Rod Bramblett - Touchdown Auburn! (Book Review)

Just in time for the start of another college football season we have this memoir from Rod Bramblett.  As best I can remember, I'm not sure I knew who Rod was when he was named our football play-by-play after the untimely death of Jim Fyffe.

It turns out that he had been doing Auburn baseball for many years.  He was there when Auburn last went to the College World Series in '93 and '97.  The first part of the book deals with his baseball memories.  It's good to remember Frank Thomas and Tim Hudson.  They played in the days when we could barely keep up with Auburn baseball since there was no internet and no radio broadcasts heard in the Birmingham area.

He talks about the anguish of finally scoring our first touchdown of the 2003 season yelling "Touchdown Auburn!" to honor Jim Fyffe.  He speaks of our short-lived #2 ranking in 2006.  For some reason I do not remember that #2 ranking in '06.  Just how good was the 2004 team?  Could it have beaten USC?  Unfortunately we will never know.  He writes about the 2010 season of course. Will we ever see a football player like Cam again?  Basketball is still a promise with Coach Pearl.  I'm betting the best of Auburn basketball is yet to come.

Rod Bramblett is a good Auburn football man.

Wilder Playing Trump

I could see Gene Wilder playing Trump. Of course his hair would have to be downgraded, but I can see him correcting a mispronunciation, "That's Trump: T-R-U-M-P."
Breaking into song, "Make America great again la la la la la." With that big smile of his. But please, no cap. Maybe a Willy Wonka hat?

At This Point

At this point in time Clinton maintains her strong lead in national polls.  I predict that the poll gaps will close and that it will be a close race come November.  I gather that the Democrats have a realistic chance to retake the Senate.  There is talk of chances in the House, but I doubt that will happen.

Michael Fellman - Citizen Sherman (Book Review)

This is the third and best Sherman biography that I've read.  What stands out the most is the irony attached to this man.

His father named him Tecumseh after a great Indian chief.  Yet Sherman headed the army that exterminated Native American Indians in the West after the war.  He never had any use for these people considering them savages unable to assimilate into white society.  Either kill them or isolate them he said.

He failed as a banker though mostly due to forces beyond his control.  Yet his efforts both during and after the war with the building of the cross-country railroads led to banking domination of the country during the Guilded Age.

He was a family man though he spent about half of his married life apart from his wife Ellen.  Yet his beloved son Tom turned against him and became a Catholic priest.  His other son led a tough life and died in unfortunate circumstances in 1941.  Father Tom struggled and lived until 1933.

He was working in Baton Rouge and liked the South except for the few who led the South out of the Union after Lincoln was elected.  He did as much as anyone to destroy the slave states during the war. Yet before the war he considered settling in the South even in Northeast Alabama.  He thought the South made a mistake in seceding and things should have continued as before in the country after Lincoln was elected.   Slavery was not a moral problem in his mind.  He mellowed somewhat in his old age, but not much.

As he torched Atlanta and rampaged on to Savannah and up into the Carolinas he personally freed a lot of slaves, yet he had no use for them.  He got into trouble with the Secretary of War over his harsh attitude toward blacks.  In a time when "everyone" was racist, he was more racist than most.

As the war ended, he negotiated a generous treaty with Confederate General Johnston which was repudiated by the administration.  Ironic that Sherman destroyed the South in his last drive thru Georgia and South Carolina and yet was willing to let the South resume its place in the Union on generous terms.  He would have been happy to let slavery continue if that could be arranged.

He hated the press yet he must have enjoyed his notoriety from the press.  Surely his publicity boosted his considerable ego.

He always hated politics and politicians mainly because they wouldn't do what he thought should be done.  It was probably for the best that he was not nominated and therefore did not serve.

In LBJ's World

Living in L.B.J.’s America

Mortimer Jordan

Speaking of Huck Finn lighting out for the territories, I spent a horrifying time in Morris, Alabama, last night, attending a high school football game. We have territories locally. Have you ever been to Mortimer Jordan High School in the dead of night? Well, you haven't missed anything. It's dark and I kept listening for dueling banjos and watching for people with green teeth and dirty overalls and only one ear. Strange sounds coming from the woods. Not more than one or two street lights anywhere. I could have been captured, sold into slavery, and never heard from again. If it weren't for a kind Kimberley po-lice man, I might never have escaped before the light of day if then. I still got the shakes.

Racial Prejudice is in His DNA

How Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias

By JONATHAN MAHLER and STEVE EDER 11:51 AM ET

• As Donald J. Trump assumed an increasing role in his father’s business, the real estate company’s practice of turning away potential black tenants was painstakingly documented.
• An investigation by The New York Times uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.

The "Alt-Right" Talk

As far as I can tell, the so-called "alt-right" is just a restatement of white supremacy.  It's nothing new.

Talking to Strangers

How to Talk to Strangers

The health benefits are clear. The political benefits are newly relevant.

Nicolas Pollock / The Atlantic

 
 
 
 
 

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• JAMES HAMBLIN
 
•  2:54 PM ET
 
•  HEALTH

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Next time you enter an elevator, walk in and keep facing the back wall. If you stay that way, in my experience, people will laugh or ask if you’re okay. (That’s an opportunity, if you want, to say you would love for someone to define “okay.”)
Standing this way breaks unstated rules of how we’re supposed to behave in elevators. Detaching from expectations gives people an excuse to talk, to acknowledge one another’s humanity. Absent a break in the order, the expectation is silence.
(Of course, you can make a quick joke—my favorite is, if the elevator is stopping frequently, “What is this, the local train?”—and expect a modicum of laughter. But even if the joke goes over well, the rule seems to be that you can’t say it more than once in the same ride.)
The celebrated Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman saw elevators as microcosms of society. Described by the Times Literary Supplement as “a public private eye,” Goffman covertly studied people as they rode in elevators in 1963. He noted that the rule upon entering seemed to be to give some brief visual notice of other passengers, and then to withdraw attention, not making eye contact again at any point. (Though 35 percent of people added one or two glances to the initial look.)

Goffman called this civil inattention. That is, we act civilized toward one another—not harming anyone or blocking their paths or shouting in an enclosed space—but also not attentive. This goes on today, wherever people might be described as alone together.
“That’s the principle that’s operational when people aren’t talking to each other on the subway,” Kio Stark, the author of the forthcoming book When Strangers Meet, explained to me. “You can pretend you’re there by yourself.”
And this is good and necessary at times, especially in a city as bereft of solitude as New York. But it can be overdone. As Stark argues from the top of the book, “This if nothing else: Talking to strangers is good for you.”
Her work appealed to me because I’ve suggested as much in a mediocre piece called “Always Talk to Strangers.” That was based on a study that found that people who considered their neighbors to be friendly and trustworthy were less likely to have heart attacks. Other public-health research has shown improved moods among commuters who chat on the subway, and happiness and creativity among people who talk to strangers.
Kio Stark always has and does. She was born in a New York family and doesn’t think it’s rare. Her reasons are many, but among the most compelling is essentially boredom. She writes that a stranger-encounter is “an exquisite interruption” to whatever expectations you had about your day. Go to work, and you know who you’ll see. Hang out with friends, and you know what to expect. But engage with a stranger, and at least something interesting might happen.
“It’s not only about novelty,” she added when we spoke. “It’s about feeling connected to my block, my neighborhood.”
At a grander scale, in an increasingly polarized society, it can require concerted effort to break out of sociocultural strata and online algorithms that are constantly pairing us with like-minded people. (Don’t know anyone who’s voting for Trump? That’s on you.)
Beyond the promise of a unique and enlightening experience, there is also the little jolt of breaking a rule. Of course, not a rule rule, like harassment or assault, but an unstated social rule. It’s up to us to know when and how to break those rules in ways that don’t unduly offend or put other people out. That’s the hard part. So she suggests exercises to start. Figure out what makes you uncomfortable, and target ways to get over those. A good one for most people is just to do an exercise where you walk around your neighborhood and just say “hi” to everyone you see.

Once you’ve mastered that, try having an actual interaction (not necessarily a conversation). That usually works well by doing what Stark calls “triangulation.” That’s sociology-speak for remarking on something external to both you and the stranger—something you’re both experiencing or observing. Like the weather, but less boring. Commenting on a shared experience tends to be less confrontational than making a remark about the other person directly, however flattering (read: creepy).

Willing listeners and your correspondent in Prospect Park, Brooklyn (Nicolas Pollock / The Atlantic)

Once you’ve mastered saying hi and triangulating, Stark suggests advanced strategies like asking people profound existential questions, or getting lost in a neighborhood where you have to genuinely ask people for directions. And, before doing that, embrace the sensation of being “the stranger” who doesn’t belong. She describes that as “emotionally risky.”
So I didn’t try that one. But I did attempt some others, and you can watch them here in today’s captivating episode of If Our Bodies Could Talk.

If Our Bodies Could Talk

 

One fun behind-the-scenes fact is that I met a guy named Enrique in the park, and he was there practicing on his brand new, red guitar-kelele. (It’s barely larger than a ukelele, and has six strings like a guitar.) We chatted for a while, and I asked if I could play it. He kindly agreed. I played for a long time. I played all of “Stairway to Heaven.” I was sort of testing the waters of his politeness, which were apparently boundless. Anyway, we had to cut this footage because our legal team told us that someone already owns the performance rights to “Stairway to Heaven.”
Stark’s book is a 101 introduction to stranger engagement. It serves primarily to call attention to the profound implications of the art, at times uneasily high-minded for a 100-page primer, as with the opening line “How do you divide the world into known and unknown?”
That is, though, the question at the heart of this practice. Once we consider a person known, our behavior toward them changes entirely. We can emote and commiserate and learn and be ourselves.
When it comes to knowing people, that line is still often drawn at whether you’ve spoken to a person before. If you have, you know them. A significant threshold to be crossed with a simple act.

Michael Fellman - Citizen Sherman (3)

After conquering the CSA, Sherman turned his energies to conquering Indians in the West.

"Disease, slaughter of the buffalo, their economic base, and intrusion of white settlement, together with the extermination of their most warlike younger men, all were serving the eliminate the Indians.  The capstone, literally uniting the white surge, was, as Sherman always believed it would be, the railroad."  P. 274

Michael Fellman - Citizen Sherman (2)

Sherman is such an interesting 19th Century man.

The central paradox of General Sherman is that no one did more he did to win the war in one single campaign than when he torched Atlanta in 1864 and took Savannah in December of '64 to clinch Lincoln's reelection in November.  Yet after the war was won, he wanted to return control of the former slave states to the very men who left the Union and therefore brought on the war to start with because he hated blacks and did believe in giving them the vote or any other political rights.  He feared race-mixing.  Obviously he did not understand irony.

Sherman's beliefs are in full view for everybody who looks.

Rotten to the Core

"There is something rotten at the core of this man that no length of script or turn of phrase can ameliorate," Charles M. Blow writes in The New York Times Opinion Section.

Ineluctable Rules

There are certain ineluctable rules in life. I before E except after C. Nothing is sure but death and taxes. Both fish and visitors smell after three days. Add to that this new one: There is always something new to hang on Hillary, and Trump flipflops again.

David Cay Johnston - The Making of Donald Trump (Book Review)

David Cay Johnston is a respected investigative journalist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  He has followed Donald Trump since the 80's.  In this book he exposes Trump for the crook and scoundrel that he is.

Trump's father, Fred Trump, was notorious in New York for racism and shady business deals.  Donald learned from the master.  He inherited millions from his father.  His statement that he started with a million dollar "loan" from his father is absurd.

How anyone can read this book and even consider voting for Trump would astound me.

The author sized Trump when he first met him as a P.T. Barnum.  P. X

Trump has hid his lifelong connections with the mafia, drug traffickers, and assorted crooks very well.  P. XIII

German roots.  P. 3

Donald is utterly ignorant on just about everything.  P. 19

His greatest personal value is to always get even. Revenge is his lodestar.  He cannot accept any criticism.  He always has to strike back, and this has been true his entire life.   P. 25

His mentor was Roy Cohn, chief lawyer for Senator McCarthy.  P. 33

Trump says that Cohn once told him that he had spent more than two-thirds of his life under indictment for one thing or another.  P. 34

Trump's statements about his net worth over the years have varied so greatly that his word is worthless.  P. 77

It is documented that Trump would call reporters and pretend to be one of his associates and brag about himself, and he planted stories in the press about imaginary lovers.  P. 139

His casino record in New Jersey is so sleazy and scandalous.  How he gets away with it is amazing.
 P. 177

We can never fully know his character, but we can assess his actions, and with that conclude that Donald John Trump is a despicable and unethical person.  P. 206

Trump Knows Debt

From today's NY Times

ELECTION 2016

In Trump’s Empire, Hazy Ties and $650 Million in Debt

By SUSANNE CRAIG

• A Times investigation into the financial maze of Donald J. Trump’s real estate holdings in the United States reveals that companies he owns have at least $650 million in debt.
• That is nearly twice the amount apparent in his federal election filing

Michael Fellman - Citizen Sherman (1)

Fellman's Sherman comes alive.  This is the sharpest presentation of "Cump" yet.

Female Crime Fiction

Thomas Allen

 
 
 
 
 

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• TERRENCE RAFFERTY
 
•  JULY/AUGUST 2016 ISSUE
 
•  CULTURE

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• REVIEWS

  The Darkest Secret
  By Alex Marwood
  Penguin
• Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s
  By Sarah Weinman, Editor
  Library of America
• You Will Know Me
  By Megan Abbott
  Little, Brown
• The Secret Place
  By Tana French
  Penguin
• Woman With a Secret
  By Sophie Hannah
  William Morrow
• Hard Light
  By Elizabeth Hand
  Minotaur
• What Remains of Me
  By Alison Gaylin
  William Morrow

Once upon a time, in the smoky, violent neverland of crime fiction, there were seductive creatures we called femmes fatales, hard women who lured sad men to their doom. Now there are girls. It started, of course, with Gillian Flynn, whose 2012 suburban thriller, Gone Girl, told a cruel tale of marriage and murder and sold a zillion copies. The most striking thing about Flynn’s cool, clever mystery is the childishness of its main characters, Nick and Amy Dunne, the sheer pettiness of the deadly games they play with each other. And the prize for winning is something like a gold star from the teacher:Gone Girl takes place in a world in which grown-up girls—and boys—will kill for no better reason than self-validation. This is not a world Raymond Chandler would have recognized. On the streets his people walked, motives were more basic—money, sex—and means were more direct. “When in doubt,” he once told his genre brethren, “have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” When today’s crime writers are in doubt, they have a woman come through the door with a passive-aggressive zinger on her lips.

For those of us who choose to entertain ourselves, from time to time, with made-up stories of murder, mayhem, and deceit, this is actually a welcome development, because the men with guns don’t do their job nearly as well as they used to. They’re old, they’re getting tired of walking through those doors, and the heroes they used to threaten—lone-wolf private eyes like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe—have practically disappeared from the genre. Like the cowboy, the private eye once embodied male fantasies of rugged individualism. As individualism itself became a less sustainable concept, the popular imagination began to relocate its mythic figures to places farther and farther away from the real-world settings of the old West and the modern city (to, say, the Marvel universe).

I miss those tough guys, with their cigarettes and their hats, but I’ve learned to do without them. I’ve read crime fiction all my life, and like most mystery lovers, I don’t really have a type. As a young reader, I favored Sherlock Holmes stories and intricate puzzles of the Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr sort, then moved on to the grittier, bloodier private-eye stuff of Dashiell Hammett and Chandler and Ross Macdonald. In my baffled adulthood, I have found myself drawn, more and more, to the kind of dark, fatalistic psychological thriller that noir writers such as Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, and especially Patricia Highsmith brought into the world in the 1940s and ’50s—tales of people in impossible situations making catastrophically poor choices.

FROM OUR JULY/AUGUST 2016 ISSUE

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I do still go back every now and then to the eccentric sleuths inspecting corpses in locked rooms, or to the hard-boiled dicks walking down their mean streets, but only as an exercise in nostalgia. These days, just about all the exciting work in the murder-for-entertainment business descends not from Arthur Conan Doyle or Hammett but from Highsmith, who has had many more daughters than sons. A number of years ago—well beforeGone Girl—I realized that most of the new crime fiction I was enjoying had been written by women. The guys had been all but run off the field by a bunch of very crafty girls, coming at them from everywhere: America (Megan Abbott, Alison Gaylin, Laura Lippman), England (Alex Marwood, Paula Hawkins, Sophie Hannah), Scotland (Val McDermid, Denise Mina), Ireland (Tana French), Norway (Karin Fossum), Japan (Natsuo Kirino).

That’s not to say the guys are gone, or even going away anytime soon. Elmore Leonard has now left the building, but the lowlifes and criminal idiots who peopled his stories haven’t altogether vanished; George Pelecanos keeps an eye on them for us. And the aging police detectives of Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, and Michael Connelly are still, at their stately pace, finding ways to make their grim investigations pretty interesting. It’s a struggle, though. Male crime writers seem never to have fully recovered from the loss of the private eye as a viable protagonist, and men, for whatever reason (sports?), appear to need a hero of some kind to organize their stories around. Cops and lawyers and the odd freelance avenger (Lee Child’s Jack Reacher) are about all that’s left.

Penguin

The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence. Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others—lovers, neighbors, obsessive strangers—but the body counts tend to be on the low side. “I write about murder,” Tana French once said, “because it’s one of the great mysteries of the human heart: How can one human being deliberately take another one’s life away?” Sometimes, in the work of French and others, the lethal blow comes so quietly that it seems almost inadvertent, a thing that in the course of daily life just happens. Death, in these women’s books, is often chillingly casual, and unnervingly intimate. As a character in Alex Marwood’s brilliant new novel,The Darkest Secret, muses: “They’re not always creeping around with knives in dark alleyways. Most of them kill you from the inside out.”

Library of America

The awareness of that inside-out sort of violence sets the women writers apart, these days, from even the best of the men. Women’s murder tales have always been at least a little more psychologically acute than the guys’. Even in the so-called golden age of detective stories, the 1920s and ’30s, when the emphasis was on elaborate puzzles, the motivations of the culprits in Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were usually more plausible—and nastier—than they were in Carr or Rex Stout or Ellery Queen (a low bar, but still). Later, while male pulp writers were playing with guns and fighting off those wily femmes fatales, women like Highsmith and Dorothy B. Hughes and Margaret Millar were burrowing into the enigmas of identity and the killing stresses of everyday life.

Little, Brown

For beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence, see the Library of America’s two-volume Women Crime Writers (2015), which collects eight terrific thrillers from the ’40s and ’50s, including the novels that inspired the classic film noirs Laura, The Reckless Moment, and In a Lonely Place. Women have been writing books like those ever since, but until Gone Girl, publishers tended to look askance at stand-alone crime novels and instead encourage their writers to develop series characters, which could be marketed more easily. So the next wave of women—those who began to write between the mid-’60s and the early ’90s—turned out stories about private eyes (Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone) and medical examiners (Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta) and humane police inspectors (Ruth Rendell’s Reg Wexford). For a while, putting a feminist spin on the old, fading male-empowerment fantasies seemed reason enough for them to write crime stories.

Some of those novelists did solid work in the traditional forms, and many still do. Karin Slaughter, for example, specializes in muscular, action-packed police procedurals; Alafair Burke does expertly plotted legal mysteries; Val McDermid has invented more than her rightful share of homicidal sociopaths for her psychologist-cop team, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, to run to ground. Donna Leon and Karin Fossum have made significant contributions to the humane-inspector bloodline, and Alison Gaylin and Laura Lippman have managed to create plausible contemporary private eyes.

Men with guns don’t do their job nearly as well as they used to.

But they chafe at the limitations; all of those writers have produced books outside their main series. For half a century, the prolific Rendell (who died last year) took frequent breaks from her melancholy, low-key Wexford mysteries to write seriously twisted one-off psychological thrillers, in which the profoundly disturbed and the blithely clueless cross paths fatefully: ignorant armies clashing by night, with no victors. The outcomes are comically, almost surreally, awful. In her most powerful works—A Judgment in Stone (1977), say, or The Bridesmaid(1989)—fate is inexorable, an onrushing train with no one at the controls. There’s nothing for a reader to do but settle in for the ride and watch the darkness speeding past the windows.

In the gone girl era, that sort of novel is having its moment. Traditional mysteries are still with us, but tortuous, doomy domestic thrillers are what readers seem to want now, and dozens of women are ready, willing, and able to oblige. Last year, the publishing industry found, in Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, its long-sought “next Gone Girl,” which is to say another blockbuster bourgeois nightmare about terrible relationships, told in the voices of more than one profoundly unreliable narrator. Unlike Highsmith and Rendell, who preferred to ply their sinister craft in a dry, deadpan third person, writers of the current school tend to favor a volatile mixture of higher-pitched first-person tones: hectoring, accusatory, self-justifying, a little desperate. Reading these tricky 21st-century thrillers can be like scrolling through an especially heated comments thread on a Web site, or wandering unawares into a Twitter feud. Down these mean tweets a woman must go …

Compared with their male counterparts, today’s female crime writers seem more familiar with (or less wary of) the primordial ooze of ego and id that is social media, the swampy no-man’s-land where millions of self-created personal brands battle for supremacy. It’s dangerous territory, as the journalist Nancy Jo Sales shows in a harrowing new book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers. Sales speaks with dozens of teenage girls—who are, she asserts, “in fact the number one users of social media”—about the peculiar mores of their online world. These kids are stressed, looking down at their phones as they navigate from locker to classroom to mall to home, leaning into a blizzard of words and images as they try to fight their way to something like adulthood.

Penguin

The words are frequently unkind, the images can be downright rude, and not everything, by a long stretch, is true: It’s a fun-house universe, a hall of mirrors like the one where bullets fly in the climax of Orson Welles’s great noir The Lady From Shanghai. Women writers seem to know this place even if they didn’t grow up in it. (An awful lot of them—Abbott, Flynn, Hannah, Burke, Slaughter, French, Hawkins, Sara Gran, Attica Locke—are in their 40s, and many of the rest are at least a little older than that.) Jessica Knoll, who’s in her early 30s, is the only one almost young enough to have actually lived there, and what the narrator of her remarkable debut novel, Luckiest Girl Alive (2015), says of her teenage self is this: “We were all young and cruel.”

William Morrow

For the older writers, it’s a matter of memory, of recognizing in the unlit alleyways of social media the labyrinthine geography of their own not-yet-forgotten adolescent psyches. The teenage mind is a strange and lonely place, and these women know a crime scene when they see one. In Megan Abbott’s superb new book, You Will Know Me, a young woman in her 20s reflects aloud: “The girl you were at fifteen, sixteen. Angry and nasty. Hungry for love … You’re always that girl. She never goes away. She’s inside you all the time. That girl is forever.” A male detective in French’s The Secret Place (2014), after spending a few hours questioning the 16-year-old boarders at a school outside Dublin about a murder, blurts out, “If I’ve learned one thing today, it’s that teenage girls make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods.” (For mystery-story innocents, and non-initiates in the cult of Cumberbatch: That’s Professor Moriarty, the evil genius who is the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes.) The exasperated cop later admits that he can’t quite get a handle on how these girls think. “She was written in a code I couldn’t begin to read,” he says to himself about one of them. “They all were.” But in her amazing, sorrowful book, French manages to crack the code because she was a girl once herself, and like the school’s headmistress, she remembers the key: “Girls like to reveal their secrets, and they like to be secretive.” Men who don’t read these books are missing some crucial information.

Doomy domestic thrillers are what readers want now.

The eponymous secret place of French’s novel is a bulletin board that’s an explicit substitute for social media for the students of St. Kilda’s. The boarders are not allowed unsupervised access to the Internet, because, the headmistress believes, “young girls slip between worlds very easily.” She fears they could “lose their grasp on reality.” So the girls, anonymously and nonvirtually, do more or less what they’d do on Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat. They post photos and clippings and drawings, small confessions and small aggressions, all these traces of their secret selves—jumbled, overlapping, out there for everyone to see. This physical site is of course no more fundamentally “real” than the social media it’s meant to replace, but its finiteness makes it appear more graspable. That’s an illusion: The girls are in an in-between world anyway, because that’s where teenagers live. And in The Secret Place, as in real life, that state can be perilous.

People revealing their secrets and being secretive (often simultaneously) is a fair working definition of social-media culture, and of the post–Gone Girl crime novel, too. In book after book, characters share, compulsively but selectively, until revelation and artful concealment become nearly indistinguishable. Unreliable narrators—Gillian Flynn’s, and Paula Hawkins’s inThe Girl on the Train, and Sophie Hannah’s in her recent Woman With a Secret(2015), and many others—induce a sort of vertigo in readers’ minds, an effect good crime writers strive for.

In the golden age, they’d achieve it by furnishing their cozy murder scenes with too many suspects and too many physical clues—the bickering relatives, the shady servants, the cigar ashes, the restaurant matchbooks, the stopped clocks. Now the effect is managed with language alone. In the dizzying verbal performances of the new-style thrillers, every sentence can be a clue or a red herring. (It may be worth noting that Agatha Christie, who knew how to multiply potential killers and suggestive objects, also created one of the most fiendish unreliable narrators in English-language fiction; to name the book would be a spoiler, I’m afraid.) To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, who was a lifelong mystery fan, this new wave of women writers do the police—and the murderers and the victims and the innocent bystanders—in different voices. The line between high modernism and 21st-century entertainment is getting blurry.

Minotaur

Crime fiction isn’t the worst way of dealing with the too-much-information, too-many-voices overload of the present day. At least it holds out the possibility of a solution, of something approximating truth; that’s written into the form’s tacit agreement with its audience. In general, readers of mysteries and thrillers have an impressive tolerance for complication. We enjoy the feeling of being overwhelmed by masses of contradictory-seeming data, because the promised resolution, the daylight when the fog lifts, is so pleasurable. It’s like the moment of sweet clarity a poet experiences when he or she sees at last the right, the inevitable, word—the one that makes sense of everything. No wonder Eliot and W. H. Auden loved detective stories.
At our bewildering moment in history, the Internet-generated fog is thick, practically impenetrable: a pea-souper (as the Brits say) whose main component is talk, too much of it viscous with ulterior motive. Every voice in the new crime novels by women raises suspicions instantly. We can never be sure what any speaker’s agenda is. What’s not being said, and why? The verbal gamesmanship can be enjoyable, particularly when practiced by a wit like Sophie Hannah, who specializes in the apologias of middle-class women with incurable cases of the existential jitters.

Her chief narrator in Woman With a Secret (published in the U.K. as The Telling Error) is Nicki Clements, an apparently ordinary suburban wife and mother, who is one of the funniest pathological liars in recent fiction. Although she seems to be reasonably happy, she lives a clandestine life online (“nickibeingnaughty@hushmail.com”), which, to her alarm, begins to bleed into her everyday life. There’s a grisly murder and a series of mysterious posts on a hookup site called Intimate Links. Naughty Nicki is clearly involved, somehow; the precise nature of her connection takes a while to emerge, though, because in her panicky monologues she doles out actual truth as grudgingly as a Watergate conspirator. She takes that approach (the modified limited hangout, Nixon’s men called it) in all her interactions, online and off; this naturally has the effect of making just about everybody—family, police, readers—wonder whether she is, or is not, a crook.

“Girls like to reveal their secrets, and they like to be secretive.”

Hannah (who’s also a poet) obviously has a taste for the language of evasion and deceit. She loves liars, especially ones who, like Nicki, aren’t terribly good at lying. Watching them thrash about in the tangled webs they’ve woven seems excellent sport to her. In a way, Woman With a Secret is the portrait of someone stuck in a sort of permanent adolescence, lying for the pointless thrill of it, for the drama it brings into her insufficiently awesome life. Mostly it’s about the writer’s delight in linguistic flimflam.

On the whole, though, today’s crime-writing dames deploy the deceptions and evasions of their shifty monologuists less gleefully, and more purposefully. The dubiousness of their narrators’ reliability is for mystification alone—which is a perfectly sound justification in, you know, a mystery. The only problem is that this technique is already, a mere four years after Gone Girl, beginning to harden into a convention. The time is coming, and it might not be far off, when dodgy first-person accounts of dire events won’t trick anyone but the most gullible readers. The audience for crime stories has been conditioned to anticipate startling, unguessable reversals—what an iBooks promotion that recently popped up in my inbox called “gotcha! plot twists.” If the verbal pyrotechnics that these women writers have been so effectively using get predictable, if their narrators become reliably unreliable, the power to mystify dissipates like the smoke from a fired gun.

William Morrow

Fortunately, the best of the women now writing in the genre have more on their minds than bamboozling credulous readers. Thanks perhaps to the current cultural emphasis on youth—on girls in particular—many of these writers have turned their attention to the mysteries of growing up. Frequently their books are as much about old crimes, imperfectly understood, that date from childhood or adolescence as they are about new ones. In Laura Lippman’s non-series novels, like What the Dead Know (2007) and the new Wilde Lake, she likes to shuttle between the present and the past; mysteries are solved, elegantly, but the dominant mood is elegiac.

Brenna Spector, the private-eye heroine of Alison Gaylin’s And She Was (2012),Into the Dark (2013), and Stay With Me (2014), has a rare condition called hyperthymesia, which renders her, like Borges’s Ireneo Funes, incapable of forgetting anything she’s seen, read, heard, smelled, or touched since the disappearance of her older sister, when Brenna was 11. Brenna is a living metaphor for the persistence of memory. Random recollections flicker through her brain as she tries to find missing persons in the present and track her vanished sister down the dark passages of time.

Crime fiction isn’t the worst way of dealing with the too-much-information overload of the present day.

Burnt-out Cassandra Neary, the “last punk standing” who narrates Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss (2007), Available Dark (2012), and this year’s Hard Light, is a variation on that theme. As a photographer, she, too, is a sort of metaphor for the recovery of memories. Her way of apprehending the world is to fix images and look at them as closely as she can, to find what she didn’t see clearly enough while it was happening. She needs that kind of aide-mémoire, because both her present-day experiences and her natural memories tend to be blurred by drink and/or drugs. Despite her various impairments, Cass is perhaps the only entirely reliable narrator in women’s crime fiction today. Like the camera, she doesn’t lie (not to the reader, anyway). She is also, in her rootless middle age, a cautionary tale about the folly of hanging on to youth too long: She’s still on the run, a girl gone for good.

All of these women seem to know that feeling. In so many of the crime stories they’ve been writing, the sense of loss is overpowering. People die or go missing, of course, because that’s the genre, but it’s more than that. The crimes in novels like French’s The Secret Place and Abbott’s You Will Know Meand Marwood’s The Darkest Secret come to represent some larger absence, a hole in the coherence of the world. In Sunset City, a striking first novel by Melissa Ginsburg (another poet), the murder of a high-school friend sends the young heroine into a self-destructive spin. In emotional free fall, she says to herself, “There were no boundaries anywhere”—which could be the motto of all the lost girls in today’s crime fiction.

The title of Gaylin’s latest book, a mournful Hollywood mystery, is What Remains of Me. Its main character, who was convicted of murder at 17 and spent the next 25 years in prison, knows that not enough does. Devon, the teenage gymnast whose prowess is the focus of an entire suburban community in You Will Know Me, is herself a vacancy; there’s a murder in the novel, but she’s the real mystery. The sisters in The Darkest Secret, one a teenager and the other in her aimless 20s, suspect throughout that there are important things they’re not being told, and they’re right: They’re drowning in other people’s lies.
These are terribly sad books, about the confusions of youth and the nagging emptiness beyond, and what enables these novelists to address these subjects excitingly is the crime genre itself—a form that can turn inchoate disaffections into bodies, into dire acts to be investigated. For these writers, it’s as if girlhood were a cold case, tantalizingly unsolved.

These are terribly sad books about the confusions of youth and the emptiness beyond.

Although the Chandler-style femme fatale appears to have been laid to rest, maybe she’s just been internalized by a generation of crime writers who use their wiles for the different(ish) purpose of literary seduction. Genre aficionados—inquisitive women and melancholy guys like me—fall for it every time. Of course, there’s another agenda, and it is (final twist) surprisingly like Chandler’s, at least as Auden defined it in his provocative late-1940s essay “The Guilty Vicarage”:

I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.

In the books I’ve been reading, the Great Wrong Place is sometimes suburbia, sometimes social media, sometimes high school, sometimes the marriage bed—everywhere something feels missing in contemporary life. The best of these novels are pure noir, velvety and pitiless. Writers like French and Abbott seem to have looked at the history of crime fiction the way Gloria Grahame looked at Humphrey Bogart in the 1950 film of In a Lonely Place: attracted but wary. They see the darkness in there, and in themselves. They’ve come a long way from the golden age, from Christie and Sayers, from the least-likely-suspect sort of mystery in which, proverbially, the butler did it. They know better. The girl did it, and she had her reasons.

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