First things first: Angel Luis Colón’s “POP!”, which came out this week via Ruadán Books, is easily the funniest crime novel of the year, and maybe one of the most bitter outside of Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece.” It follows Poppy Leathers, who burns way too much of her time and energy (and considerable smarts) working on behalf of thoroughly mediocre men, including an assassin wracked by ennui and a pretentiously unoriginal artist. There’s heavy subtext here about the failures of capitalism, gentrification, and “meritocracy,” but that doesn’t slow down the book’s blistering pace. It’s a kick.

Colón is one of those writers who keeps producing great work. I met him over a decade ago, when he was publishing his (also bleakly funny) Blacky Jaguar crime novellas with Shotgun Honey; he moved on to crime and YA novels, with a whole slew of short stories, comics, and other projects mixed in. I wanted to talk with him about the ideas behind “POP!”, what makes a great villain, and more.

Poppy is a perfect anti-hero…or should I say villain? You understand her motives perfectly, she’s a hard worker, and she has good taste. At the same time, she also does some pretty terrible things. When you’re designing a character like her, do you really care if they’re “likable,” or is it all about ensuring they’re well-rounded?

I’ve talked a million ears off about this and I will forever die on this hill – likeability doesn’t matter to me. I don’t believe in worrying about whether a character is relatable, likeable, whatever; I don’t care. What matters is a character having their convictions and motivations. They can be weird and awful, but if that is who they are meant to be, that is what they are meant to be. I find myself far more interested in how certain characters navigate stories and I’ve yet to find myself very engaged when said characters are as bland as vanilla ice milk.

Sloppy folks in sloppy situations will always be a lot more interesting.

I think the obsession with likeable characters leads into more concerning territory about media literacy and it makes me think of an old social post from a handle I can’t remember that I will terribly paraphrase: Folks can’t help but see depiction in popular media as an endorsement when their entire diet is escapist or validating. When they see media about uncomfortable topics, they assume others are consuming horrible things for pleasure and make judgement.

I’ll caveat that there is plenty of gutter slop being made that explicitly endorses horrible, horrible things and work like that isn’t art, so I’m excluding that in my argument.

One thread throughout your novels is the existentially distressed hitman; I’m thinking of your excellent “Hell Chose Me,” which came out several years ago, and features a hardcore portrait of a bad soul in torment. Atticus, your hitman in “POP!”, is ostensibly more comic, but with a deep undercurrent of pathos. What keeps drawing you back to this kind of character? How are they useful in terms of expressing your books’ bigger themes?

Sometimes we choose what we are experts at, but more often than not, we land into things that we become experts at (more often against our will). For something like a professional killer, there’s something there we don’t normally see in the real world – the conscious decision to lean into doing something deeply repugnant for money. Where does that come from?

In the case of “Hell Chose Me” I wanted to explore the tragedy of that kind of life and how misplaced ideas of masculinity were at the root of the problem. In POP! I decided to focus on what it would be like when a career as a professional killer becomes unfulfilling. There’s something horrifically comedic about the idea of a person so completely bored of murdering people that they begin to consider a career shift in mid-life.

I’d argue that while these are very different takes on hitmen, I still use these characters to explore a society that has utterly consumed itself in its pursuit of power and influence. Murder as an open business feels like a logical end point to where we’re at. I guess I want to understand it as well as I can before it destroys us all.

Speaking as someone who spent perhaps too many years living in Park Slope and other Brooklyn enclaves, I thought you parodied the hipster ecosystem perfectly—not just the pretentious focus on artisanal products and “edgy” art, but also the streak of real cruelty and exclusion that runs beneath it. When you started putting together the ideas for “POP!”, what compelled you to take a railgun to hipsterdom?

That’s the Bronx in me. I come from one of the last ‘unconquered’ boroughs (that is very much becoming conquered), so seeing the world in which I came up becoming this shrink-wrapped fantasy version of NYC for people who were born elsewhere and will move on to succeed elsewhere, I wanted to focus on how absolutely cruel that process is to the people who built these communities.

Brooklyn, for me, was one of the first victims of gentrification I’d ever seen, so that struck a deep chord with me. Doubly so as someone of Puerto Rican ancestry – my people are some of the OGs of being underfoot to the colonizer mindset. These days, you really see the impact in the aftermath of gentrifiers fleeing out of the urban areas. It’s post-apocalyptic. They leave a place worse than how they “found” it.

Which makes setting the story of a criminal wanting to rule a criminal empire based in a place that’s so utterly doomed even more compelling to me. There’s a tragedy in Poppy’s ambitions and methods being so aligned with folks who undervalue her and I hope readers really pick up on that.

In addition to your crime fiction, you’ve written some books for young adults. There are some obvious differences between those genres — you can’t have bloody wall-to-wall violence in a YA novel, for starters — but I imagine some commonalities, as well. How do you approach composing a YA book vs. one aimed at adults?

Honestly? I don’t really approach either very differently. While I’ll tone down some aspects, more often crude language, a book like “Infested”, my YA horror novel, is probably as violent as anything I’ve written in the adult space. Now, if I’m writing Middle Grade, I massively tone things down, but I’ve found that doesn’t mean you write down – if that makes sense.

Readers are readers no matter the age, so I’ve learned they will understand what I’m conveying without ever talking down to them. If anything, the younger the reader, the more nuanced they can be when it comes to ingesting themes – especially social themes. I’ve often found myself having to be slightly more ham-fisted with adults, to be honest.

That said, I have found interiority is far more vital in the YA space. You really need to think about how your characters think and react in their own minds to the events unfolding around them. I focus on that with my adult work, but those moments are a little brisker than with YA. I like to think that has a lot to do with the fact that by the time we’re adults, we’re better at emotional management (I know there are exceptions0, so big feelings don’t leave us mulling over our decisions as often.

What’s on your wish list to write next?

If you were to ask my agent the answer is probably too much. The list is pretty damn long.

For one, I’m about to submit a new YA novel to editors. It’s a little fantasy and a little horror and very Puerto Rican. I’m excited to see the response to it, honestly.

I’m also working on a few errant ideas. I’m enjoying the low fantasy/horror stuff, but I have a few crime novel ideas I might jump back into; including a period piece that spans the 80s/90s in The Bronx. There’s also a PI novel that’s very much in the key of a Big Lebowski detective story.

I’ll also do incredibly degrading things to get my hands on Marvel’s White Tiger. First Latino superhero that’s Puerto Rican, but as far as I know, never written by a Puerto Rican? Hi, I’m right here. I will write that. I already have a full pitch.

Contact me, Marvel. I like money and upsetting nerds. We’re a match made in heaven.

An adaptation of William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” is due to hit our collective television screens soonish, courtesy of Apple TV. If you’ve never read the original novel, and you’re interested in high-tech heists that take place within a burned-out urban dystopia, it’s well worth your time; for many writers of my generation, it was an inspirational text.

I’m not here to praise or damn what’s coming based on a few minutes of footage. I do think it’s interesting that cyberpunk, the literary sub-genre that “Neuromancer” helped create, is having a bit of a moment, in large part because of everyone playing “Cyberpunk 2077,” a video game based off a board game that came out in 1988, four years after Gibson’s novel. A cursory search online also reveals an infinite number of self-published cyberpunk novels, all hitting the same themes (evil mega-corporations, cybernetic augmentation, cutting-edge criminality), most reading like reheated pastiches of “Akira.”

What’s behind all this? I’d say it’s a hankering for a different kind of anti-utopia outside our windows.

When “Neuromancer” hit, the internet was a digital zygote, a way for military and academic networks to chatter amongst themselves; Japan was flexing its economic and cultural muscles; fears of corporatization were gaining speed. Gibson might have been influenced by writers like JG Ballard and William S. Burroughs, but the writers inspired by Gibson took all of those real-world signals and decided the future was essentially a toxic version of 1980s Tokyo, with more high-tech weapons and snarky cyborgs walking around.

While Japanese creators embraced the genre hard—the aforementioned “Akira,” “Ghost in the Shell,” etc.—Americans traditionally haven’t brought the same level of enthusiasm, at least when it comes to movies and TV. Previous attempts to make “Neuromancer” into a movie crashed and burned. “Johnny Mnemonic” (1995), based off one of Gibson’s cyberpunk short stories (and directed by painter Robert Longo, by his own admission biting off more than he could chew) was an interesting mess that tanked at the box office. “Ghost in the Shell” (2017), a live-action adaptation of the anime, was also a dud, despite Scarlett Johansson doing her best.

(You’re going to say “The Matrix” (1999) is an exception to this, and I’m going to tell you that, while the Wachowski sisters borrowed quite a number of cyberpunk ideas for their magnum opus, it isn’t a cyberpunk work per se.)

Cyberpunk predicts a bad future, but also an entrepreneurial one. It says that even the biggest loser can buy a bionic eye or an augmented hand that will give them the vision and power of a tiger; that anyone with a little moxie and a lot of guns can climb to the top of a soulless conglomerate; that there’s often a way out, either through the neon world of cyberspace or a slice of paradise you can purchase. Contrast that with our reality, where many people—particularly the young’uns—feel like they’re spinning their proverbial wheels, where too much of our technological know-how seems devoted to churning out shinier versions of the social-media apps draining our attention.

On top of that: In the 80s and 90s, the cyberpunk environment came off as too strange, depressing, dystopian for many people to embrace. But now our reality is a dim echo of the genre’s most enduring visuals. We have a sky orange from wildfire; someone on the plane had an (Apple-built) virtual reality headset attached to their face; a hacker can infiltrate your vacuum robot and transform it into a spy. All we’re missing are the cybernetics, and those are likely here sooner rather than later.

Which is why I think, if its quality holds up, the new “Neuromancer” might be a hit. A big chunk of the audience might see Case, its antihero protagonist (and one hell of a cyber-jockey) as aspirational; his environment all too real.

It’s also interesting to note that Gibson himself moved beyond cyberpunk into other realms of speculative fiction. His novel “The Peripheral” (2014) is another favorite of mine, and it’s eerily predictive of what might be coming. It incorporates quantum computing, nanotechnology, and parallel timelines—and plays with the idea that our apocalypse will be a gradual process rather than a theatrical bang (referred to as the Jackpot). If cyberpunk is oddly comforting, his later vision is terrifying because it’s our world altered by a few degrees.

(First things first: WHERE THE BONES LIE has been nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America. Here’s the full list of this year’s nominees, which include the new Hap & Leonard (!), Elvis Cole (!!) and Easy Rawlins (!!!) novels—fortunately, none of them in my particular category.)

I remembered enjoying Daniel Kraus’s novel “Whalefall,” which is probably the best book ever written about someone working through their daddy issues while trapped in the stomach of a large and curiously telepathic physeter macrocephalus, which is why, when I heard Kraus’s follow-up book “Angel Down” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I made a pilgrimage to the local bookstore to buy it, and it was only upon the subway ride home that I opened the first page, and quickly flipped through the rest, and realized it was written in one long sentence, which intrigued me immensely, as I’m a huge fan of seeing what authors can do when the handbrake of a period is removed—such as Joyce’s stream of consciousness capping “Ulysses,” or Krasznahorkai’s pages-long sentences spiraling deeper into esotericism, two influences that ruined my own writing for years—but it only took me a few pages to realize that Kraus was cheating, or maybe providing a much-needed flip on the trick, because after letting the Ur-sentence run for a few hundred words, he abruptly stopped

for a chapter break, and then characters began speaking, with the usual punctuation thrown in, and then a few pages later we had more breaks

to indicate changes in perspective, to pace out the action (World War I, France, trenches, dying soldiers, supernatural stuff), to provide a few flashbacks that frame our protagonist’s frame of mind, and the more I thought about it, the more firmly I concluded that these breaks were sort of

brilliant

because the issue with the unending sentence (I like to call them “oners,” after the slang term for the minutes-long tracking shots that some auteurs try in film) is its imposition of an ever-larger cognitive load on the reader; following the thread, keeping track of the accumulating details, begins to crowd out the cerebrum’s evolution-crafted ability to process, similar to how endless pages of legalese forces the mind to vapor lock by the 15th subclause demanding your liver or your rights; and with an author like Krasznahorkai, this is deliberate, you’re being gripped by the scruff of your neck and forced to stare into the depths of reality until you’re overloaded, but that sort of thing isn’t for everyone, especially all the folks who give literary novels a one-star rating on Amazon if the text didn’t move fast enough, and so if you’re an author who wants the momentum and power of the oner without the deadening cognitive side effects, you decide to break

when appropriate, even if it is a cheat, even if a pure oner can’t include any dialogue that doesn’t end with a comma and Kraus insists on periods and question marks followed by a lowercase letter (somewhere out there a copyeditor’s head just exploded like a David Cronenberg gag), and in the end none of those grammatical niggles matter, do they, if the book sold really well and landed a huge literary prize—you can break any rules you want after you master them—and while we’re on the topic, why did this book win a Pulitzer, it’s undeniably a genre work filled with angels and magic and fights and a bracing bit of surrealism at the very end, it touches lightly on Big Themes like racism and the nature of war but doesn’t add anything new to those particular conversations, it’s not especially insightful about the human condition, it evokes just as effectively as a thousand other novels the smells and horrors of trench warfare—which means, from a writerly perspective, there’s a kernel of hope in here for us somewhere, that if we execute a decent idea with a lot of flair, we might land some accolades to balance out the grind, the slightly-late royalty checks, but even more to the point, if books like this gain some readers and attention, then maybe the slobbering shibboleth of the publishing industry will find the courage to sign

more

interesting

stuff

which would be a good thing because it can’t all be romantasy and psychological domestic thrillers, can it, we deserve a little more weirdness in our intellectual gizzards to help mash up reality.

I’m coming around to the idea that the best way to kill a compelling villain isn’t bullets, fire, or magic—it’s giving them too much backstory.

I was chatting the other day with a film producer about movie villains of the 1980s and 90s, Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter in particular. How Vader was the icon of childhood nightmares, a black-hooded techno-reaper with a terrifying wheeze—and then the prequel trilogy revealed that, under his skull-like mask, he was nothing more than a whiny, petulant teenager. The big guy’s aura was deep-sixed forever.

(I’ve heard a younger generation has an affinity for those prequel movies, which says something disturbing about modern taste; when they were released twenty-odd years ago, everyone walked out of the theater with a pained and vaguely sickened expression, as if George Lucas had personally hosed them down with a fine manure-mist. Anyway.)

It’s a similar deal with Lecter. It’s easy to forget that he plays a relatively minor role in both “Red Dragon” and “Silence of the Lambs,” with his origins mostly mysterious. “Nothing happened to me,” he says at one point, when asked about his pathology. “I happened.” Then his creator, Thomas Harris, decided to negate that statement in the next book, “Hannibal,” which gave everyone’s favorite cannibalistic psychologist a teary-eyed origin story, complete with a dead sister and war-related trauma; maybe he was a more well-rounded figure now, but he was also boring, less a force of nature than just another freak working out his issues.

I’ve always bought the theory that, following the blockbuster success of “Silence of the Lambs,” Harris grew tired of Lecter, and used “Hannibal” as a way of deliberately undermining what he’d built. That’s his privilege as the author, although some of us would have appreciated a few more books with the character in his original, largely unknowable form.

In a similar vein, I’ve been watching the “Cape Fear” series on Apple TV, which is much better than I originally feared, thanks in large part to Javier Bardem’s take on gritty psychopath Max Cady. But the series’ very nature is also its undoing—because it needs to fill 10+ hours of episodes, it keeps adding layer after layer and twist after twist to Bardem’s Cady. He was a restaurateur before going to prison! And also a womanizer! Who might have killed his mother and wife! After about four hours of this, I began to long vaguely for the simplicity of Cady as portrayed by Robert Mitchum and Robert de Niro, respectively, in the 1962 and 1991 versions: psycho killer, lots of tattoos, anger issues.

When it comes to villainy, maybe the fewer details, the better; fear always exists in the unknowable, the void your brain tries and fails to fill in. The Judge at the center of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is an enigma, even if he never stops talking about the universe or death or the nature of war. The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Night” taunts everyone around him with multiple origin stories, all equally plausible—and all equally meaningless.

The possible lesson here, one I’m trying to follow myself in my next book: If you’re trying to construct the perfect antagonist, resist the urge to make them nuanced, to give them a history; maybe opt for as little as possible. You’ll tingle your reader’s lizard brain.

I’m re-reading some stories from Stephen King’s “Skeleton Crew” right now, amidst everything else going on, because I wanted to analyze how he engineered suspense in a few instances. I hadn’t cracked the book in years, and I was surprised at how antique many of the tales felt—closer, in style and tone, to the pulp yarns of dim yesteryear than anything produced in the past few decades.

Duh, you might say. Most of those stories were written in the 1970s, so of course they read like old pulp.

When King wrote most of the stories in the collection, the market for crime and horror short stories was still relatively vibrant. It was likely difficult (if not impossible) to make a living purely off scribbling shorts, but there were still a galaxy of venues willing to pay a decent rate if you had good ideas and a serviceable style.

Now, of course, that market is a mere nub of its former self. I’m not saying the short form is dead; far from it. Reddit and other, often more writing-specific forums are jammed with people composing short fictions for fun and external validation—mostly romance and horror. In a loosely analogous fashion, YouTube and TikTok are full of creators trying to stuff as much story as possible into videos that run a few minutes, or even a few seconds.

But the short story as envisioned by literary types—a tale of a few thousand words, refined by an editor and running in a magazine organized around a particular genre or theme, all in exchange for a few cents per word—well, that’s increasingly a relic. And the reason for it is simple: not enough people are turning to these kind of short stories for entertainment. Maybe back in the day, people swung by a newsstand for a handful of pulp before heading to their shift at the glue factory, but now they’re on their phones on their way to the cubicle, staring at “Backrooms” YouTube videos or reading spicy tentacle horror on r/nosleep.

If you’re a writer like me, who grew up on short story collections and loves the form, this situation is likely to spark an existential crisis. Why burn the hours writing short stories?

It’s certainly not the money. Even at pro venues, the per-word is roughly the same as 50 years ago. I think in my best and most prolific year for writing short stories, when I scored yarns in a handful of pro-rate mags and anthologies, I made the equivalent of a few months’ rent: solid, sure, but not a life, and not repeatable from year to year. (I’ve also had short stories optioned for movies/TV, which—also fantastic, but the money runs out once a producer realizes they can’t turn your madcap slasher comedy into a streaming flick.) I imagine Nixon was probably still in office when you last had writers who could sustain solely off short fiction.

You often hear people saying, “Well, a good short story in a prominent magazine can land you an agent,” which might have worked a few decades ago, but it’s bullshit now. At best, a good short story may compel an agent to ask if you have a completed novel manuscript, with any future relationship hinging on whether the latter fits any market.

The worst reason is what I might term “community validation”: you write to compete for awards, or because you see an appearance in a particular magazine or anthology as giving you an advantage over other writers. The first time you win a trophy, it’s exciting; do it a few times, and you hardly blink when your fancy embossed certificate for Story X accidentally slides off a wall and disappears behind the bookshelf, never to be seen again. It’s an insecure way to work, with diminishing returns.

So why do it?

As George Mallory said right before tumbling off Everest: Because it’s there. Because you have an unstoppable compulsion to slam your pickaxe into the rocky flank of Mount Literature and do a bit of climbing, and, well, not every adventure needs to be novel-length; sometimes you just want to describe one character’s small gesture. That should be enough, but I think sometimes it gets lost in all the noise around per-word fees and big anthos and options.

(Weird aside: “The Man Who Hated Dogs,” my Capri-set short story that appeared in Cold Caller magazine, was named a distinguished story (re: runner up) for the Best American Mystery & Suspense 2026 anthology. You can read it here. I’ll have another bracing jolt of news about this story later this year.)

If you’re an Apple TV user, or you drift around the more movie- and TV-centric regions of the web, you’ve likely picked up that “Sugar,” starring Colin Farrell, is coming back for a second season.

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, and you watch the latest trailer, you’d be lulled into thinking it’s a detective series:

Spoiler alert: it’s not, at least not in the way you might think. It’s far weirder. That the trailer declines to reveal the series’ central conceit—which drove a multitude, including yours truly, insane midway through the first season—hints at producers uncomfortable with how exactly to explain this strange beast, years after its debut.

I remember my curiosity when that inaugural season rolled out. How often does a major studio (or a tech company playacting as a major studio) spend a substantial amount of money on what initially seemed like a detective TV series? The initial episodes leaned heavily into the standard tropes: Farrell in a good suit, pursuing a missing girl down the mean streets of Los Angeles at the request of a rich old man, encountering a rogues’ gallery of weirdos and toughs along the way. If that wasn’t enough to earn the attention of detective-fiction fans, this sleuth also drove a vintage Chevy Corvette, brandished the same pistol that Glenn Ford used in Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (the latter given to him as a gift by his mysterious handler), and loved older noir films.

All the noir allusions are a little too on the nose, which was okay with me—it was reminiscent of hearing a bar band doing a great cover of a classic song. But as the series progressed, I found myself more than a little disconcerted by the building allusions to something larger, stranger. With every new episode came more hints that Farrell’s character wasn’t quite human, that he might be something… different.

And then came the big reveal: he was a space alien. A lonely space alien wrestling with existential angst.

(Imagine time-traveling back to the mid-20th century and submitting that note to Chandler, Wilder, pretty much any ink-stained wretch dealing in noir tropes for a living. ”Hey, ah, yeah, listen, you gotta make your hardboiled detective an alien with big feelings.” You would’ve heard their derisive snort all the way up in Malibu.)

Yet again, it was clear that entertainment executives didn’t think unadulterated detective noir would sell to a larger audience. That’s not an isolated impulse in Hollywood. Even “True Detective,” which spent its first three seasons remixing old-school crime-fiction themes and ideas, tiptoed toward the supernatural in its fourth season, as if straight-up murder in an isolated patch of Arctic wasn’t intriguing enough.

But I also understand those executives’ fear: you create something that plays like an updated version of “The Big Sleep,” and you risk attracting only a small band of classic-movie freaks, the kind of people who quote Hammett or Chandler or Thompson at parties and expect everyone in the room to give them something other than blank looks. While there have been some interesting detective series in recent years (“The Lowdown” pops immediately to mind), I wouldn’t hold my breath for a straight-up, no-chaser resurgence in detective yarns.

I started experimenting with AI during the early stages of the pandemic, when OpenAI was still a little “nonprofit” and you could rig together a blithering, borderline-moronic LLM with just your localized PC hardware and a small dataset. As part of that, I uploaded around 10 years’ worth of my writing and asked my little homebrewed bot to replicate my style. Here’s an excerpt from what it drooled back:

The old man, his shirt torn, his jeans ripped asunder, walked over to the couch. Rising to his knees, he bent down, brushing against the back of Miller’s neck with his fingertips. That’s a little rough, Miller mused. It was a long way from Grandma’s farmhouse, and Grandma knew it, and you shouldn’t do that to people, the old man thought. Taking the older man’s hand in his own, Miller took the sunglasses from the coffee table, stuffing them into his mouth. Can I get a cup of coffee? Miller asked. You say I have a parole board? The old man looked at Miller with dark eyes. What is that? Miller blinked. You on parole, are you?

That was probably the most coherent bit; it had my rhythms but no logic or pace or even sense of physics. As I’ve written about before, I took some of those bits and incorporated them into the dialogue of a nonhuman character in “Payback Is Forever,” my weirdo noir novella published by Shotgun Honey five years ago.

In the intervening years, the debate over the use of AI in writing has, of course, blown up. (Quick aside: the term “AI” is an aggravating misnomer; as I recently discussed with WSJ columnist Christopher Mims for my day job, a better term might be something like, “swarm intelligence,” but we’re getting a bit too technical here.) posted a column a few months ago that nicely positions AI vis-a-vis other technological “marvels” of the past few centuries, and makes this key point:

“Current AI has been trained with every written word available (and image, for that matter), in print or online, by all accounts. Sure, that includes the classics, the great works of philosophy, the titans of journalism and scientific research. But that also includes every comment thread, conspiracy screed, every racist/ableist/sexist/etc.-ist pick-a-number-Chan thread; every bad idea, anonymous and unfettered, shoveled by the terabyte into the brain of some billionaire’s pet AI that grows less cooperative and more deceptive the smarter it becomes.”

An LLM, at its most reductionist, is essentially autocomplete on steroids; but load its knowledge base with the entire internet, and weight it with a couple billion parameters, and nobody’s quite sure why it gives the answers it does, which is frightening. Does a language corpus married to a set of rules spontaneously birth a kind of intelligence? Or have the simpler among us fallen sway to the babblings of a stochastic parrot? What’s inarguable is that, in the relatively short time since Craig wrote that essay, the leading AI products have gotten measurably more powerful; your LLM of choice is capable of spitting out pretty much anything in any tone you desire.

For example, I just asked Google Gemini to do its best Pynchon imitation:

“It started, as minor apocalypses sometimes do, over brunch, that liminal meal teetering between the sacred and the profane, between the lingering dreams of Saturday night and the encroaching anxieties of Monday morning. One moment the world, or at least the brunch-consuming portions of Brooklyn, was humming along to the tune of artisanal bacon sizzling and the polite clatter of ethically sourced mimosas; the next, it was humming over itself, an overlapping, dissonant shriek of parental commentary, a ghostly Greek chorus harmonizing on the theme of your life choices.”

Like my long-ago experiments with homebrewed LLMs, Google’s AI captures the tone of Pynchon, somewhat, but there’s no meaning behind it, no binding intelligence behind the sentences, no flow. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself; ask an LLM to spin up a couple of paragraphs imitating your favorite writer, and then try editing it for meaning, pace and content. It’ll fall apart like overcooked spaghetti.

Which brings me, of course, to the current literary tempest in a teapot, a sad comedy in one act: the Granta AI scandal. For those blissfully unaware, Granta held a contest, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, that awarded 2,500 British pounds and publication on the Granta website to five regional short story winners. An entry from Trinidad, “The Serpent in the Grove,” is a.) a war crime against prose, and b.) according to many online, a prime example of an LLM writing a story. For example:

“They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men. Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it. Eyes that skimmed and did not land, as if what she wanted was elsewhere and she had to pass through men to get there. She wore the island’s mixed bloodlines like a crown – African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.”

From their inception, it’s been clear that LLMs have zero idea of how reality actually works. They have no world model, no sense of what’s realistic. How could they, being a web of tokenized bits? “Maybe rain took a shape” and “walking that made benches become men” are the kinds of phrases that hint at AI flailing at coherency. Or maybe, if this was human-written and/or -edited, it’s just another example of modern literature leaning too lyricism without meaning.

Granta’s own statement on the matter tells us nothing:

Since 2012 Granta has hosted the winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize on our website. Granta editors were not involved with these stories or their selection beyond copy-editing them upon receipt. This year, there has been speculation that some of the stories may have been at least partially AI-generated. The suggestion that writers have submitted material not authentically their own is a charge we take seriously, but until definite evidence comes to light we will keep these stories on our website.

Maybe the editors should lean into this whole AI thing. Open the door to any and all AI submissions, in the name of the best possible “literature,” the same way that some half-wits argue the Olympics should become a doping-encouraged event, just to see how high someone can jump before their knees snap off.

Anyway. Say what you will about genre, but the need for a driving plot—to move, to tell a story, to sell emotion and tension—acts as a sort of ballast beneath a story. However, so many writers who aspire to be lit’rary turn up their noses at such things. “I’ve moved beyond plot,” one aspiring novelist told me a few months ago at a party. I’m also thinking back to college, when in my naïveté I submitted noir short stories to the campus literary rag, only to watch those submissions get shredded for, gosh darn it, not featuring enough “deep themes” and being “too straightforward.”

But without the engine of plot, the desire to entertain, what’s left? In many cases, with the exception of some greats like László Krasznahorkai or Gerald Murnane, pretty words on a page, signifying nothing—which leaves the proverbial door open to a powerful AI, driven by the right prompt. I experiment with AI quite a bit, for work and my own entertainment (know your enemy), and I can tell you that asking the Machine to craft an outline for a competent thriller, much less an actual draft, takes monumental effort and frustration—so much, in fact, that it’s easier and more fun to simply do it yourself, using the organic laptop in your skull.

But ask me to craft an award-winning literary short story based off a prompt, and I could give you that in under a minute—thirty seconds for the AI scan and absorb a selection of literary magazines’ award-winning stories from the past 10 years, and another thirty to spit words:

“Maren stood on the rotting planks of the mole, her thumb tracing the smooth, concave lip of a cowrie shell tucked deep inside her apron pocket—a habit that had long since worn the whorls of her own fingerprint into the calcium. She was a woman built out of small, defensive angles, her shoulders hitched against a world that had spent decades trying to dissolve her. To the few merchants who sailed in from the archipelago, she was merely the silent clerk who tallied crates of parched nutmeg with a splintered slate pencil; they did not see the way her gaze weighed each incoming hull, not for what it brought, but for how much water it displaced, as if she could calculate the exact volume of the world she was being denied. Her silence wasn’t the peace of the cloistered, but the breathless, vibrating stillness of a dry twig just before it snaps under an invisible boot.”

Granta, I’ll take that check now.

The irony is that the novelistic giants of the 20th century, the ones who—for better or worse—birthed the current literary moment, were very concerned with plot, and movement, and character. Their books were funny as hell, and engaged with reality. Of course, most of them have been forgotten or canceled at this juncture, leaving a generation of MFA graduates who seem determined to crap out watery imitations of Nicole Krauss. It’s sad, sure, but it’s also kind of hilarious.

Apologies for the month-long radio silence; I’ve been flitting across the Atlantic, dealing with work stuff, finishing up a horror screenplay for the Blacklist + Tubi contest, and last but certainly not least, figuring out whether my current novel manuscript needs to be scrapped and scavenged for the best bits of dialogue and description.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece,” and I’m calling it now: this is the best crime novel of the year. It’s a buzzing, screaming, bullet-quick plunge into the worst parts of Los Angeles. Rich people doing messy, evil things. Nightstalker journalists cruising the highways and byways. Black-bag PR and body cleanup. Serial killers and mercenaries.

At first read, the staccato rhythms and the terminally damaged characters might remind you of a James Ellroy book, except “Masterpiece” feels more vital than anything Ellroy has written in years; the self-styled demon dog of crime fiction seems incapable of moving his narratives out of the mid-20^th century, which—despite the druggin’ and shootin’ and cussin’—makes them seem increasingly antique.

Harper, on the other hand, is unafraid to bind his fiction to the current moment. There’s a nasty character who’s an obvious stand-in for Jeffrey Epstein, and his death kicks off a maelstrom. Without becoming preachy and pedantic, the book also sprints headfirst into issues like police brutality, income inequality, decaying infrastructure, and more. It’s political, and frankly, that’s exactly what we need at this current moment. How else can we process everything going on, distill the spirit behind it all?

Too much crime fiction, particularly bestselling crime fiction, seems intent on divorcing itself from the chaos outside our front doors—resulting in airless, gray repeats of stuff we’ve been reading for decades.

(“But Nick,” you scream. “Not all crime fiction needs a political bent! Simenon wrote novels set during the French Occupation and never mentioned the Nazis once!”

(Yeah, except the Nazis would’ve shot or jailed Simenon otherwise, and he knew it. As a country, we’re not there. Yet.)

While reading “Masterpiece,” I made the mistake of watching Barton Layton’s “Crime 101,” based on the Don Winslow novella. As a movie, it’s fine—a high-end robber finds himself pressured by the LAPD and his own fence; there’s cinematography that’s a bit too self-consciously Michael Mann, and one good car chase—but in comparison to Harper’s book, its portrayal of LA seems particularly inert. Even when the cops questionably shoot a suspect, it’s treated with a shrug, a way to provide a blip of extra motivation for another character. Harper would have burned the city down.

The movie’s bright spot is Chris Hemsworth as Mike, the thief protagonist. On paper, Mike is a 21st century clone of Frank, the safecracker in Mann’s “Thief,” or even De Niro’s Neil McCauley in “Heat.” But Hemsworth (who’s a better actor than people give him credit for) realized that a Mann-style smooth operator is likely, underneath it all, a neurotic wreck; his thief is good at his job but barely keeping himself on an even keel, psychologically speaking. His twitchy, tense performance adds a compelling nuance that the rest of the film doesn’t really deserve.

In any case, if you’re looking for an intense book—filled with sentences polished into dark little jewels—track down Harper’s novel.

Other Stuff

• I wrote about the upcoming “Miami Vice” remake for CrimeReads, which seems like a pointless retread, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

In my last Substack, I promised to get a little bit more into the rhythms and structure of action scenes that build suspense—the Action Toolbox, if you will.

The great thing about building action scenes is you have any number of tools that you can use in a wide variety of ways. We’re going to go into how different writers approach action, but first, I want to break down one of my favorite examples.

As a writer, Ernest Hemingway seems to fall in and out of favor. Of course, he was huge in his heyday, but over the past two decades, he’s undergone something of a re-evaluation. He’s too macho, too much a creature of his time, and so on.

Your own mileage may vary on that, of course. But no matter how you feel about him, you can’t deny the guy was a wordsmith of the highest order, and he’s smooth enough that sometimes you don’t even realize he’s doing something really tricky or complex with his prose.

I discovered his novel “To Have and Have Not” when I was in college. Hemingway was the first to admit it was one of his weaker efforts, even if Howard Hawks made a pretty great movie out of it with Bogart and Bacall. But it has a dynamite scene near the end which is notable because it breaks out pretty much every single literary trick you can use to manipulate the tension and stakes within an action sequence.

(Just a bit of background for anyone who hasn’t read it but doesn’t want to read the Wikipedia summary: the novel version of “To Have and Have Not” is about Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain who’s forced by the Great Depression to become a smuggler, mostly taking illicit goods and people between Cuba and Florida.)

This scene is a shootout on a boat, and it comes near the end, as Morgan faces the inevitable consequences of his actions. Here’s how it starts:

Interiority

A great way to build tension and the inner stakes is to dip into a character’s head during a scene. Here we see Harry psyching himself up before the action begins. When you’re following a character’s thought process, especially if they’re scared or angry, you create an emphatic bond that keeps the reader engaged.

Alternating Rhythm

Hemingway is a master of this technique. Sentences of the same length and structure tend to become monotonous very quickly. He often takes care to alternate longer sentences with short ones, keeping the reader engaged.

Speaking of engagement, let’s move to the shootout:

And then:

Fog of War

“The man was crawling toward him. No, toward the man who lay half overboard.” This is maybe my favorite two sentences in the whole sequence because it encapsulates what a lot of action-oriented writers do—a technique I like to call Fog of War. Especially if your action scene is from the tight perspective of a particular character, they might see or hear things wrong the first time around, or mistake someone for someone else—it’s yet another dynamite way of immersing the reader in your narrative.

Onomatopoeia

“Bot-bot-bot-bot stopped.” Some people might complain that using an onomatopoeia—which is a word that looks like the sound it makes, and you hear that sound when you read it—is a weaker tool in the literary toolchest, but I’m here to tell you that it can be really effective in terms of adding immediacy to your action scenes, provided you use it sparingly.

Now comes perhaps my favorite sentence in action literature, the one I keep coming to again and again:

Delay

Again, it’s an amazing sentence with all of these subclauses. Read it out loud and hear the dark music: “As he stood up, holding the Thompson gun in his left hand, looking around before shutting the hatch with the hook on his right arm, the Cuban who had lain on the port bunk and had been shot three times through the left shoulder, two shots going into the gas tank, sat up, took careful aim, and shot him in the belly.”

I’ve relied on this delaying technique many times myself—draw it out, draw it out, draw it out—and it’s great for building suspense within a single sentence, pulling the reader along. To go back to the Lee Child example I used in my previous column, this kind of sentence structure asks a question—in this case, what happened when he stood up—that’s only answered by the very end, and the eye rushes to get there.

Building in Beats

In that column, we talked about how Lee Child creates suspense via a devastatingly simple formula of posing a question and then delaying the answer. It works on a plot level, and it works within action scenes themselves. The more questions you can set up within your action scene, and then delay the answer, the more suspenseful you’ll make it.

Pain

Action often hurts. A fistfight, a gunfight, a car crash, being a little too close to an explosion—it has a way of damaging flesh and blood, igniting those pain nerves. One reason I really love the John Wick movies, just as an example, if because Keanu as Wick pulls off all kinds of amazing moves, but he’s also constantly wincing and limping and generally conveying that he’s on the verge of passing out if he has to tumble down another extra-long flight of stairs. It builds an immediacy to the action scenes and helps build empathy for your character.

But describing pain can be more difficult than it looks. My friend Rob Hart once collaborated on a novel with James Patterson; Rob described one character who’s hit by a car or something as “feeling like he was hit with a cannonball.” Patterson read that description and wrote in the margin, “nobody knows what being hit by a cannonball feels like.”

Well, there’s probably a one-legged pirate out there who disagrees with that, but Patterson made a good point: if you describe hurt and pain, you should probably do it in ways that are relatable to the audience, so they can envision it more effectively. Describe pain but keep it within the guardrails; find a relatable metaphor.

Weapons

A note about weapons: many action scenes involve weapons of some sort—swords, firearms, what have you. One thing I’ve learned about readers who like action is that many of them are also extremely particular about accuracy in weaponry. No matter how big your readership, if you mistakenly say that a gun can fire five shots when it actually has a six-shot capacity, for example, you will receive a sternly worded email from someone.

As a writer, I actually like handling every weapon that I mention in one of my books. I’m fortunate in that I have several friends who are gun owners, so I’ve actually been able to go out on the range and fire many of them. There are exceptions—in one book, I had a character use a rocket launcher, and because I’m not interested in being investigated by the FBI, I didn’t actually try to go out and fire one of those myself.

And you don’t necessarily need to handle a weapon yourself in order to build a realistic feel for it in a book or short story. There are plenty of videos on YouTube that can give you a sense of how weapons perform, what they sound like, and so on. For the thing I’m working on right now, for example, I’ve watched way too many of those YouTube videos where a couple of excitable dudes try out the stopping power of various guns on watermelons, fake torsos, etc.

Once you’ve written something, if you have friends who’ve been involved in the kind of action you’re describing, you can ask them to give it a quick fact-check. This will potentially save you some grief later; I highly recommend it.

I have heard of one loophole, although I don’t know how true it is. Supposedly John D. MacDonald, when he was writing Travis McGee, got around any potential issues with guns by writing that a particular gun had been ‘modified,’ which allowed him to get away with getting any details wrong. I’m just not sure how much that would fly, though—you can’t have all your characters running around with conspicuously modified weaponry.

I went viral again this week—and not in the biological sense, thankfully. The Great Algorithm in its infinite anti-wisdom decided to toss one of my random Tweets before the eyeballs of 100,000 people:

At least the responses have been mostly kind; the last time I went super-viral, it was because I Tweeted a lighthearted joke about the prospect of Amazon opening a massive facility at the end of my road, which was retweeted by AOC, which led to millions of drooling morons storming into my mentions to accuse me of being an evil Marxist hellbent on the destruction of everything pure and good in America. Who doesn’t love the internet’s ability to bring folks together? Anyway.

My defense of “The Martian” and its story mechanics have me recalling a class I taught last year on action writing, which is a neglected element in most writing courses. It shouldn’t be; knowing how to keep an audience gripped is a fantastic skill—and a simple one.

The 3,000-Year-Old Hook

Action scenes are as old as storytelling.

Back in the 8th century BC, Homer (either a lone genius or a collective of them) immortalized the meat grinder of the Trojan War. If you’ve ever read “The Illiad,” you know it’s nonstop Bronze Age carnage, just battle after battle on the dusty plain between the Mediterranean and the walled city of Troy.

Why does the poem stick with us? Why, three thousand years later, do we still care about dudes in horse-hair helmets getting a spear through the liver?

Because Homer understood that every fight isn’t just a fight; it’s a question, a promise, and a bucket of emotions in one fast-moving package. When the hero Achilles finally steps out of his tent in search of bloody revenge, the question isn’t “Will he win?” (we know he’s an unstoppable killing machine, except for that inconvenient ankle thingie). The question is: What will his grief look like when it’s weaponized? We’re jacked with anticipation, anxious to witness.

Kill Billzzzzzz

I feel like one of the big mistakes people make when writing action is they think they can just describe people and objects in some kind of motion and it will be instantly compelling. This isn’t the case. Even intense action can be really boring if it’s simply description.

I think it was Terry Rossio, who wrote the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, who said there’s nothing more boring than trying to read an action movie screenplay. The first time I heard that, I found it confusing, because I love action movies. But then I actually read a few action screenplays and saw exactly what he was talking about.

For example, I like Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” but the screenplay is a cure for insomnia if you’re in the wrong mood. It’s dozens of pages of:

“The Bride steps backward.”

“The Bride swings her sword.”

“The Bride kills three more guys.”

It’s monotonous, nothing more than information. Of course, screenplays aren’t meant to be read in the same way as a novel or short story, but I feel like many writers who’re starting out approach action in a similar way to this—she shoots, this guy falls, this guy over here jumps up—pages and pages of it.

You can’t go on for too long with that before the reader gets bogged down and TDFs that novel you spent years writing.

The Physics of the Pull

When you approach the idea of writing action scenes, and keeping the momentum going, and you’re looking at everything conceptually, I keep circling back to advice that Lee Child offered once in a column about building suspense. Of course, Lee Child knows how to keep readers glued to the page. He also devotes a considerable amount of those pages in each book to having his protagonist, Jack Reacher, brawl with whatever villain he’s set up.

“As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer,” he said. “Readers are human, and humans seem programmed to wait for answers to questions they witness being asked.”

Child sees every book as a series of big and small questions: who killed the victim? Why did they do it? How will the protagonist discover the killer? And so on, down to the subclause level. He went on: “Page to page, paragraph to paragraph, line to line — even within single sentences — imply a question first, and then answer it second. The reader learns to chase, and the momentum becomes unstoppable.”

You can apply a similar principle to action scenes. The best action scenes have their own beats and logic—call and response, question and answer—and they depend on a deep integration with the rest of the narrative. So to loop back to “Kill Bill,” something like:

“The Bride steps backward and swings her sword.” (dull!)

To (and I’m switching entirely into that machine-gun Child style here):

“She gave ground just enough to find her leverage. Only then did she swing the blade. She was tired, bloody. Could she hit the target? She had done this a thousand times, ten thousand. But she had to get it right this time. The blade met flesh. Boom.” (better!)

I also want to touch on something related:

The Cascade

No action scene exists in a vacuum; that’s why it can be difficult to open a book or a script to a random action scene and get really drawn in.

There are numerous examples of the cascade at work, but in the most basic form, it works like this: you spend a chunk of your narrative setting up the pieces, raising the stakes, and building the audience’s relationship to your characters. This is the equivalent of pulling back on a rubber hand until it’s taut.

The more taut the rubber band, the more invested your audience, the bigger the impact when you finally snap into an action scene.

If you want a good example of the cascade, you really can’t do better than a lot of 80s movies, which spent a lot of time on buildup. James Cameron in particular is very good at this; read his screenplay for “Aliens,” which (unlike “Kill Bill”) is an example of a script that doubles as a really engaging read.

Cameron doesn’t start with the acid blood and gunfire and chases. He spends an hour building the dread, establishing the camaraderie of the Colonial Marines, and showing us Ripley’s trauma. He’s pulling the band back. By the time the motion trackers start beeping in the dark, you’re already screaming.

In a book context, a really good example of this is Stephen King’s “Roadwork,” which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The book is all buildup, slow and meandering at times, but with every page adding another layer to the character, until you reach the end—and the humble narrator commits a violent, explosive act. Only because you’ve had 220 pages in his head does that act seem powerful and maybe even a little bit justified, at least from his point of view.

If you want your action to hit, stop focusing on the choreography of the blow. Start focusing on the tension of the wait.

In the next Substack (because I have a lot of notes on this, and the helpful Substack advice emails keep telling me to shorten my newsletters), I’ll cover the all-important Action Toolbox, which is filled with all kinds of things that can really make an action or suspense scene hum along, including that call-and-response I mentioned a bit earlier.

I first discovered A.J. Quinnell’s “Man on Fire” in the bathroom of Snowdonia, a bar in Astoria. Some wit of an owner had lined the shelves beside the sink with tattered, yellowed paperbacks from a bygone era, and I presumed customers were meant to help themselves.

Like Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” and Roderick Thorp’s “Nothing Lasts Forever” (adapted into “Die Hard”), “Man on Fire” is an example of a pulpy, largely forgettable novel that was eventually transformed into a memorable film. The narrative follows Marcus Creasy, a former mercenary turned full-time alcoholic who takes a job as a bodyguard for the young daughter of a textiles manufacturer in Milan. The girl is kidnapped and killed by the local mafia; Creasy then murders his way through all the gangsters responsible.

It’s not prose or a plot for the ages, and it yielded a pretty dull action movie with Scott Glenn in 1987. Thirteen years after *that,* however, Tony Scott directed another version of the film, with Denzel Washington as Creasy and the setting changed from Italy to Mexico City, and that is worth seeing.

“Man on Fire” is the epitome of Scott’s late period, when he had enough cachet in Hollywood to go stylistically berserk with no repercussions. The ultra-sleek filmmaking of “Top Gun,” “Crimson Tide,” and his other 80s and 90s hits gave way to jittery chaos: extreme-contrast shots, often shaky and hand-held; jarring cuts and freeze-frames; characters’ lines displayed on screen like living cartoon bubbles; odd green and orange filters.

This technique didn’t always work. When Scott made “Domino” (2005), one of my favorite “bad” movies, he kept the proverbial accelerator slammed to the floor for the entire running time, resulting in the cerebral equivalent of guzzling a 2-liter Mountain Dew chased by a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. When Tom Waits as a crazed preacher is the calmest thing in your movie, you might be alienating most of your audience.

But “Man on Fire,” released the previous year, achieved a finer balance. In that film, whenever Christopher Walken, cast somewhat against type as the quiet voice of reason, engages Washington’s Creasy in discussion about their misspent lives, the camera settles down and behaves. Washington often sits in silence for a few moments, gathering himself before the next pyrotechnic performance. If you’re going to subject an audience to two-plus hours of visual insanity, you need to pause for breath every 20 minutes or so:

The movie also works because Washington, as one of the finest actors of his generation, was able to channel a rage so blue-flame pure, you completely understand—maybe even empathize—as he does terrible things. The script gives him glib finishing lines, typical action-movie bullshit, but he delivers them with a frightening surety that just makes you glad someone like that isn’t after you.

The ending is also a bit of a dud, and you can’t fault Scott for that. The original finale, which you can find on YouTube, is much better, but you can see why they reshot it—it echoes aspects of the so-called War on Terror, then at its height, that Americans would sooner overlook. But overall, the film is a memorable piece of work.

In any case, for our sins, Netflix is gifting us a streaming-series remake, with Yahya Abdul-Mateen in the Creasy role, and the locale updated to Brazil. I have zero doubt that Abdul-Mateen can deliver, but like Apple TV’s upcoming remake of “Cape Fear” with Javier Bardem, you have to ask yourself: why? Or as someone put it online: “Why is Netflix giving us gas-station burgers when Denzel already delivered filet mignon?”

Why indeed. The answer’s obvious: because remaking existing IP is a safe bet. Netflix’s algorithm probably spat out that people who watched Scott’s “Man on Fire” were 50 percent more likely to watch other action movies on the service, or something like that. Based on the trailers, it doesn’t seem like the new series’ directors are trying to rip off emulate Scott’s flair, which I guess is a small blessing.

In the meantime, in a priceless example of how our pop culture has achieved a twisted type of ouroboros, Washington himself essentially remade A.J. Quinnell’s original novel with “The Equalizer 3” (2023), in which he plays a shadowy ex-operative who takes refuge in a bucolic Italian village, gets spiritually adopted by the nice townsfolk, and then horrifically murders a whole lot of stereotypical mafia goons. (Or maybe it’s a spiritual sequel to Scott’s “Man on Fire,” considering the cast, although Scott himself would’ve thrown a chair through a window at the thought.) The epic of righteous revenge is an archetype that we can’t seem to ever escape, just recycle into new forms that always contain some of the old.

There’s an Anthony Bourdain quote I particularly love:

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.

After finishing William J. Mann’s “Black Dahlia,” an exhaustive examination of L.A.’s arguably most famous murder case, my mind riffed on that quote:

Once you’ve read about the real Elizabeth Short, you’ll never stop wanting to slap James Ellroy upside the head.

If you’re reading this newsletter, chances are good you’re familiar with the details of the Black Dahlia case: Elizabeth Short, a young wanderer who worked intermittently as a waitress (and aspired to become an actress, according to some sources) was found brutally murdered in vacant lot in Leimert Park on the morning of January 15, 1947. The case was an instant tabloid sensation, and the LAPD deployed an immense amount of resources to find the killer—only to come up with squat after years of investigation.

Within days of the murder, the tabloids crafted a portrait of …

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Every generation gets the “Cape Fear” remake they deserve.

The 1962 version of the film starred Robert Mitchum as Max Caddy, a psychotic ex-con on a rampage of revenge against the attorney (played by Gregory Peck) who put him in jail. Mitchum’s Cady is slimy, bitter, and increasingly dangerous as the movie progresses—he moves through its climactic setpiece with the tensed silence of an apex predator. He even fills the talky scenes with dark energy, helped in large part by director J. Lee Thompson giving him ample space to work:

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Quick, what do Graham Greene, Ambrose Bierce, and Shirley Jackson all have in common?

First and foremost, they’re all long dead: Greene in 1991, Jackson in 1965, and Bierce likely in 1914-ish, although in the lattermost case they never found the body (editor’s note: blundering through the Mexican Revolution had a way of radically reducing your life expectancy).

Second, despite their current non-corporeal state, all three have been nominated within the past decade for crime-fiction awards or other honorifics: Jackson for Best Short Story at the 2016 Edgars, Ambrose Bierce in the Mysterious Bookshop’s The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 (which also featured a tale by Sue Grafton, who’d been deceased five years at that point), and Greene for Best Short Story at this year’s Edgars. No doubt I’m missing a few more undead nominees, but I’m short on time to shuffle through years of lists.

Digging up a long-indisposed author and propping them up behind a podium to accept an award, especial…

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Is there any director more confounding than Joe Carnahan?

His first film, “Narc” (2002), was a gritty thriller starring Jason Patric as an undercover cop suffering from PTSD after accidentally shooting a pregnant mom during an arrest; he’s paired with Ray Liotta as a bad lieutenant with a penchant for hurting suspects. With its grainy film stock and jerky handheld shots, it played like a grimier version of a 70s cop drama.

But instead of playing out that thread and positioning himself as a neo-Lumet, Carnahan decided to zig in a zanier direction with his next film, “Smokin’ Aces” (2006), a rambunctious crime-action-comedy mashup that ran like an extra-caffeinated Tarantino pastiche, if that makes any sense: colorful, bloody, and nihilistic.

His next job was a studio gig, a relatively generic remake of “The A-Team.” After that, he zoomed back into “Narc” territory with “The Gray” (2011), in which Liam Neeson and a bunch of other hardboiled actors play oil workers trying to survive a plane…

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Last week, Christopher Nolan released the first trailer for his upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey,” and every fanboy online promptly transformed into an expert in the arms and armor of the Late Bronze Age.

Take a look for yourself:

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Among mystery genres, the locked-room conundrum is one of the oldest. Poe helped pioneer it with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which came out 20 years before the American Civil War; Arthur Conan Doyle played with the form several times via Sherlock Holmes stories; dozens of mystery and thriller writers have taken a crack at it over the past 150+ years.

The ingredients are simple: a perplexing event that takes place within a seemingly impenetrable room (often a murder, although the disappearance of a valuable object will do); a detective (usually an unusually deductive one) to figure out the cause of the event; a scattering of seemingly random clues (the red thread! the razor!); and a solution that’s either infuriatingly ingenious or simply infuriating (“What do you mean the f*cking ape did it?”).

Optional: A large cast of eccentric suspects (call it the Christie variation).

Also optional: substituting the literal locked room for a similarly ‘impossible’ situation; say, someone killed …

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Is it just me, or did it feel like a particularly weak year for movies, especially thrillers? Maybe it’s just a matter of perspective. If you combine movie theaters and streaming networks, there’s more out there than ever before, but that endless tide of movies and TV shows (“content,” in the dull vernacular of executives) forces its own kind of tunnel vision—as more and more screens flash before you, you focus on less and less.

In any case, a handful of the forementioned thrillers did stand out to me in 2025, if only because they showed their respective creators at their best (and weirdest). Here we go, in no particular order:

Black Bag

A few years ago, a friend who works as a contractor for the Department of Defense offered up a truism about folks in military intelligence: sooner or later, a significant percentage of them go crazy. When you live in a world of shadows and mirrors, it’s easy to lose sight of any true horizon.

I kept thinking about that as I watched Steven Soderbergh’s “Bl…

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Daniel Woodrell died the other week. Most folks will remember him for writing “Winter’s Bone,” an excellent book adapted into a solid movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and (a completely terrifying) John Hawkes. My own introduction to Woodrell came at the age of 12, when my parents gave me a copy of “Give Us a Kiss,” an Ozark noir about a weed-growing family that finds itself in nasty conflict with a rival clan.

Many of Woodrell’s obits dismiss “Give Us a Kiss” as a minor work. It’s nothing of the sort. Its weird humor and bone-crunching violence, layered with nuanced bits of Ozark culture, preceded TV shows like “Justified” and authors like Eli Cranor by decades. Or maybe I’m just feeling defensive—it’s a key text in my early development as a crime-fiction writer, up there with John Ridley’s “Stray Dogs” and Hammett’s “Red Harvest.”

In any case, his passing is a good excuse to plunge into his books if you’ve never read him before; he had an economy of language reminiscent in some ways of…

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Over on his Substack, critic and “punk whisperer” Jim Ruland makes an interesting assertion about crime fiction:

“One my gripes against contemporary crime fiction is how conservative it is. All genre fiction is conservative in that it adheres to the conventions of the genre that set it apart from other forms of writing. Many contemporary writers take this as a cue to write conservatively, in other words to conform, reinforcing the tropes of crime, mystery, and suspense. This bores me.”

I thought about Jim’s comments during the finale of “The Lowdown,” Sterlin Harjo’s newish series starring Ethan Hawke as a journalist/bookstore owner named Lee Raybon, who spends the bulk of his time cruising the mean streets of Tulsa in his battered white van, digging into the crimes of the local elite. Like Harjo’s other series, “Reservation Dogs,” a significant amount of screentime is devoted to Oklahoma’s local color, including various weirdos and miscreants—to the point where the central mystery, inv…

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