Sept. 20: U.S. charges ‘brazen’ theft of $250 million from pandemic food program

Sept. 20: Prosecutors allege an inside job. The target? Rare bourbon

Sept. 22: Can Science Solve the Mystery of the Concrete Book?

Sept. 22: How Leopold and Loeb Ended up with the Country’s Most Famous Lawyer

Sept. 24: How a suburban St. Louis detective broke a 30-year-old serial killer case wide open

$ept. 24: Brett Favre pressed for facility funding despite being told legality in question, court filing says

Sept. 25: Author makes case for most compelling Zodiac Killer suspect in decades

Sept. 26: One Man’s Search for the First Hebrew-Lettered Cookbook

$ept. 27: Brett Favre is the face of a scandal, but Mississippi’s issues go deeper

Sept. 28: Kandinsky painting returned to Jewish family as Netherlands shifts approach to looted art

Sept. 28: The Evils of Larry Ray: A Creepy Dad Who Started a Sex Cult at Sarah Lawrence College

Sept. 28: Hollywood-Beloved Espionage Author Ben MacIntyre on What Truly Motivates Spies

Sept. 28: RFK assassin Sirhan asks to go home to live ‘in peace’

$ept. 28: Brett Favre’s foundation, aimed at helping children and cancer patients, gave funds to USM athletics

Sept. 29: Man Pays $75 for Medieval Text That Could Be Worth $10,000

Sept. 30: The Lindisfarne Gospels: ‘everyone should see this show at least once’

Words of the Month

cacoethes (n.) “itch for doing something,” 1560s, from Latinized form of Greek kakoēthēs “ill-habit, wickedness, itch for doing (something),” from kakos “bad” (from PIE root *kakka- “to defecate”) + ēthē- “disposition, character” (see ethos). Most famously, in Juvenal’s insanabile scribendi cacoethes “incurable passion for writing.” (etymonline)

What We’ve Been Up To

Amber

Deanna Raybourn – Killers of a Certain Age

Ready to retire, four women (of a certain age) are treated to a boat cruise by their former employers as a reward for their exemplary service. A vacation which they enjoy right up until one of the group spots a former colleague on the same boat.

The only problem — Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie’s former job title: Assassin.

Deanna Rabourn’s tale is a rollercoaster ride of the first water! Blending together the librarians from Gunpowder Milkshake, the general premise of Burn Notice, and Lana’s origin story from Archer — you’ve now got an inkling of the wild ride between the covers of Killer’s of a Certain Age.

Seriously, I couldn’t put Killers of a Certain Age down.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who needs a fantastic, fast-paced read for the bath or a holiday. Seriously, I love how these women outwit, outmaneuver, and outshine their pursuers using experience their younger counterparts don’t yet possess…

Plus, it was just lovely to sit down for a few hours and read a book from cover to cover — especially when Raybourn penned such a satisfying ending!

Fran

Keep an open mind

I had just finished watching the series “Madam Secretary” when I picked up State of Terror. Now, if you were going to write a thriller involving the Secretary of State, and you wanted a fast-paced, well plotted book with intriguing characters, who would you have author it? Be fair, be honest, who knows their stuff?

Hillary Rodham Clinton knows the ins and outs of being Secretary of State. Whatever you may think of her, she knows her stuff.

Louise Penny has proved time and again that she can write a gripping novel filled with real people.

Together, they created State of Terror, and honestly, now is the time to read it.

I want to sit down and talk about this book with you face to face so you can see my enthusiasm. But it’s good that I can’t, because I’d give away spoilers. For our plot purposes here, let me just say that Ellen Adams was a harsh critic of now President Doug Williams during her media mogul days, so it was a huge surprise when he appointed her Secretary of State. Adams handed off her media empire to her daughter and accepted the position, where her first assignment failed miserably. Let’s just say this did not displease President Williams.

But when bus bombs happen in a couple of European cities, Adams and Williams have to work together to figure out where the next target is. One of Secretary Adams’ people in the Pakistan office gets a clue, and the race is on.

“The most amazing thing that has happened in my lifetime is neither putting a man on the moon nor Facebook having 2.8 billion monthly active users. It is that in the 75 years, 7 months, and 13 days since Nagasaki, a nuclear bomb has not been detonated.” – Tom Peters

The more I read this book, knowing HRC‘s insider knowledge of Washington politics and its back door dealings, combined with Louise Penny’s astonishing ability to put you right in the heart of the story, the more terrifying it became. And watching current news cycles both in the US and around the world, this book becomes more relevant every day. I had no idea.

Which is not to say it doesn’t have moments of levity. Some of the characters will jump right into your heart. Betsy Jameson, Secretary Adams’ good friend and counselor is one of them. She’s the “Mrs. Cleaver” below, because she looks so ordinary and friendly.

“Steve Kowalski, Ellen’s head of Diplomatic Security, a longtime veteran of the service, turned in the front seat to look at Mrs. Cleaver as she combined and conjugated words that should never, really, have conjugal relations. The ensuing progeny was both grotesque and hilarious, as she turned nouns into verbs, and verbs into something else entirely. It was a display of linguistic gymnastics the agent hadn’t thought possible. And he’d been a Marine.”

You’ll get chills, and it’s possible that your sleep will be disrupted by this novel – and remember, it is just a novel – and with good reason. The possibilities given here are far too plausible not to be considered, and when a power team like this presents it to you, you pay attention.

Also, it’s a great thriller! Trust me, you want to read State of Terror now.

I was thrilled to find that Rinker Buck had a new book coming out. The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey was one of the best books I read when it came out in 2016. I’ve given away at least a half-dozen copies. In it he builds a canastoga wagon and set off, powered by three mules, across the Oregon Trail. It is an outstanding book, jammed with history and interesting tidbits, and I was ready for a new adventure.

Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure mirrors that earlier book but this involves first building a flatboat – the sort first used to navigate the Father of Waters – and then float it from the start of the Ohio River and down to New Orleans. Nearly everyone he discusses this plan with tells him he’s going to die. They’re all quiet serious. Perhaps it is hubris, or his own native mule-headedness, but he plunges on. It’s a daunting plan but you know he survived ’cause you’re reading the book.

Along the way you accumulate a flowing history of how the commerce and settlement of the country was enhanced by European-Americans moving West and following the waters. Of course, the current river is nothing like the unfettered highway of 200 years ago – just as the Oregon Trail no longer exists as it was when first blazzed. Buck is aghast at the garbage and trash (it often was, he says sadly, a “floating junkyard”). “And the river has been so contained and shaped so as to stay within it’s bounds that is in no way as wild as it once once. That’s not to say it isn’t dangerous; big storms along any of the rivers that feed it can make it swell and churn, and the commercial traffic is astonishing. Then, too, there are the weekend fools.

Like the junk that float by, so too does the awful history of our country – Buck does not shy from explaining the ways the waters helped to decimate the natives that had ruled and helped to spread slavery further into the landscape. Truly, life on the Mississippi is both a grand tale of human progress corrupted because of the costs that it charges on all who used it.

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All Haunting is Regret

Don’t worry if you start Hell and Back and can’t figure out what is going on. Neither can Walt. Craig Johnson puts all of us – readers and characters – in a place that defies explanation and populates it with people who can’t possibly there. In fact, there are so many people from Walt’s past that I stopped reading the new book and re-read the previously three and it helped. It is a book overflowing with mystery and mysticism. It is a book unlike any of the previous Longmires, yet is is easily experienced as another in a long line of Absaroka County stories that are unique and comforting. Because at the center is Walt Longmire and he is trustworthy to all.

“Words are important, no matter what the language – they are perhaps one of the most powerful things we have. Words can preserve life or invoke death and should be handled with the same care as any deadly weapon.” Those are Virgil’s words, but the truth is Craig’s.

Boy Howdy…

=================================

Pulitzer-nominated investigative reporter Howard Blum‘s brand new book is astonishing. The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through A Legacy of Betrayal begins with a boat sailing itself into the shore of the Chesapeake Bay and gets strange from there.

So starts an entertaining and convoluted story of the hunt for a Soviet mole in the CIA. Scads of books have been written about this hunt, the suspects, the battles over which Russian turncoat to believe, and the destruction and devastation the hunt caused to US intelligence. Blum’s book follows the investigation of Tennent “Pete” Bagley, a retired American spook who lived through that destruction and suffered from it. The circumstances of the mystery sail boat brings him back to the hunt and it unfolds like a well crafted whodunnit. Clues, red herrings, and blind alleys abound and, along the way, you see the Cold War games of both sides of the spy landscape.

If you’re interested in American history, Cold War history, CIA history – or even if you don’t think you are – pick up the books. It’s a great mystery, but all true.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Next up: a book that was released in Feb. but that I just discovered near the end of Sept – Fran has been yelling at me for years to read Joe Ide. So far I haven’t but I will now. To my knowledge, this is the third book the Chandler estate has engaged current authors to pen a new Philip Marlowe novel. First, in 2014, there was Benjamin (John Banville) Black’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, a follow-up to The Long Goodbye. In 2018, Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osbourne was released. In that, Marlowe is 72 and living in Mexico.

It’s one thing to search for new books by a favorite author. I’m not sure how you search for new books about a favorite character!

BUY SMALL ~ SUPPORT SMALL

R.I.P.

Hard to believe that the time has flowed so quickly, but today marks five years since we locked the doors on the Seattle Mystery Bookshop as an operating business for the last time. Sure, there was lots of work left to do – counting the inventory, boxing it up, dismantling the shelves, the computers system, and packing it all out of the space – but Sept. 30, 2017 was the end of the road.

Seems as if there should be noirish terms to apply.

Amber, Fran and I would still get together for lunch now and then. But then Fran moved out of state, Amber moved out of town, and now we keep in touch electronically, as we do with you.

We miss one another, we miss being together, we miss being around books every day and knowing about what books to look forward to, and we miss talking about the books we love with readers looking for a new book to love.

But nothing good lasts forever and it was grand while it did.

Thanks again for 27 years ~ JB

September 2022

Following the attack on Salman Rushdie, his books are leading the bestseller lists.

Kentucky’s flood-affected bookstores need your help.

Attention book lovers: your dream job is hiring again.

How Does the FBI Break Into a Safe?

How Spider-Man Led to the Invention of the Prisoner Ankle Monitor

Take a Look Inside Dr. Seuss’ La Jolla Home Before it Sells For The 1st Time in 70 Years

Missing Pages: the podcast revisiting jaw-dropping literary scandals

The 15 Most Instagrammed Bookstores in the World

The Orient Express Is Resuming Its Legendary Journeys From Paris—and It’s More Glamorous Than Ever

Here’s another incredibly strange dream-like Chinese bookstore.

Newly published Charles Dickens letters reveal he was ‘a bit of a diva’

Spice Up Your Life: Swag for Unabashed Smut Readers

Words of the Month

school (n.): [place of instruction] Middle English scole, from Old English scol, “institution for instruction,” from Latin schola “meeting place for teachers and students, place of instruction;” also “learned conversation, debate; lecture; disciples of a teacher, body of followers, sect,” also in the older Greek sense of “intermission of work, leisure for learning.”

This is from Greek skholē “spare time, leisure, rest, ease; idleness; that in which leisure is employed; learned discussion;” also “a place for lectures, school;” originally “a holding back, a keeping clear,” from skhein “to get” (from PIE root *segh- “to hold”) + -olē by analogy with bolē “a throw,” stolē “outfit,” etc.

The basic sense of the Greek word is “leisure,” which passed to “otiose discussion” (in Athens or Rome, the favorite or proper use of free time), then it came to be used for the place for such discussion.

The Latin word was widely borrowed (in addition to Old French escole, French école, Spanish escuela, Italian scuola; Old High German scuola, German Schule, Swedish skola, Gaelic sgiol, Welsh ysgol, Russian shkola).

The meaning “students attending a school” in English is attested from c. 1300; the sense of “school building” is by 1590s. Sense of “people united by a general similarity of principles and methods” is from 1610s; hence school of thought (by 1848). As an adjective by mid-18th C., “pertaining to or relating to a school or to education.”

School of hard knocks “rough experience in life” is by 1870; to tell tales out of school “betray damaging secrets” is from 1540s. School-bus is from 1908. School days is from 1590s. School board “local committee of education” is by 1836; school district “division of a town or city for the management of schools” is by 1809. (etymonline)

Serious Stuff

+Stephen King in Books Merger Trial: “Consolidation Is Bad for Competition”

‘Assassin with loaded AK47’ faces federal charges for surveilling home of Iranian-American journalist

Grand jury declines to indict woman in Emmett Till killing

Howard Carter stole Tutankhamun’s treasure, new evidence suggests

‘Hackers against conspiracies’: Cyber sleuths take aim at election disinformation

Mexico calls disappearance of 43 students a ‘state crime’

Mexico arrests former top prosecutor over 2014 missing students case

The big idea: should revenge ever be a part of justice?

Over 90% of Medieval Manuscripts Have Been Lost, Study Says

30 years ago tonight [Aug. 25], Sarajevo’s National Library was burned to the ground

How Two Mexican Drug Cartels Came to Dominate America’s Fentanyl Supply

Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood on All Things Evil

Books and bomb shelters: Ukraine returns to school

CENSORSHIP OR THE AMERICAN TALIBAN

After Anti-LGBTQ Attacks, Suburban Chicago Bakery Threatened With Fines

Books by Toni Morrison and others now feature a warning label in a Florida school district.

New York will censor a book about the Attica uprising in its state prisons

US library defunded after refusing to censor LGBTQ authors: ‘We will not ban the books’

Virginia Republicans are testing a new way to ban books and restrict their sales. In the long run, it might just work.

Tennessee District Attorney Now Denies That She Would Prosecute Librarians for Keeping Queer Books

universities scrap ‘challenging’ books to protect students

School librarians in Missouri pull books as new law allows charges for ‘explicit’ material

Librarian sues over accusations that kids’ section contains “erotic” books

A school librarian is suing the right-wing “activists” who defamed and harassed her.

Book banning goes full ouroboros as a Texas school district removes the Bible from its shelves.

Students lose access to books amid ‘state-sponsored purging of ideas’.

A Florida district declines dictionary donations as it navigates a new book law

A Texas woman went to the cops about an actual library book.

Afghan women open library to counter growing isolation

The book-banning lawsuit against Barnes & Noble is moving forward in Virginia.

Judge thwarts Va. Republicans’ effort to limit book sales at Barnes & Noble

They’re shooting books now: censorship-loving, book-banning vigilantes stoop to a new low.\

Local Stuff

True Crime Byline: Surprise verdict in Robert Pickton trial upset family, supporters

I’ve been battling Indigenous art fraud for 30 years. It’s only getting worse.

Mercer Street Books has become a world-famous neighborhood bookstore

Odd Stuff

Last Convicted Salem ‘Witch’ Is Finally Cleared

An Update on a Previously Posted Story: Man Who Lost $180 Million Bitcoin Hard Drive 9 Years Ago Still Trying to Dig Through Trash – He’s not ready to give up.

Texas man who shot a woman in the neck is killed after bullet also hits him

Man trying to burn spider with lighter sparked Utah wildfire, police say

John Lennon’s Scathing Post-Beatles Breakup Letter to Paul McCartney Goes to Auction

Tarek Abi Samra on Stealing Kant From a Bookstore

“It has absolutely nothing going for it, except Satan.” Read James Baldwin on The Exorcist.

+These are the best lines from all the PRH-S&S antitrust trial erotic fiction on the internet.

Jigsaw Puzzles for Crime Fans

Amina Akhtar and Erin Mayer Talk Fashion and Murder

Artwork of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang invention has sold for £3500

French justice ministry under pressure to explain jail go-karting

‘Mutilated by rats,’ burned, trashed: 200 years of presidential papers lost

The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz Would Like a Word With the FBI

Great Moon Hoax of 1835 convinced the world of extraterrestrial life

A 1835 illustration in the New York Sun claimed to show animals on the moon, discovered by Sir John Herschel in his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, and copied from sketches in the Edinburgh Journal of Science. New York Times

Words of the Month

learn (v.): Old English leornian “to get knowledge, be cultivated; study, read, think about,” from Proto-Germanic *lisnojanan (cognates: Old Frisian lernia, Middle Dutch leeren, Dutch leren, Old High German lernen, German lernen “to learn,” Gothic lais “I know”), with a base sense of “to follow or find the track,” from PIE root *lois– “furrow, track.” It is related to German Gleis “track,” and to Old English læst “sole of the foot” (see last (n.1)).

From c. 1200 as “to hear of, ascertain.” Transitive use (He learned me (how) to read), now considered vulgar (except in reflexive expressions, I learn English), was acceptable from c. 1200 until early 19th C. It is preserved in past-participle adjective learned “having knowledge gained by study.” Old English also had læran “to teach” (see lere). (etymonline)

SPECTRE

Dum Dums hustle on Amazon costs family candy business millions

Amazon is diving deeper into health care. That’s raising eyebrows

+The books merger that’s all about Amazon | Commentary

Amazon Wants to Make TV Out of Your Front Yard

Uh Oh, Amazon Bought Your Favorite Robot Company

Amazon keeps growing, and so does its cache of data on you

007=’

Desmond Llewelyn’s James Bond archive sells for 15k

Watch the Lego store in London build a life size James Bond Aston Martin DB5

James Bond’s Tastes: ‘Goldfinger’

Why David Bowie Turned Down A Chance To Be A Bond Villain

Daniel Craig Learned A Painful Lesson On His First Day As James Bond

James Bond’s Dr No is getting Steelbook boxset for 60th anniversary

Bond films’ future secured after MGM and WB agree deal

Was Goldfinger’s Famous Gold Paint Scene Based on a Real-Life Incident?

Christopher Nolan Is Still The Best Director Choice For James Bond 26

Words of the Month

study (v.): Early 12th C., “to strive toward, devote oneself to, cultivate” (translating Latin occupatur), from Old French estudiier “to study, apply oneself, show zeal for; examine” (13th C., Modern French étudier), from Medieval Latin studiare, from Latin studium “study, application,” originally “eagerness,” from studere “to be diligent,” from PIE *(s)teu- (1) “to push, stick, knock, beat” (see steep (adj.)). The notion appears to be “pressing forward, thrusting toward,” hence “strive after.

From c. 1300 as “apply oneself to the acquisition of learning, pursue a formal course of study,” also “read a book or writings intently or meditatively.” From mid-14th C. as “reflect, muse, think, ponder.” Meaning “regard attentively” is from 1660s. (etymonline)

Awards

Tess Gunty has won the inaugural Waterstones debut fiction prize.

Book Stuff

The True Story Of The World’s Most Obsessive Book Collector

‘Heat 2’: Why Michael Mann’s Sequel to His Classic Crime-Movie Had to Be a Novel

Charity shop’s ‘donation of a lifetime’ with first edition Charles Dickens classic

Meet-Cute: Susan Coll on Falling In Love with (and at) a Bookstore

People of color driving rise of independent bookstores

What We Gain from a Good Bookstore

Ex-cop charged after fatally shooting another officer during training exercise at a DC library

Eight Courtroom Dramas That Leave Readers Reeling

Uh-oh! Scientists have invented… augmented reality books.

Dollars, Cents, and Being Left With the Bill: Jillian Medoff on Breaking Up With Her Literary Agent

If You Want to Ruin Bookstores for Yourself, Become a Writer

Shelf Talkers: What They’re Reading at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas

Hold the Backstory: Or, How To Open Your Novel with a Bang

Sara Paretsky: ‘The story of Joan of Arc made me long for a vision’

Pages Upon Pages: 5 Favorite Books-Within-Books

The Independent Bookstore, as Imagined by a Corporate Lobbyist

The Creative Life and Death of Bruce Montgomery, aka Edmund Crispin

Color Her Orange: Talking with Grace Ellis About Her New Graphic Novel Featuring Patricia Highsmith

A Reading List of Psychopathic Women

The World of Philo Vance, Spectator of Life (this is the introduction to the new edition of Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case)

What Is Going On With Barnes & Noble?

Book Publishers Go to War With the Internet Archive

A Reading List of Psychopathic Women

Darwin’s Lost Treasure, Found

Andrew Cuomo wins lawsuit over his $5 million book deal

Bad Blood: A poet is suing Taylor Swift for more than $1 million for copyright infringement.

On Crosswords and Crime Fiction

Hungry Like a Dog: James Ellroy Will Not Stop Being James Ellroy

The Dangers of the Open Road: 5 Key Works of Motorcycle Noir

On Maggie Bradbury, the woman who “changed literature forever.”

Good news for books: The Washington Post’s book section is back!

In “The Life of Crime,” Martin Edwards takes on the colorful history of the detective novel, and its enduring fascination.

Author Events (in person)

Sept.6: Craig Johnson signs his new Longmire, Third Place/LFP, 7pm

Other Forms of Entertainment

‘Irredeemable’ Batgirl movie unexpectedly cancelled despite being in final stages

The Truth Finally Comes Out About Why David Fincher’s Mission Impossible 3 Never Happened

Terrence Malick Is One Of The Unsung Heroes Behind Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Role

10 Underappreciated American Neo-Noirs of the Early 1970s

We’re getting a Keanu Reeves prestige TV series: Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City

How Quinn Martin and His Crime Shows Came to Dominate 1970s TV

French Connection‘s “Picking Your Feet In Poughkeepsie” Line Explained

Robert De Niro, Barry Levinson Team for Warner Bros. Gangster Drama ‘Wise Guys’

The Bourne Identity at 20: the surprise hit that changed action film-making

Rediscovering a Vanished Species: Half-Hour TV Mysteries

Remembering Harry O, The Seventies’ Second Best, Mostly Forgotten Private Eye Series (remembered fondly by JB!)

Enough James Bond. Give These Spy Books a Movie.

Steve Carell’s Understated Performance Kills in Serial-Murder Drama ‘The Patient’

Ryan Gosling in Talks to Join Margot Robbie in New ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ Movie

Confess, Fletch Trailer: Jon Hamm Takes Over The Troublesome Reporter Role From Chevy Chase

‘After Dark: Neo Noir Cinema’ Collects Memorable Noirs from the 90s

Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson’s Batman Sequel Is Officially
Moving Forward

The Big Sleep Was Smart To Cut A Major Humphrey Bogart Scene

Review: ‘Out Of The Blue’ Is A Film Noir With Ample Self-Awareness

Clue Drops Bodies in a New Animated Series

Steve Carell Led Series ‘The Patient’ is a Surprisingly Profound High Concept Thriller

Apple show halts production in Baltimore after shooting threat

10-hour marathon of rarities highlights Music Box film festival

Eddie Murphy’s ‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel Foley’ Sets Cast

The Best Crime Shows Coming Out in September

Words of the Month

class (n.): c. 1600, “group of students,” in U.S. especially “number of pupils in a school or college of the same grade,” from French classe (14th C.), from Latin classis “a class, a division; army, fleet,” especially “any one of the six orders into which Servius Tullius divided the Roman people for the purpose of taxation;” traditionally originally “the people of Rome under arms” (a sense attested in English from 1650s), and thus akin to calare “to call (to arms),” from PIE root *kele- (2) “to shout.” In early use in English also in Latin form classis.

Meaning “an order or rank of persons, a number of persons having certain characteristics in common” is from 1660s. School and university sense of “course, lecture” (1650s) is from the notion of a form or lecture reserved to scholars who had attained a certain level. Natural history sense “group of related plants or animals” is from 1753. Meaning “high quality” is from 1874. Meaning “a division of society according to status” (with upper, lower, etc.) is from 1763. Class-consciousness (1903) is from German Klassenbewusst. (etymonline)

RIP

Sad note: we just learned that Seattle mystery writer Frederick D. Huebner died on December 31, 2019. He was a great writer, a great friend of the shop, and one of the very few people who ever bought one of JB’s paintings. Sorry we didn’t know it at the time to pay tribute then.

Aug. 1: Vadim Bakatin, last head of Soviet KGB, dies at 84

Aug. 6: Clu Gulager, Actor in ‘The Virginian,’ ‘The Last Picture Show’ and ‘Return of the Living Dead,’ Dies at 93 (he was also one of The Killers, the last movie of Ronald Reagan’s)

Aug. 7: Roger E. Mosley, Actor on ‘Magnum, P.I.,’ Dies at 83

Aug 8: David McCullough, award-winning author, has died at 89 (he was also the narrator of Ken Burns’ epic series “The Civil War”)

Aug. 10: Raymond Briggs, Beloved Author and Illustrator of ‘The Snowman,’ Dies at 88

Aug. 16: Wolfgang Petersen, German Commander of ‘Das Boot,’ ‘Air Force One,’ ‘In the Line of Fire,’ ‘Outbreak’, Dies at 81

Aug. 18: Andrew J. Maloney, Prosecutor Who Took Down John Gotti, Dies at 90

Aug. 23: Writer Michael Malone, 80, Dies of Pancreatic Cancer (great books – Uncivil Seasons, Handling Sin, Time’s Witness)

Aug. 29: Robert LuPone, “Sopranos” and Broadway Actor, Dead at 76

Links of Interest

July 31: Meet the Exotic Dancer Who Went Undercover to Take Down Domestic Terrorists

Aug. 1: Why Armstrong, Sinatra and Crosby all had mob connections: ‘Get yourself the biggest gangster’

Aug. 1: Have Scholars Finally Deciphered a Mysterious Ancient Script?

Aug. 1: Exclusive: 83-Year-Old Paroled for Starved Rock Murders Claims New DNA Results Prove His Innocence

Aug. 2: The Greatest True Spy Stories

Aug. 4: The Crime of My Life – A crime reporter turned his investigative skills toward an old family crime with deep contemporary relevance and finds himself implicated

Aug. 5: Crypto Company Offers Massive Bounty to “White Hat Hackers” After Giant Heist

Aug. 5: ‘Soon I Will Own You’: Inside the Wild Life of a Fake CIA Bro

Aug. 7: Learjets, Mistresses, and Bales of Weed: My Dad’s Life as a Drug Kingpin

Aug. 7: Ex-Scientologists Came Forward with Shocking Child Trafficking Claims. Now They Say They’re Being Stalked

Aug. 9: Drug Lord Mass-Killer ‘El Chueco’ Strikes Fear in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains

Aug. 10: Realtor Accused of Trying to Put a Hit on Former Mother-in-Law Is in Hot Water Again

Aug. 10: After a career of cracking cold cases, investigator Paul Holes opens up

Aug. 10: Lake Mead’s bodies may be identified using genetic genealogy, a science redefining ‘unsolvable’

Aug. 11: Stolen €250,000 Gagliano violin, sold by thief for just €200, recovered by police 3 years later

Aug. 12: At What Point Do You Become a Money Launderer?

Aug. 15: Human remains reportedly found in suitcases bought at New Zealand auction

Aug. 15: Julian Assange lawyers sue CIA over alleged spying

Aug. 15: Stolen Picasso painting ‘worth millions of dollars’ found during drug raid, Iraqi authorities claim

Aug. 16: Two of New York’s Oldest Mafia Clans Charged in Money Laundering Scheme

Aug. 16: Using Fake Psychics, Brazilian Woman Allegedly Stole $142 Million Worth of Art

Aug. 18: Justice Department announces 3 men charged in Whitey Bulger’s killing

Aug. 18: Photographer Theo Wenner Spent Two Years Following Homicide Detectives in Brooklyn’s Most Dangerous District. Here’s What He Saw

Aug. 19: On the 1981 Wonderland Murders and the 2003 film that reconstructs its events

Aug. 22: France remembers De Gaulle’s close escape depicted in The Day of the Jackal

Aug. 24: Crowd-sourced detective work narrows window for disappearance of Winston Churchill portrait (it was replaced by a fake…)

Aug. 30: A Salem Witch Trials exhibit is coming to the New-York Historical Society

Aug. 31: Ruth Dickins was convicted of murder in 1948. A new book re-examines the case.

Aug. 31: New Exhibition Explores Three Generations Of Family Of Pulitzer Prize-Winning Writer John Hersey

Aug. 31: Utica Sculpture Residency Vandals Are Under the Age of 11, Police Say

Words of the Month

recess (n.): 1530s, “act of receding or going back or away” (a sense now obsolete), from Latin recessus “a going back, retreat,” from recessum, past participle of recedere “to go back, fall back; withdraw, depart, retire,” from re– “back” (see re-) + cedere “to go” (from PIE root *ked– “to go, yield”).

Meaning “hidden or remote part” is recorded from 1610s; that of “period of stopping from usual work” is from 1620s, probably from parliamentary notion of “recessing” into private chambers. Meaning “place of retirement or seclusion” is from 1630s; that of “niche, receding space or inward indentation in a line of continuity” is from 1690s.(etymonline)

What We’ve Been Up To

Amber

Nonna Maria and the Case of The Missing Bride — Lorenzo Carcaterra

I finished this book in a day.

I tried so hard to take it slow, I swear!

I gardened, did laundry, baked cookies, made the bed betwixt chapters…and yet, I still devoured the pages in less than twelve hours!

The thing is, Nonna Maria occupies the space between Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple. Driven by neither cold logic nor the belief in the baseness of people’s motivations — Nonna Maria serves at the pleasure of her fellow islanders. Intervening when asked, she combines island gossip, a decade’s worth of past experiences, and her own leg work to solve whatever problem presented to her — relying on a plethora of friends, a legion of family members, and occasionally the Carabinieri to catch the culprit (and have her back during perilous situations).

I know Barnes & Noble placed Nonna Maria in their cozy section. Probably because there’s not much in the way of on-stage bloodletting…However, there’s still plenty of death, thugs, threats, and mystery to satisfy any reader without relying on a shoehorned in themes like cats, gourds, cookies, Santa, quilting, dumplings, or crafting to generate interest in the story.

I cannot recommend Nonna Maria and the Case of The Missing Bride highly enough. Set in sun drenched Southern Italy, this mystery is everything I didn’t know I wanted to read over and over again this August!

Fran

Louise Penny isn’t afraid of tackling difficult subjects. She never has been, even before her collaboration with Hilary Rodham Clinton, about which I’ll write in another post.

But in The Madness of Crowds, she delves much deeper into a dark place that most of us would really rather avoid. I don’t want to get into specifics because of spoilers, but she taps into a collective awareness that no one wants to look at, but of which we have all glanced at.

All the regulars are back, and this is really not a stand alone. To get the full impact, you need to have read all the books that have come before, beginning with Still Life. There are new, compelling characters here, ones who will remain with you forever, and there are the ongoing delights. Rosa has expanded her vocabulary, and is teaching it to the children, much to their parents’ dismay. There is laughter and humor, compassion and passionate humanity, and all of it stems from people being people, in the best and worst possible ways.

I really cannot recommend Louise Penny’s writing strongly enough. They do need to be read in order, and once you have experienced the world of Three Pines, even if you’re not a fan of police procedurals, you’ll want to visit this village time and again, I promise.

Finally, finally, after toooo many decades, I read Fredric Brown’s The Fabulous Clipjoint. Published in 1947 – and winning the very first Best Novel Edgar – it’s a lively and raucous story of a young man and his uncle who undertake an investigation into a murder – the young guy’s father and his uncle’s brother.

This is the first in a series to feature Ed and his uncle Am (short for Ambrose). Am is a carny and the pages are jammed with the hardboiled jargon of the late 40s AND carnival lingo. Am also makes for a good investigator. His years sizing up “marks” at the carny give him an edge when talking to those involved.

Here’s one line that I found particularly sharp. Uncle Am says to his nephew, “I’m not worried about going to hell, Ed, but I begrudge the money the ticket costs.”

A bonus is the introduction by Lawrence Block who takes you on a tour of his reading as a young man.

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

A year or so before the shop closed, a man came in one afternoon and introduced himself: James Grady. Now, maybe you have to be a “certain age” to have reacted as Fran and I did. Six Days of the Condor was published in 1974, which means I probably read the paperback in 1975 when it came out. The movie version, Three Days of the Condor was released around the same time. I’d read a number of his books over the years, Old Dogs was one that stands out.

We chatted awhile and he explained that he had an idea for a thriller that took place on a train going from Seattle to Chicago and was in town to start his research. We talked about the long history of train mysteries and showed him our list in the Yellow Notebook that we refereed to when people came in asking for one. I kept my eyes alert for his book, and it’s out now.

James Grady’s This Train features an odd cast of characters who first see one another in the Seattle train station. At first, they’re “named” by their visual shorthand. As the trip progresses, you learn names and details. You can tell that some are a bit shady but, if you’ve been reading thrillers as long as I have, you know that anything is possible from any one character.

The fun, of course, is finding out who is who and if you’re suspicions were correct. You find that the short-hand descriptors from the start – the guy in the camel-colored cashmere coat or the young woman with the intense red hair – are also accurate descriptors of their personalities.

And then, or course, why are all of these people on this one train and what about the SWAT team, and the guy who always lugs around the beat-up satchel? Well, find out yourself. It’s a great ride!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This debut by Dwyer Murphy got great reviews. The New Yorker promoted it, and the cover carries a one-word rave by Walter Mosely. As a bonus, An Honest Living is billed as a bibliomystery and who isn’t looking for the next John Dunning? So I got a copy right away.

This is very much a New York Novel. The lawyer who narrates the story is certain to tell you what street he’s on, where he turns, where he eats or drinks, details about the neighborhoods, and so on. In that, it reminded me very much of the Scudder books by Lawrence Block. The City itself is a character.

The time frame was a bit puzzling. At one point, he looks someone up on-line and mentions Gawker – stopped publishing in 2016 but recently re-started- so I was unclear about when the book was set. Of course, that shouldn’t really matter, but when I first read that name it popped me out of the story. And that’s not a good thing.

And I can’t point to any good things. He writes well, the characters were interesting…

Overall, it was a very easy book to put down. I have no particular fascination for the minutia of NYC when it is a major component of the story. It read as if it was filler, in place of a plot – because the mystery, and the bibliomystery element, aren’t there. I don’t even think it is fair to call it a mystery for a number of reasons but I can’t tell you those and not ruin the story. Go ahead, give it a try.

Especially if you live in NYC…

BUY SMALL ~ SUPPORT SMALL

“In the early 1950s Avon Books created the VendAvon, a coin-operated book vending machine, found in airports, hospitals, and ferry terminals. Avon installed 210 machines, each containing 24 of the latest Avon titles, across several states.” [Second row down, far left is Paul Cain’s *Seven Slayers*, to the left of the Cain is Raymond Chandler’s *Fingerman,* and then Robert Terrall’s *A Killer is Among Us*, down a row and two over is Cain’s one novel, *Fast One*, and by the woman’s right ear is Frederick Nebel’s Six Deadly Dame, and bottom row, 3rd from the left, is Agatha Christie’s *The Big Four*.]

“In June 1947, Popular Science featured an early book vending machine called the Book-O-Mat which offered a selection of 50 books published by Pocket Books, any one of which could be purchased for a quarter.”

“The Penguincubator appeared in London in 1937. Conceived by Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, the Penguincubator dispensed classic literature in paperback form for about the same price as a pack of cigarettes.
Sir Allen may have succeeded in changing English reading habits, but the Penguincubator had little to do with it. Specifically, it was never manufactured in sufficient quantity to make an impact on the market.”

photos and italicized quoted from flickr

AUGUST 2022

Man Who Accidentally Got Paid 330x His Salary Quits, Disappears

Hip, Woke, Cool: It’s All Fodder For the Oxford Dictionary of African American English

Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave.

Drool over the personal bookplates of 18 famous writers.

The Secrets of a Long-Overlooked Cipher Linked to Catherine of Aragon

After a local bookstore was scammed out of $35K their Detroit neighbors stepped in to save it

The Crypto Revolution Wants to Reimagine Books

Oakland librarian reflects on nearly 10 years of chronicling found objects

Mystery of Australia’s ‘Somerton Man’ solved after 70 years, researcher says

Rare 1952 Mickey Mantle baseball card going up for auction

After Selling for $43 million, Rare Copy of the Constitution Goes on Display

Teens who mostly read paper books are better readers, a recent study says.

Books and bouncy houses: How the Uvalde library is helping a broken community heal

Words of the Month

nonsense (n.) “that which is lacking in sense, language or words without meaning or conveying absurd or ridiculous ideas,” 1610s, from non– “not” + sense (n.); perhaps influenced by French nonsens. Since mid-20th C., non-sense, with the hyphen, has been used to distinguish the meaning “that which is not sense, that which is different from sense,” not implying absurdity.

Serious Stuff

>Police Department Used Images of Black Men Holding Guns as Target Practice

*How To Directly Impact Democracy: Book Censorship News, July 1, 2022

*Who Controls What Books You Can Read?

*Pathetic Proud Boys Ruin Another Pride Month Event for Kids at Indiana Library

*Battle Over Sex and Gender in Books Divides a Texas Town

*All the Little Things You Lose in the Culture War

*Oklahoma Threatens Librarians: ‘Don’t Use the Word Abortion’

*School District Enacts One of ‘Strictest’ Book Bans Yet After Raucous Meeting

People Are Using AI to Generate Disturbing Kids’ Bedtime Stories

An Old Waterpark Could Be Mexico’s Largest Narco Mass Grave

Six Reasons the Murder Clearance Rate Is at an All-Time Low

Two men jailed for Molotov cocktail attack on Dutch journalist’s home

>Emmett Till’s Accuser Wrote A Secret Memoir!

>Emmett Till’s Chicago Home Will Be Preserved

>MS Police Chief Boasted “Shot That N-Word 119 Times,’ According To Leaked Recording

>Co-defendant in Central Park Five case to be exonerated

A Hacker Explains How to Shoplift

Rare medical book collection tracks tangled history of women’s health

28 Incarcerated Women Allege That Guards Allowed Male Inmates to Rape Them for $1000

Local Stuff

Do you recognize this woman? Mounties renew appeal to help ID woman found dead in Richmond marina (Vancouver Sun)

Lucinda Turner, who worked to combat illicit trade in Indigenous art, has died at 63

Planes, parachutes and armed robbery: Netflix take on the master criminal who became a folk hero (D.B. Cooper documentary)

From books to weddings and memorials, Island Books has served Mercer Island for nearly 50 years

D.B. Cooper, the changing nature of hijackings and the foundation for today’s airport security

The Outsider Journalist: The Story Behind a 70 Year Old Cold Case Murder and the Push for Alaska’s Statehood

Shelf Talkers: What Booksellers Are Reading at Third Place Book

Portland’s Books With Pictures named best comic shop in the world

Words of the Month

hooey (n.)“nonsense, foolishness,” 1922, American English slang, of unknown origin.

Odd Stuff

How TikTok Became a Bestseller Machine

As Watergate simmered, Nixon buckled down on a sportswriting project

Feds Nab Woman Who Tried to Rent a Hitman on RentAHitman.Com.

Dressed to Kill: A True Crime Collection of Criminal Clothing

A Judge Pulled a Gun in the Courtroom—and Then It Got Weird

How an Unqualified Sex Worker Allegedly Infiltrated a Top Air Force Lab

Million-Dollar Wine Heist Ends With Mexican Beauty Queen Arrested in Europe

The YouTuber making millions from true crime and make-up

FBI Comes Up Empty-Handed in Search for Jimmy Hoffa in New Jersey Landfill

How a Dick Pic Helped Detectives Crack a $30M Celebrity Diamond Heist

Alabama Officials Tell Reporter Her Skirt Is Too Short to View Inmate’s Execution

The Sinaloa Cartel Is Now Selling Tesla and Prada Branded Cocaine

Eadweard Muybridge: The Eccentric English Bookseller Who Created the First ‘Motion Picture’ Was Also a Murderer

The Collected Works of the Zodiac: Was the 1960s serial killer a frustrated author, desperate for his voice to be heard?

Codebreakers Find ‘Sexts,’ Arctic Dispatches in 200-Year-Old Encrypted Newspaper Ads

Literary-themed cruises with famous writers are apparently a thing now.

Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul Unveil Bronze Statues of ‘Breaking Bad’ Characters in Albuquerque

Words of the Month

twaddle (n.)“silly talk, prosy nonsense,” 1782, probably from twattle (1550s), of obscure origin.

SPECTRE

Security News This Week: Amazon Handed Ring Videos to Cops Without Warrants

Amazon Gave Ring Doorbell Videos to US Police 11 Times Without Permission

Fake online reviews lead shoppers to overpay, new study says

Amazon wants to be your doctor now, too

Amazon’s Dangerous Ambition to Dominate Healthcare [Time Magazine, no less]

Words of the Month

guff (n.)“empty talk, nonsense,” 1888, from earlier sense of “puff of air” (1825), of imitative origin.

Awards

Mick Herron wins crime novel of the year award for Slough House

Booker prize unveils book club challenge

2022 Booker prize longlist of 13 writers aged 20 to 87 announced

These 24 debuts just made the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize longlist.

Here’s the shortlist for the first Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize.

Book Stuff

Writer’s Digest Best Writing Advice Websites For Writers 2022

Iowa City Public Library eliminates fines for overdue materials

HarperCollins Union Has Voted To Strike

Sotheby’s To Bring A Most Rare Shakespeare First Folio Under The Hammer In New York On July 21

PS: Rare original copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio sells for £2m ($2.4M US)

Irish writers dropped from UK school curriculum in move to increase diversity

Daphne du Maurier: Novelist who traced past to a French debtors’ jail

The New York Public Library Opens a ‘Virtual Branch’ on Instagram and Launches a Reading Recommendation Project Using Augmented Reality Technology

‘First modern novel – oldest language’: Sanskrit translation of Don Quixote rescued from oblivion

Collecting first-edition Beatrix Potter books

The Cult Classic That Captures the Grind of Dead-End Jobs

News From Nowhere: Inside Liverpool’s iconic radical bookshop

His First Novel Was a Critical Hit. Two Decades Later, He Rewrote It.

The Great Locked Room Mystery: My Top 10 Impossible Crimes

Tess Gerritsen: ‘There’s always comfort in Sherlock Holmes’

My First Thriller: Laura Lippman

Dana Canedy, Publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Flagship Imprint, Has Left the Job

London and the Long, Dark shadow of Charles Dickens

A copyright lawsuit threatens to kill free access to Internet Archive’s library of books

This Website Makes It Easy for You to Support Local Bookstores

Writer Gets Locked Out of Novel Draft by Chinese Word Processor for Illegal Content

From Mo Hayder: The Desert Brings Danger and Mystery in This First Look at The Book of Sand

The Bookseller Who Helped Transform Oxford, Mississippi

Little Essays on Sherlock Holmes: “The Engineer’s Thumb”

Book review by Joseph Kanon: A (dubious) suicide, a (possible) mole and an enduring CIA mystery

Ian Flemings ’13 Rules for life’ notebook sells for $52,500 [“Rule 13. Live until your dead.“]

A historic lesbian-owned queer bookstore is fighting to stay open.

21 Independent Bookstores to Browse in the DC Area

Attention ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ fans: Rare Dr. Seuss collection coming to Columbia

With Violence All Around Us, What Does It Actually Mean For a Book To Be a Crime Novel?

Artist Barbara Bloom and Writer Ben Lerner Invent a New Kind of Book

How do you organize your books? 9 authors share their favorite shelves.

**Vintage Typewriters Are Taken Apart and Reassembled Into Movable Bird Sculptures**

How a Book Is Made – Ink, Paper and a 200,000-Pound Printer

Milton Propper: Scion and Imitator of the Golden Age Mystery, Pioneer of the Procedural

We Need to Reckon with the Rot at the Core of Publishing

Meet the People Behind Some of Today’s Best Small Publishers Specializing in Crime Fiction

From Duluth to Decatur these bookstores are helping in the fight for reproductive justice.

The Search for the Funniest Crime Novel Ever Written

Author Events

Aug. 3: Deborah Cuyle signs Murder and Mayhem in Spokane, Auntie’s 7pm

Aug. 4: Leah Sottile signs her Idaho true crime book, When the Moon Turns to Blood, Elliot Bay Books, 7pm

Aug. 9: Mercer Island author Mark Pawlosky signs Hack, Island Books 6pm

Aug. 13: 2 OR authors sign their new cozies from Kensington ~ Angela M. Sanders and Emmeline Duncan, University Books, 2pm

Aug. 19: Beverly Hodgins signs Mercy and Madness: Dr. Mary Archard Latham’s Tragic Fall From Female Physician to Felon!, Auntie’s 7pm

Aug. 23: Patricia Briggs signs her new Mercy Thompson, University Books 6pm

Aug. 23: Peter Blecha and Brad Holden sign Lost Roadhouses of Seattle, Third Place/Ravenna 7pm

An Interesting List That Mixes Books and Film

The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time

Other Forms of Entertainment

True crime psychologist sharing insights with Central Illinois library-goers

‘Dark Winds’ Renewed for Season 2 at AMC

+Michael Mann Plans To Turn His Heat 2 Novel Into ‘One Large Movie’

+Why Marxist Heist Masterpiece ‘Thief’ Was James Caan’s Finest Work

+Inside Tokyo Vice, the Flat-Out Coolest Show of the Year

Daredevil’s Darker Tone Called For A Different Kind Of Superhero Costume

The 25 Best True-Crime Podcasts of All Time

7 Movies Depicting a “Perfect” Murder

Girl in the Picture review – the scale of the true-crime monstrosity will leave you reeling

All Agents Defect: Espionage in the Films of David Cronenberg

‘Almost mythical’ Michael Flatley thriller Blackbird gets September release; Lord of the Dance star ‘thrilled’ self-financed film finally being released four years after premiere

The ‘Butcher of Delhi’ Was One of the Most Savage Serial Killers in History. A New Netflix Series Dives Into His Twisted Mind.

‘Noir Alley’ host celebrates cinema’s double crosses and doomed characters

Tony Sirico Used to Direct His Sopranos Castmates, Whether They Liked It or Not

Is Christopher Nolan’s ‘Insomnia’ a Successful Remake?

Two Drivers Shooting at Each Other Crash Into Chicago Set of FX’s ‘Justified: City Primeval’

8 International Podcasts To Listen to This Summer

The HBO True Crime Series That Starts With an Exoneration—Then Gets Really Interesting

Five of the Best Unexpected Crime Movies of All-Time

Your Guide to the Best Crime Shows Coming Out This Month [published at the very end of July]

Deliverance at 50: a violent battle between urban and rural America

Jonathan Banks of ‘Better Call Saul’ explains Mike’s saving grace

Words of the Month

fiddlestick (n.): 15 C., originally “the bow of a fiddle,” from fiddle (n.) and stick (n.). Meaning “nonsense” (usually fiddlesticks) is from 1620s. As an exclamation, c. 1600.

RIP

July 1: Joe Turkel, the Bartender in ‘The Shining,’ Dies at 94

July 3: Novelist and former Guardian journalist Susie Steiner dies at 51

July 7: James Caan, Macho Leading Man of Hollywood, Dies at 82 [here’s a link to what we put up on the day of his death]

July 8: Tony Sirico, ‘The Sopranos’ Actor, Dies at 79

July 8: Larry Storch, Corporal Randolph Agarn on ‘F Troop,’ Dies at 99

July 9: L.Q. Jones, ‘Wild Bunch’ Actor and Member of Peckinpah’s Posse, Dies at 94

July 11: Bond theme composer Monty Norman dies aged 94

July 12: Frederick Nolan, thriller writer and publisher who became an authority on the American old west and Billy the Kid, was 91

July 21: Taurean Blacque, Det. Neal Washington on ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 82 [let’s be careful out there!]

July 23: William Richert, Writer-Director of ‘Winter Kills,’ Dies at 79

July 24: Bob Rafelson, Director of ‘Five Easy Pieces’ and Co-Creator of ‘The Monkees,’ Dies at 89

July 25: David Warner, Convincing Big-Screen Villain in ‘Time Bandits,’ ‘TRON’ and ‘Time After Time,’ investigator in ‘The Omen’, Dies at 80

July 25: Paul Sorvino, Actor in ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘That Championship Season,’ Dies at 83

July 27: Faye Marlowe, Actress in the Film Noir Classic ‘Hangover Square,’ Dies at 95

July 27: Stone Barrington novelist Stuart Woods dies at 84

July 28: Mary Alice, Actress in ‘Fences,’ ‘Sparkle’ and The Matrix Revolutions, Dies at 85

Links of Interest

July 3: Long-Lost Alexander Hamilton Letter to Marquis de Lafayette Discovered

July 5: Top secret D-Day map of Omaha Beach goes to Library of Congress.

July 9: Where Is Pete Panto? A union leader on the Brooklyn docks disappeared 81 years ago, presumably murdered by the mob.

July 12: Bombs, blackmail and wire-taps: how I spent my childhood on the run from the FBI

July 13: Prisoners of their own device? Men accused over theft of Hotel California manuscript

July 14: Man exonerated in Malcom X murder sues New York City for $40m

July 14: Roman Polanski rape case testimony can be unsealed, prosecutor says

July 14: Ex–CIA Hacker Convicted for ‘One of the Most Damaging Acts of Espionage in American History’

July 15: Mexico Captures Drug Lord Rafael Caro Quintero, Portrayed on ‘Narcos: Mexico’

July 15: New Report Shows Criminals Are Mixing Crypto Streams to Conceal Revenue

July 16: Crypto Founders Say It’s Not Their Fault They’re Enabling Ponzi Schemes

July 17: Millions in jewels stolen from armored truck outside LA

July 18: FBI Warns Fake Crypto Apps Are Stealing Millions

July 18: Inside the Stringer Bell Bandit’s Bank Heist Spree

July 19: Rhino Horns, Tiger Teeth and 6 Tonnes of Ivory Seized in $18M Record Bust

July 19: Italian police thwart illegal sale of Artemisia Gentileschi painting

July 19: ‘Law & Order: Organized Crime’ Crew Member Shot & Killed On Set Of NBC Drama

July 20: A discarded coffee cup may have just helped crack this decades-old murder case

July 20: How Professor Maynard Burned Down – The criminologist on trial for serial arson.

July 20: Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, wanted for questioning over real-life killing

July 21: Thieves stole ‘Precious Blood’ relic. It reemerged at detective’s door.

?July 22: Rays’ Wander Franco Has $650K Worth of Jewelry Stolen from Car in Hotel Parking Lot [pardon the editorializing, but who needs that much jewelry, and who is dumb enough to leave it in a car?!?!?!]

July 22: Three Picasso artworks discovered in three months

July 22: A German Woman Turned Herself in for a Brazen Art Theft, but Claims She Lost the Painting

July 23: Woman sentenced to prison for collecting $400,000 in viral GoFundMe scam

July 25: Former GOP Congressman Made Hundreds of Thousands Off Insider Trading Scheme, Feds Say

July 25: She seemed like an elderly Sacramento landlady. Dorothea Puente was actually a serial killer.

July 25: French Authorities Detain Two Archaeologists, Including a Louvre Curator, as Part of an Ongoing International Art-Trafficking Dragnet

?July 25: NYPD: Preacher, Wife Robbed of $1M in Jewelry During Sermon [see July 22 – same questions]

July 27: KGB Photo Deepens Mystery of Texas Couple Who Stole Dead Babies’ Identities, Feds Say

July 27: Anti-Vaxxers Looking for Love Had Their Data Exposed

July 27: Third set of human remains found at Lake Mead amid drought, National Park Service says

July 28: Father of JonBenet Ramsey is pushing for new DNA testing

?July 29: Brooklyn Pastor Robbed of $1 Million in Jewelry Accused of Plundering Congregant’s $90,000 Retirement Fund [now watch – the crime reader in us wonders if he staged the robbery to collect on the insurance?]

July 29: California court upholds death penalty for notorious serial killer Charles Ng

Words of the Month

falderol (n.)also falderal, falderall, folderol, etc., 18th C. nonsense words from refrains of songs; meaning “gewgaw, trifle” is attested from 1820.

What We’ve Been Up To

Amber

A Bride’s Guide to Marriage and Murder — Dianne Freeman

Familiarity breeds contempt…and when it’s your family?

Well…..

Things can get explosive.

And explode they do (though not literally). When a murder, accusations of infidelity, thugs, and rivalries all come to a head at and after France and George’s much-anticipated wedding.

Seriously, if your looking for a light-hearted historical murder mystery that never takes itself too seriously — the Countess of Harleigh Mystery series is the one for you! Freeman does an excellent job of blending the time period, manners, and societal rules into an excessively readable mystery.

What I love the most about the Countess of Harleigh Mysteries (BTW – Frances is said Countess) is their funny. Not a slap you on the back hardy-har-har kind but wry, sly, and observational humor that one can relate to – especially if you’ve ever tried planning a wedding with the “help” of your family and/or in-laws.

Now, you don’t need to read them in order….However, there are only four predecessors, so starting at numero uno, A Lady’s Guide To Etiquette and Murder isn’t too much of a stretch, and hopefully, you’ll laugh (or at least smile) as much as I did whilst turning the pages.

Fran

Okay, so hear me out

I don’t have a review, but I have a really good explanation. A couple of ’em, if I’m being honest. And one is legit book stuff!

The mother of a dear friend of mine passed away, and she lived near me. Her son and his wife, both of whom are great friends of mine, asked me to assess her books to see if there was anything worthwhile in there. We all figured probably not, but hey, you never know, right? And she was a pack rat, as was her late husband, so treasures were possible.

There were a couple of catches. One was that she lived near where we had originally moved to in New Mexico, which is now an hour away from where I now live, but is certainly much closer than the five hours away where Bill and Kate live. I have time and am certainly willing to help, so that was just a minor thing.

The bigger issue is that, while I’m pretty good at mysteries, I’m not so well versed at Southwestern history.

Like not at all. And it’s been educational.

There have been books, and pamphlets, and cookbooks, and all manner of things. Including Hillermans and Jances, which were easy enough. But mostly it was Southwestern stuff.

Boxes and boxes of books. It’s kept me busy, and it’s been immense fun.

But that’s why I haven’t reviewed anything.

Well, that and the fact that I’ve been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. But that’s not really a good reason. Assessing books, however, really is.

I’m going to try to have a review next month, but I’m planning on putting these books up for sale, and honestly, that may take a lot of time, so we’ll see what next month brings.

Oh, but it’s exciting!

After catching up on my Haller, Bosch, and Ballard, I picked up another from my always growing To Be Read Pile – Stephen Hunter’s Game of Snipers from 2019. Burned through it in two days, as one does with a thriller of this quality (please note I chose to not writer “of this calibre”. Swagger books are reliable fun. I don’t know about anyone else, but I skip over the nitty-gritty details of the guns in play and stick with the action. This one is as if one put the Day of the Jackal in the US with Swagger part of the team hunting the sniper. And thanks to David G. for keeping me supplied!

We’ve been watching a number of series that I’d recommend: “Dark Wind”, the adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s The Listening Woman, “Reservation Dogs”, “Obi-Wan Kenobi” with a wonderfully guilt-ridden Obi-Wan, “DB Cooper Where Are You”, and “Under the Banner of Heaven”. After watching that, I bought a copy of Jon Krakauer’s book on which it was based and burned through it. First of all, the series is quite accurate when it says “inspired” by the book. While the series is a good police procedural, it is largely fiction. Written in 2003, it is a deep dive into the Mormon faith and the fundamentalist offshoots. True it does center around a vicious double murder but it really is about people blinded by their faith and incapable or unwilling to look at the real world before them. While Krakauer does make a few faint parallels to Isis and other foreign “tribes”, the book felt more relevant to me when matched to Trumpism, and the true believers who know that they know to be truth and everyone else is just wrong.

This being the 50th Anniversary year of Watergate, I’ve read four books on that “event”- that period is better. In 2012, Lamar Waldron released his mammoth, 808 page Watergate: The Hidden History. It’s a deep dive into the subject. Then, in 2013 came Phil Stanford’s slim trade paperback White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story. Earlier this year, Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History was released. It was just under the page count of Waldron’s. I wrote about both of those in an earlier newzine. [If you want to read just one, read Waldron’s. And then read Graff’s!]

Now, what I expect to be the last “major” book on Watergate (at least this year) is out: Jefferson Morley’s Scorpion’s Dance. I’d looked forward to this, as I thought his book on James Jesus Angleton, The Ghost, was quite good. But I found this book focusing on the lethal dance between President Nixon and CIA Chief Richard Helms to be oddly light. I suppose I was expecting something of the heft of Waldron’s or Graff’s and I found it short on depth. For instance, during the heat of August 1973, he glides over the details of the Saturday Night Massacre in one small paragraph and doesn’t use that weighted term. I certainly followed along because I knew the details and was hoping for new revelations. There was little of it. I would not recommend this to someone not familiar with that crucial and sordid history.

Yet there were a few bits new to me that I found interesting:

~ After his arrest, James McCord directed his wife and a neighbor, who was also a CIA officer, to burn papers and copies of transcripts of the DNC wiretaps. The damper in the fire place was closed, they filled the house with smoke, and had to explain what was going on to the fire department.

~ He never points to a specific rationale for the Watergate break-ins, but does repeatedly write about the salacious recordings that the bugs provided. It is the supposition of some – like Stanford – that a call girl ring was being run out of the DNC office and the bugs were to get dirt on the Dems. Indeed, the office of Larry O’Brien, the head of the DNC, never was bugged.

~Helms quoted a Nixonian threat as having a “devious, hard-nosed smell”

~ Sometimes it is just the way he phrases things: “In this perilous situation, Helms had one advantage that Nixon did not. For the president, it was illegal to conceal of destroy material evidence, suborn witnesses, or dissemble to law enforcement. Helms, not so much… As CIA director, Helms had discretion to hide certain activities from law enforcement. As the duly sworn president, Nixon did not. And that would make all the difference in determining who would fall first.”

~ I had not known that like JFK, LBJ, and Nixon, Helms had recording equipment in his office. Those recordings and transcripts were destroyed damn fast. Likewise, the day after Nixon’s resignation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been recording and transcribing their meetings since the end of WWII, destroyed all of those records.

~ After his fall, Helms was stunned by how Washington had deserted him. “‘ It was unthinkable that the Establishment would turn against Dick Helms’… He could not understand with all these powerful friends and with all these connections and with all these people who he had helped and become socially close to them and that retained positions of influence and power, that this could nonetheless be done to him…” This brought to mind the disbelief in the intelligence world after Philby defected to the Soviets. He was one of them, he was from their schools, they socialized and ate dinner and drank in the same clubs – this “Old Boy” network was the rot at the center of the post-war Free World. Those who belonged to it were deluded and took us down with them.

~ At Helms’ sentencing, the judge threw down the wrath of the bench at him: “If public officials embark deliberately on a course to disobey and ignore the laws of our land because of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and belief that there are earlier commitments and considerations which they must first observe, the future of our country is in jeopardy.”

What would that Judge, Barrington Parker, an African-American Republican appointed by Nixon, think of January 6th and The Big Lie that won’t die????

BUY SMALL ~ SUPPORT SMALL

Summertime Reading Choices

“Listen, kid, it’s summer. We can read Grisham or we can read Koontz.”
newyorker.com. cartoon of the day, July 21, 2022

Addio, Shalom, and Thanks

For James Edmund Caan, born in NYC on March 26, 1940

For “Brian’s Song”, El Dorado, Thief, The Godfather, Rollerball, Misery, Cinderella Libery, The Killer Elite, Comes a Horseman, A Bridge Too Far, Gardens of Stone, Alien Nation, Eraser, “Poodle Springs”, and, of course, Elf.

Died on July 6, 2022, age 82, in Los Angeles

July 2022

Independent booksellers grew in number, diversity in 2021

One in Five Americans Struggles to Read. We Want to Understand Why.

Words of the Month

dame (n.): c. 1200, “a mother,” also “a woman of rank or high social position; superior of a convent,” and an address for a woman of rank or position, used respectfully to other ladies, from Old French dame “lady, mistress, wife,” from Late Latin domna, from Latin domina “lady, mistress of the house,” from Latin domus “house” (from PIE root *dem– “house, household”). From early 14th C. as “a woman” in general, particularly a mature or married woman or the mistress of a household. Used in Middle English with personifications (Study, Avarice, Fortune, Richesse, Nature, Misericordie). In later use the legal title for the wife of a knight or baronet.

Slang sense of “woman” in the broadest sense, without regard to rank or anything else, is attested by 1902 in American English.

We got sunlight on the sand, We got moonlight on the sea

We got mangoes and bananas, You can pick right off the tree

We got volleyball and ping-pong, And lots of dandy games

What ain’t we got? We ain’t got dames!

Richard Rodgers, “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” 1949 (etymonline)

It’s a tricky thing to suss out who is awarded what each year when Buckingham Palace releases The Gazette. For those of us who don’t follow it, the initials attached to the various awards are as confusing as the bureaus outta DC. OBE? GBE? DBE?

We bring this up after the news that Ian Rankin is now SIR Ian Rankin. We could remember Dame Agatha and Dame Phyllis, and Sir Arthur, but who else? This sent us off on a quest for answers – and then we ran into the three-letter question.

To be given Sir or Dame, one must be a subject of the Queen. Hitchcock was born in England, as was Bob Hope, and Sidney Poitier was born in Jamaica, so they all were knighted. Spielberg is an honorary knight, as was Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Dames and Sirs are, or have been, awarded GBE, KBE, or DBE. If you want to know what the difference is, well do your own investigation. It’s pretty simple.

Sir Ian joins a healthy list of authors: Antonia Fraser, Hilary Mantel, Salmon Rushdie, Kingsley Amis, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, PG Wodehouse, JRR Tolkein, and Jorge Louis Borges, to name some in no particular order. Not many mystery or crime writers that we found right off.

A healthy list of writers declined the “honors”: CS Lewis, Roald Dahl, Aldus Huxley, Robert Graves, JB Priestly, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Rudyard Kipling.

There are names that aren’t on any list. For instance AA Milne… Anyway –

Congratulations to Sir Ian, a great writer and a nice guy!

Words of the Month

knight (n.) Old English cniht “boy, youth; servant, attendant,” a word common to the nearby Germanic languages (Old Frisian kniucht, Dutch knecht, Middle High German kneht “boy, youth, lad,” German Knecht “servant, bondman, vassal”), of unknown origin. For pronunciation, see kn–. The plural in Middle English sometimes was knighten.

Meaning “military follower of a king or other superior” is from c. 1100. It began to be used in a specific military sense in the Hundred Years War, and gradually rose in importance until it became a rank in the nobility from 16th C. Hence in modern British use, a social privilege or honorary dignity conferred by a sovereign as a reward, without regard for birth or deeds at arms. In 17thc.-19thc. a common jocularism was to call a craftsman or tradesman a knight of the and name some object associated with his work; e.g. knight of the brush for “painter.” Knight in shining armor in the figurative sense is from 1917, from the man who rescues the damsel in distress in romantic dramas (perhaps especially “Lohengrin”). For knight-errant, see errant.

The horse-headed chess piece so called from mid-15thc. Knights of Columbus, society of Catholic men, founded 1882 in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.; Knights of Labor, trade union association, founded in Philadelphia, 1869; Knights of Pythias, secret order, founded in Washington, 1864. (etymonline)

For your Summer plans –

Top 10 novels about things that go horribly wrong on islands

Classy Stuff

Russian Journalist to Auction Nobel Medal to Benefit Ukraine

Nobel sold for Ukrainian kids shatters record at $103.5M

Serious Stuff

They were killers with powerful guns. The president went after their weapons.

>The Group Banning LGBT Books Wants to Replace Them With Anti-Gay Propaganda

>Long Island library board comes to its senses and reverses ban on children’s Pride displays.

>First they came for queer story time… And what did you do?

>This right wing religious website is telling readers to ruin LGBQT+ library displays.

>A South Dakota school district planned to destroy Dave Eggers’s novel. He went to investigate

=Perspective | Why the press will never have another Watergate moment

=During Watergate, John Mitchell left his wife – so she called Bob Woodward

=Woodward and Bernstein thought Nixon defined corruption. Then came Trump.

=How ‘All the President’s Men’ went from buddy flick to masterpiece

=How Martha Mitchell’s firing of a bodyguard spurred Watergate scandal

=Why ‘The Watergate Three’ Are Remembered as a Duo

=Watergate Still Holds Secrets, Even After 50 Years

=The Target of the First Watergate Burglary Still Wonders: ‘Why Me?’

=How the CIA’s Cuba Debacles Brought the Future Watergate Conspirators Together

=Watergate at 50: Revelations From New Declassified Evidence

=He discovered the Watergate break-in, then died destitute and forgotten

=Opinion: What the Nixon pardon tells us about the perils of letting Trump walk

Michigan prisons have banned dictionaries in the “obscure” languages of Swahili and Spanish.

Suspected murderer of Wisconsin judge had hit list including Mitch McConnell

Blake Masters Blames Gun Violence on ‘Black People, Frankly’

‘I’m Not Jumping in’: Arizona Cops on Leave for Standing by as a Man Drowned

Massive Internet Identity Theft Marketplace Shut Down by Feds

Specialist gang ‘targeting’ Ukrainian treasures for removal to Russia

How a Tulsa grandmother became a vicious Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist—in her own words.

Google Says It Bans Gun Ads. It Actually Makes Money From Them.

Kurt Vonnegut Museum Is Giving Florida 1,000 Copies of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Amid Ban Effort

After 91 years, Black teen exonerated by defense lawyer’s great-grandson

What drove some to resist Hitler — and others to stay quiet

Discovery of 1955 warrant in Emmett Till’s murder sparks calls for arrest

Feds Find ‘Significant Justification’ to Investigate NYPD’s Sex Crimes Unit

Words of the Month

excrescence (n.): early 15c., “action of growing out,” from Latin excrescentia (plural) “abnormal growths,” from excrescentem (nominative excrescens), present participle of excrescere “grow out, grow up,” from ex “out” (see ex-) + crescere “to grow” (from PIE root *ker- (2) “to grow”). Meaning “that which grows out abnormally” (on a living thing) is from 1570s (excrescency in this sense is 1540s). (etymonline)

Local Stuff

Elliott Bay Book Co. sold to longtime manager, Capitol Hill bar and business owners

White supremacism, WA ties, death threats: What to know about Patriot Front arrests near Idaho pride event

Out West, we know the right-wing extremist threat just keeps rising

How A Break-In and A Blizzard Shaped April Henry’s New Mystery

From vacation reads to picks for locals, Vashon Bookshop serves an island’s literary needs

Spokane author Jess Walter on writing short stories, his working-class roots and his hometown

Oregon School’s Ridiculous Battle Over ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Ends With Book Ban

Ransomware attacks increasing in Oregon, nationwide, FBI says

~ Samantha Allen on Writing the Sasquatch Slasher Novel the World Needs Right Now

~ Why Samantha Allen Wrote A Lesbian Sasquatch Novel

Odd Stuff

This Hacker Group Forces People to Do Good to Get Their Data Back

*Attempted Reagan Assassin John Hinckley Jr. To Play Brooklyn Concert

*John Hinckley’s Sold-Out Brooklyn Concert Is Canceled

Eleven members of Rome-based mafia clan face trial over electricity theft

Accused Murderer’s Defense Says Cough Syrup Made Her Run a Woman Over

Minor Literature: Kafka’s Drawings

Cupcake Mogul Led a Wild Double Life Using Dead Baby’s Identity, Feds Say

Denied his high school diploma over a book fine in 1962, he finally walked the stage

Find your next great literary insult in Nabokov’s burn book.

Frederick Douglass Books, a new imprint, will publish nonfiction by writers of color.

One of the country’s oldest Black-owned bookstores is closing.

The sad-sack, fascist Proud Boys have sunk to a new low: storming a library story time.

?James Patterson claims White male writers face ‘another form of racism’

!Author James Patterson apologizes for saying white male writers face ‘another form of racism’

Dog uncovers ‘fugitive Dutch pedophile’s’ child abuse stash and hidden cellphone among ‘rancid’ laundry in dingy Mexico apartment after sniffing out electronics during police raid

Simon & Schuster Will Distribute Jan. 6 Report With Foreword by Conspiracy Theorist

How Jean-Paul Sartre’s relentless pranking forced his teacher to resign

You Could Win This Drug Lord Mansion in Mexico City for $10

Cousins receive mystery postcards sent decades ago: ‘I was stunned’

A Drug Lord Who ‘Died’ of COVID Last Year Was Just Arrested in Europe

Words of the Month

peep (v.1): “to glance, look from a state of concealment” (especially through or as through a small or narrow opening), mid-15th C., pepen, perhaps an alteration of Middle English piken (see peek (v.)). Hence, “to come partially into view, begin to appear” (1530s). Peeping Tom “a curious prying fellow” [Grose] is from 1796. (etymonline)

SPECTRE

Amazon employees protested its Pride event over its sale of anti-trans books.

Authors are protesting Amazon’s e-book policy that allows users to read and return

Amazon restricts LGBT goods in United Arab Emirates

Words of the Month

vote (n): mid-15th C., “formal expression of one’s wish or choice with regard to a proposal, candidate, etc.,” from Latin votum “a vow, wish, promise to a god, solemn pledge, dedication,” noun use of neuter of votus, past participle of vovere “to promise, dedicate” (see vow (n.)). Meaning “totality of voters of a certain class or type” is from 1888.

Awards

Kalani Pickhart has won the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

George Chauncey has won the Kluge Prize for his work in LGBTQ history

Miles Franklin 2022: shortlist revealed for Australia’s prestigious literary prize

Book Stuff

10 Years Later, Gone Girl Is Ripe for a Sequel

20 Famous Writers on Being Rejected

Martin Edwards: My Life In Crime

Shop Talk: Lisa Unger on Waking Up Early, Carving Out Time, and Writing Longhand in the Target Parking Lot

How Agatha Christie’s Deep Respect for Science Helped Her Mysteries Stand the Test of Time

We’re Living in a Golden Age of Australian Crime and Mystery Television

Former Hong Kong journalists open independent bookstore Have a Nice Stay for those who remain amid emigration wave

James Patterson shares his formula for success. It’s pretty simple.

Here are the guest editors for the Best American Series 2022. (see the choice for mystery and suspense!)

Cornell Woolrich, the Dark Prince of Noir

The Disposable Spy: Or, How To Get Away With Revealing Agency Secrets In a Novel

It took a Hundred Years and Two Gays to Decode Her Diaries

The Only Surviving Manuscript of ‘Paradise Lost’

The best independent bookstores in the US [see 1 and 6]

The book that tore publishing apart: ‘Harm has been done, and now everyone’s afraid’

A Newly Discovered Céline Novel Creates a Stir

The Schomburg Center Literary Festival Makes Its Return to Harlem

NY Public Library Is Giving Away 500,000 Free Books This Summer

Inside the Push to Diversify the Book Business

Interview with an Indie Press: Seagull Books

Death Goes Drag: How the Queer Experiences of Mystery Writers Rufus King and Clifford Orr Influenced Their Golden Age Detective Fiction

Be gay, read books: Aesop’s free Queer Library is back

Five independent bookshops you need to visit in Scotland

‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ celebrates 25 magical years

Book bombs: Trump aide tell-alls fail to sell

San Francisco Art Book Fair Returns After a Two-Year Break

Check out a cool new guide to indie bookstores on the West coast.

Author Events (in person)

July 6: Jess Walter signs The Angel of Rome and Other Stories, Powell’s 7pm

July 7: Daniel Nieh signs Take No Names, Powell’s, 7pm

Words of the Month

sufferage (n): late 14th C., “intercessory prayers or pleas on behalf of another,” from Old French sofrage “plea, intercession” (13th C.) and directly from Medieval Latin suffragium, from Latin suffragium “support, ballot, vote; right of voting; a voting tablet,” from suffragari “lend support, vote for someone,” conjectured to be a compound of sub “under” (see sub-) + fragor “crash, din, shouts (as of approval),” related to frangere “to break” (from PIE root *bhreg– “to break”). On another theory (Watkins, etc.) the second element is frangere itself and the notion is “use a broken piece of tile as a ballot” (compare ostracism).

The meaning “a vote for or against anything” is from 1530s. The meaning “political right to vote” in English is first found in the U.S. Constitution, 1787. (etymonline)

Other Forms of Entertainment

>‘The Wire’ at 20: ‘This Show Will Live Forever’: David Simon and Edward Burns

>‘The Wire’ Stands Alone

>‘Reality Never Gives You the Perfect Narrative’. In ‘We Own This City’, David Simon and George Pelecanos argue police corruption has never been worse.

>‘The Wire’ in Five Scenes

‘I thought I looked beautiful’ – how we made ‘The Incredible Hulk’

Jon Hamm, Juno Temple, Jennifer Jason Leigh to Lead ‘Fargo’ Season 5 at FX

Film Noirs ‘The Guilty’ and ‘High Tide’ Have Strong Literary Roots

The Old Guard 2 Adds Some Ex-Superheroes to Its Immortal Cast

+‘Dark Winds’: A Pulpy Mystery That Makes Native Characters the Stars of Their Own Story

+‘Dark Winds’ Review: Murder Most Foul in the Navajo Nation

‘The Staircase’ Subject Michael Peterson Addresses HBO Show

The Staircase: For Michael Peterson and Daughter Margaret, the Nightmare Continues With HBO Max

46 Things We Learned from Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Out of Sight’ Commentary

An exclusive first look at the new Netflix true crime documentary, Girl in the Picture

The Story of Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, and Quite Possibly the Strangest American Crime Film of the 1970s

She played Scout in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Now she’s got a new role.

‘The Old Man’ Brought Jeff Bridges to TV. John Lithgow Had No Advice. c

Heat: Robert De Niro and Al Pacino reunite to discuss their hit thriller

Norman Lloyd, King of the Hitchcock Collaborators

10 Conspiracy Thrillers for the Truly Paranoid (movies, that is…)

The Wild History of the Real ‘Only Murders’ Building

+From “Fargo” to “Dark Winds,” Zahn McClarnon keeps perfecting his art – but don’t call him an artist

Knives Out 2 has a title and a release date!

David Mamet To Direct ‘2 Days/1963’ Drama On Sam Giancana’s Role In JFK Assassination, From Script By Mobster’s Grandnephew Nicholas Celozzi

007=’

Ian Fleming’s lost James Bond screenplay reveals a very different 007

James Bond star Naomie Harris backs Chiwetel Ejiofor to play 007

America’s very own 00-FELON! Disastrous tale of CIA agent who was hired to write James Bond-style novels in a bid to revive agency’s terrible reputation – but ended up a sensational flop before being ARRESTED for involvement in Watergate

Ralph Fiennes Almost Became James Bond Before Bossing Daniel Craig Around

Words of the Month

boggart (n.) also boggard, specter, goblin, sprite,” especially one supposed to haunt a particular spot, 1560s; see bug (n.). (etymonline)

RIP

June 1: David C. MacMichael, C.I.A. Whistleblower, Dies at 95

June 2: Barry Sussman, Washington Post editor who oversaw Watergate reporting, dies at 87

June 13: Philip Baker Hall, the Library Cop Lt. Bookman on ‘Seinfeld,’ Zodiac, Hard Eight, Dies at 90

June 13: Baxter Black, cowboy poet and ‘Morning Edition’ commentator, dies at 77

June 14: George Weyerhaeuser Sr., timber company scion who was kidnapped as a child, dies at 95

June 17: Legendary Comic Artist Tim Sale Has Died

June 30: Sonny Barger Dies: Hells Angels Founder, ‘Sons Of Anarchy’ Actor & Rolling Stones Nemesis Was 83

Links of Interest

June 1: Myths surround ‘Untouchable’ lawman Eliot Ness. What’s the truth?

June 3: A U.S. murder suspect fled to Mexico. The Gringo Hunters were waiting.

+June 3: Lakota elders helped a white man preserve their language. Then he tried to sell it back to them.

June 4: Suspect in Litvinenko poisoning dies in Moscow, TASS reports

June 4: How Can People Fall Asleep To True Crime Shows And Podcasts?

+June 6: Puzzle Monday: Secrets of the Original Code-Talkers

June 6: The Mystery of a Billionaire’s Wife’s Disappearance May Turn on ‘Crypto Lead’

June 7: Decentralized Crypto Exchange Offline After Hacker Steals $113M

June 8: Woman Arrested for Murdering Boyfriend After Tracking Him With Apple AirTag

June 8: True the Vote Raised Millions to Combat Voter Fraud—But No One Really Knows Where the Money Went

June 9: The missing daughter of a slain Texas couple has been found alive more than 4 decades later

June 9: Florida man got $4.5 million from COVID-19 PPP fraud, then lost $3 million — and freedom

June 10: The greatest work in English literature: Shakespeare First Folio expected to fetch $2.5m at auction

June 11: Jack Vettriano reveals new muses inspired him to paint again

June 14: A brother’s 36-year fight against one of New Zealand’s worst miscarriages of justice

June 16: Rescued Art Museum: Stolen artefacts recovered by police go on display in Rome

June 17: The Reply Guy From Hell – For almost two decades, this man terrorized women online. Then they decided to band together.

June 17: Ex-Amazon worker convicted in massive Capital One hack

June 20: ‘Master of Disguise’ on the Run After Mexican Authorities Find Girlfriend’s Remains

June 20: How Paintings Lost in a Small-Town Art Heist Were Recovered 50 Years Later

June 21: Alcatraz Escapees, Now in Their 90s, STILL Sought by U.S. Marshals Wielding Digitally Aged Images of Fugitives

June 21: Scientist turned bumbling Miami spy for Russia gets 4 years in cloak-and-dagger caper

June 22: Bill Cosby Sexually Assaulted a Teen at Playboy Mansion, Civil Jury Finds

June 24: Dutch mobster Willem Holleeder sentenced to life in prison over contract killings

June 24: Contractor Loses USB Drive Holding an Entire City’s Personal Details During Drunken Night Out

June 26: How a Detective Helped Nail the Torso Killer—From the Grave

June 27: Subway worker allegedly shot, killed over ‘too much mayonnaise’ on customer’s sandwich

June 28: Biotech Wizard Left a Trail of Fraud—Prosecutors Allege It Ended in
Murder

June 28: Ghislaine Maxwell sentenced to 20 years for ‘horrific’ sex trafficking

June 29: R&B singer R. Kelly sentenced to 30 years in prison

June 29: Jamie Bartlett on the Biggest Crypto Scam of All and the Heartless Bulgarian Cryptoqueen Behind It

June 30: Researchers Blame North Korea for $100 Million Horizon Bridge Cryptocurrency Theft Amid ‘Global Manhunt’

Words of the Month

boggle (v.): From the 1590s, “to start with fright (as a startled horse does), shy, take alarm,” from Middle English bugge “specter” (among other things, supposed to scare horses at night); see bug (n.); also compare bogey (n.1), boggart. The meaning ” hesitate, stop as if afraid to proceed in fear of unforeseen difficulties” is from 1630s; that of “confound, cause to hesitate” is from 1640s. As a noun from 1650s. Related: Boggled; boggling; boggler (from c. 1600 as “one who hesitates”). (etymonline)

What We’ve Been Up To

Amber

Aunt Dimity & the Enchanted Cottage — Nancy Atherton

Once again, residents are plunging gleefully into Finch’s semi-regular ritual called the Moving-Van Vigil. Never heard of the tradition? Well, it’s where Finch villagers stake out a newly rented cottage and try to deduce who the newcomer is by the possessions as they’re moved from van to house….or what they can extrapolate from the labels on the cardboard boxes.

When the movers finish hauling their last box, the villagers disperse and chew over their tentative conclusions for three full days, thereby giving their new neighbor breathing space to get the cottage in some semblance of order. Then they descend en masse, casserole dishes in hand, to welcome the latest addition to Finch’s thriving village life.

Violators of this rule are given the hairy eyeball, publicly snubbed, and met with stony silence.

Lori and Tommy are willing to face the consequences when they witness Mr. Windle (the latest unwitting participant of this nosey tradition) in a moment of extreme melancholy, whereupon the two start worrying that the newest addition to Finch means to do himself harm….

Aunt Dimity & the Enchanted Cottage is an excellent addition to the series! It shows Finch and its penchant for nosiness at its very best. Demonstrating how a community bands together to ensure one of its’ own stays safe and remember those who earlier inhabitants failed.

I would recommend The Enchanted Cottage to anyone who loves this series and/or to anyone who needs a lovely light mystery to escape the never-ending bad news cycle.

Now, all that being said — there is one essential detail to keep in mind….Do Not Read the synopsis on the front fly-leaf.

I’m serious.

Whoever wrote it did this book and the Residents of Finch a great disservice. First, this anonymous person in the publishing house made it sound as if the villagers completely dismissed Mr. Windle for rebuffing their advances of friendship. Now, anyone who knows anything about Finch KNOWS this would never happen. Especially if they think someone needs help.

Second, this unknown synopsis writer gives away a major plot point in the mystery. I mean…who does that? Albeit when you read the summary, you wouldn’t know, but the moment you start the book? It doesn’t take long to figure out that this faceless writer both told the truth about the mystery and misled you simultaneously.

If you can, take my word that Aunt Dimity & the Enchanted Cottage is a well-written, captivating entry in this murderless mystery series and is well worth your reading time.

Fran

Stories need to be told.

“Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for a chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They would take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David’s mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.“

John Connolly wrote that in the first few pages of his amazing book, THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, back in 2006. It was true then, and it’s true now.

If you haven’t read THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, first of all, you’re missing out on a classic fairy tale, not one that’s been Disney-fied but the truly grim ones, the real ones. Mind you, there’s laugh-out-loud moments to be found, but this is a dark tale for children and adults.

David, mentioned above, loves the old fairy tales, and found refuge in them when his mother died and his father remarried. World War II was breaking over London, and David goes to live in the country with his father and their new family. Isolated and lonely, David turns to books. But when a downed German plane crashes in the garden where David is exploring, a hole in the garden wall is the only potentially safe place David can go.

Except what’s on the other side of the wall isn’t the neighboring yard. It’s a world filled with all the stories he’s been reading, and unless he is very resourceful and quick, David could be stuck there. Forever.

I’ve told you about this book before, and it bears reinforcing my determination that you should read it, but that’s not the only reason I’m telling you to pick it up.

Here’s what John Connolly said in a recent newsletter:

For some time I’ve been working on a sequel to THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS. I never really thought I’d write a sequel to that book, although I have returned to the universe of it with some short stories over the years. Nevertheless, I’ve had recourse to re-read the original over the last decade or so: first to give it a gentle polish for the 10^th anniversary edition, and then, during lockdown, in order to write a film script based on it. (The script provided a way forward, I think, as well as indicating that there was too much material in the book for a two-hour film. The film company is now looking at it in terms of a possible television series, which would provide more scope for expansion, but I’ve done my bit as far as scripts for it are concerned.)

The polish for the anniversary edition, completed in 2016, probably provided the initial impetus, while the screenplay concretized some ideas I’d had. The result is that THE LAND OF LOST THINGS will be published in the autumn of either 2023 or 2024, but most likely the former. There’s some work to be done on it yet in terms of revision, but it’s coming into focus.

YAY! A film/series and a sequel? It doesn’t get better than that!

After watching the series “The Lincoln Lawyer”, I decided to go back to Michael Connelly’s series with Mickey Haller, Harry Bosch’s half-brother. I’d stopped reading that series after the second book in the series, The Brass Verdict, which is what the TV covered. 3rd was The Reversal – which features Bosch as working with Haller. The next in the series was temporarily out of print, so I spent the month catching up with Bosch, and the newest member of that universe, Renee Ballard: The Late Show, Dark Sacred Night, Night Fire, and the Dark Hours. What the hell – if you’re gonna do it, just go overboard! Ballard and Bocsh make a great team. Each of their joint books contain at least one cold case that takes takes up most of the book, and sprinkled in are Ballard’s Late Show cases that work like mini-short stories. It’s a fascinating way to craft a novel. Won’t be another Bosch and Ballard until early November, so not it is back to Haller and the fifth in that series, The Gods of Guilt.

Finally, a personal plea: if you’re not happy with the way the country is going, the way every American’s right to privacy has been eagerly stripped away by the minority, you must resolve to vote in EVERY election. Yes, presidential elections are crucial, but so are all the local and state elections. Don’t like gerrymandering? Vote! Don’t like what the schoolboard is doing? VOTE! Don’t like what your state legislators are doing, or the governor? VOTE! If you’re registered but don’t vote, you’ve helped those who removed your – our – rights. If you’re not registered – register and vote in every election. Because, as you can see, it matters… Protesting is good, showing numbers and raising voices is good. “A few weeks before his death in 1895, Douglass was asked what advice he would give to a young black American. ‘Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!’ the old man answered.”

Remember – Black MEN in America were theoretically given the right to vote in 1870 but that was not enforced – again, theoretically – until the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That now seems to be under threat in many forums. WOMEN in America were not allowed to vote until the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920! So, if you listen to Constitutional Originalists who want the things to return to what the Constitution said when it was written… ‘Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!’ and VOTE!

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Happy Birthday to a shop Favorite

Lawrence Block, born in Buffalo, NY, June 24, 1938