The Imagery of Doublethink
My new historical mystery, Hall of Mirrors, is set in post-WWII Washington, DC. It’s the second book in a trilogy that began with The Savage Kind, set in 1948. Midcentury America was a period rife with contradictions, a time of relief after the Second World War but paranoia that communism would infiltrate and corrupt the “American way of life,” a time of technological progress, such as television and space travel, but conservative regress, limiting the roles of women in the home and the workplace and oppressing Blacks and LGBTQ+ people (from the racist G.I. Bill to the Lavender Scare) and a time of economic prosperity and future-thinking cast in the shadow of the threat of nuclear extinction.
Let Them Be Morally Flawed: In Defense of Queer Villains in Stories
Queerness and villainy have a long history of being conflated by mainstream entertainment, from Peter Lorre’s effeminate and threatening Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon to the obsessed and manipulative Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to, more humorously, the violent Lord Humungus from Mad Max, decked out in leather fetish gear, to the many queer-coded Disney villains, such as the Evil (Drag) Queen in Snow White to the preening Jafar in Aladdin.
Queering Crime Stories: Establishing a New Order in Mysteries and Thrillers
A traditional mystery or whodunit offers a recognizable milieu with social and physical limitations, whether it’s a small village or a city apartment building. The inciting incident is a crime, often a murder, that ruptures its peaceful status quo. To restore order, the transgressor must be discovered and brought to justice. The world as it appears, which has been taken for granted, must be exposed as fraudulent by the detective. While the events have changed characters and illusions have fallen away by the end, the moral order that was initially violated regains its shape. The ethical system in which the community operates is rarely questioned in a typical whodunit; the order being restored is, well, an old order, one it assumes the audience supports, and the vanquishing of the villain is a celebration of the durability of that order. This is understandably reassuring. It’s why so many people watched Murder She Wrote re-runs during the pandemic and the unrest after the murder of George Floyd—but can it be problematic?
Writing Across Difference: Responsibly Writing Characters Different From You
In the publishing world, there’s much debate about the ethics of telling a story about a person who identifies differently than the author, particularly if the writer is privileged and writes about traditionally marginalized and underprivileged characters. Can a straight author write from the perspective of a queer character ethically? Can a white author write from the perspective of a Black character in a morally responsible way? Can a cis man write from the perspective of a trans character empathetically? And on and on.
The short answer is yes.
Electric Lit: 13 Queer Thrillers and Mystery Novels You Should Be Reading
In the past few years, books written by and about queer characters have become more visible to the general reading public. Gradually, straight, cisgender readers are discovering the pleasure of reading books by authors whose identities are different from their own. This is true in the mystery and thriller reading world as well.
In my new novel, Hall of Mirrors, a mystery set in 1954 Washington, D.C., about two gay writers who co-author hard-boiled detective fiction under the macho moniker Ray Kane, I explore writing from the closet, the complexity of inventing a false persona to sell books, which in the 1950s was often necessary to find broad appeal to consumers, not to mention to avoid being discriminated against and persecuted. Thankfully, today, things have changed (for the most part), and readers of all types are reaching for queer books precisely because they want to read LGBTQIA+ characters (assuming a book ban doesn’t block their ability to access these books).
Why are plot twists pleasurable?
If you’re a crime fiction lover, you’re most likely a fan of plot twists. I know I am. I've had several twists and turns in all of my novels, including my most recent novel, Hall of Mirrors.
But why do we like these twists so much? On reflection, I love the moment when I’m forced to reevaluate the narrative I’ve been told, where nothing is as it seems. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) provides one such moment (spoiler alert): When we discover that Amy Dunne’s diary is a fraud, a convincing invention designed to implicate her husband Nick in her faked murder, we’re forced to reevaluate Amy and Nick, and the dynamic of their relationship. We also must confront our own gullibility. Amy’s not only tricking Nick and the police; she’s fooling us. We’re implicated. The famous reveal of Agatha Christie’s 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where our narrator is also our villain, laid the groundwork for Flynn’s brilliant psychological novel.
Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer Equates Queerness with Monstrosity
When Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, I was sixteen years old and struggling with my sexuality. I grew up in a small town in southwestern Virginia and attended an all-boys prep school in central Virginia, both places isolated and unsafe to be out. Unlike now, positive examples of gay men like Pete Buttigeig, Dan Levy, or RuPaul weren’t in the media, and certainly gay historical figures weren’t taught in the classrooms. Instead, I had Dahmer, whose criminality the media clumsily and maliciously mingled with his sexuality, implying that there was a relationship between the two.
When I heard that Ryan Murphy, the writer, director, and producer best known for the TV shows Glee and American Horror Story, was making Dahmer, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story for Netflix with his long-standing collaborator Ian Brennan, my stomach churned, and my curiosity was piqued. Indeed, it was a double and, perhaps, paradoxical reaction: a physical revulsion at the idea of dredging up Dahmer’s horrors for profit and a true interest in how the series would handle the material artistically. My question: Would Murphy and Brennan counter the media’s initial treatment of the story and offer a truer, more balanced representation of the nightmare?
Femmes Fatales, Queer Rage, and Me
THE “FEMME FATALE” gained a popular foothold in the detective fiction of the 1930s and then, even more visibly, in the great films noir of the 1940s and ’50s. In these narratives, the femme fatale often seizes command of the straight male gaze and harnesses it to her own purposes, her own pursuit of power. Given the dominant patriarchal attitudes of the era, in these storylines she is almost always revealed to be deceitful, cold, and self-serving. This being the era of the Hays Production Code, she is predestined to be punished, often to the point of death. Because she represents a woman trying to establish agency for herself, she is bound to be shut down. The narrative is making the implicit point that powerful women pose a threat to straight male dominance. It’s not surprising, then, that her popularity as a villain was never higher than when service men were returning from World War II seeking employment only to find that many of their jobs were filled by capable women.
Sympathy for the De Vil: Reading Beyond Likability
With the tagline, “I’m Cruella, born brilliant, born bad, and a little bit mad,” the marketing for the villain-revision vehicle Cruella, which landed in theaters this summer, invites a compelling challenge to the viewer: “Watch this film,” Disney dares us, “and fall in love with one of our most vicious villainesses!” Dodie Smith’s dog-killing, dog-skinning heiress sets a high bar on unlikability. For me, a fan of the unlikable, a lover of the hard to love in fiction, the prospect was thrilling.
(Read more.)
CrimeReads—”The Femme Fatale: Subverting and Complicating a Noir Trope”
The femme fatale is a long-standing character type in crime fiction, a prominent and popular fixture of the mid-twentieth-century hard-boiled detective novel. Her overt sexuality is her chief weapon, greed is her underlying desire, and her fate is bleak, without redemption. It’s also a misogynist archetype, a product of the male crime writer’s anxiety about his diminished standing in Depression Era America and later his fraught reintegration into civilian life after World War II.
Electric Lit: "10 LGBTQ Crime Fiction Must-Reads"
The act of coming out is an unveiling. Since queer people live in a straight, cis-gendered dominant culture, we have the burden of proclaiming our sexual orientation or our gender identity. As a narrative, the coming-out story is one we’re familiar with, and one we’ve embraced. Crime stories have a similar structure, which perhaps is why they resonate with queer readers and writers: the tension of withheld secrets, the satisfying snap of the puzzle pieces fitting together, the wonder of the reveal. We’re drawn to a narrative where the unknown becomes known. Where motives are made clear. Where identity is made evident.
CrimeReads: "Closure: Crime Fiction's Most Satisfying and Elusive Gift"
Several years ago, I decided to redecorate my office. The idea was to make it more aesthetically conducive to writing: fresh paint in pleasing earth tones, new furniture made from recycled pallet wood, everywhere clean, modern surfaces—a blank canvas from which to create. In truth, it was an elaborate (and expensive) excuse to procrastinate revising the ending of my novel, Dodging and Burning. One Saturday, passionately avoiding my laptop, I grabbed my husband, and we moved the furniture out and ripped up the frayed wall-to-wall Berber carpeting. Underneath, we discovered a loose board in the pine flooring. Our curiosity piqued, we removed it. Between the support beams, peeking through the dust, we found a treasure trove: three Chesterfield cigarette packets, two Hershey bar wrappers, an ad for women’s cosmetics, a hand-drawing (perhaps a tracing) of the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, and the remains of a letter penned by a woman named Catherine, all dating back to the 1920’s or early 1930’s.
Southern Writers—Suite T: "Crafting Revelation in Fiction One Detail at a Time"
Revelation in fiction comes in many forms: In a murder mystery, the curtain is pulled back on the identity of the culprit. In other narratives, the curtain is pulled back on the true nature of a character. For a revelation to work in fiction, it must feel surprising and inevitable to the reader. These qualities seem contradictory but in the hands of a skilled writer, the tension between the inevitable and the surprising is always present; it is the only way a revelation is fairly earned.