Salon.com > Mysteries http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 A sex traffic mystery http://www.salon.com/2012/03/10/hanging_hill_mo_hayder/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/10/hanging_hill_mo_hayder/#comments Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12656311 Nobody concludes a novel quite the way Mo Hayder does: with a revelation that leaves the reader staring at the page, poleaxed, willing more words to appear or flicking back to see just how she did it. Hayder's astonishing 2007 horror novel "Pig Island," for example, ended with the stunned narrator, framed for murder, watching his nemesis depart and "something coiled and dark, like smoke or a spirit, lifting itself out of the car and hovering near the roof…" Now, on the final page of "Hanging Hill," a mother lovingly watches her young daughter and a friend drive off to the Glastonbury Festival. "The van turned left. Not right, the way she would have gone…. Leave them alone, she thought…. You just can't go on worrying about your children for ever." Worrying: a quaint, domestic impulse; utterly redundant in the terrifying world that Hayder creates.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/10/hanging_hill_mo_hayder/feed/ 4 National Review asks why Obama reads critically acclaimed fiction instead of Jonah Goldberg http://www.salon.com/2011/08/23/obama_fiction/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/23/obama_fiction/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/politics//war_room/2011/08/23/obama_fiction Barack Obama is reading gritty rural neo-noir by an acknowledged master of the crime fiction genre, and the National Review is not happy with him. The president bought Daniel Woodrell's "Bayou Trilogy," along with a number of other novels, at a Martha's Vineyard bookstore, and Tevi Troy, a "senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former senior White House aide" ("senior fellow at the Hudson Institute" means "minor Republican apparatchik in need of a paycheck while his party's out of power") is analyzing the president's reading list for you.

The reports are in about the books President Obama is looking at on his annual trip to Martha’s Vineyard. According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante.

The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/23/obama_fiction/feed/ 160 The latest “Game of Thrones” casting news http://www.salon.com/2011/07/08/game_of_thrones_season_two_casting_christie/ http://www.salon.com/2011/07/08/game_of_thrones_season_two_casting_christie/#comments Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:09:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2011/07/08/game_of_thrones_season_two_casting_christie George R.R. Martin's blog, "Not a Blog" (it's a LiveJournal), posted a cryptic message yesterday, about bunnies and Aussies and barbicans.

Since the tag was "Game of Thrones" and "HBO," the collective Internet began salivating as it tried to unravel the mystery. Surprisingly, some people got it.

Turns out all these references were clues about the casting of Brienne, Maid of Tarth, a character that appears in the second "A Song of Fire and Ice" book. British actress Gwendoline Christie snagged the coveted role of a woman described as "piggish" and "awkward" in the books, who is mocked with the nickname "Brienne the Beauty" because she is well … not.

Christie however, is quite a looker, though I see where Martin saw the female knight in her: The actress is 6'3.

Martin revealed the meaning of his riddle later that night:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/07/08/game_of_thrones_season_two_casting_christie/feed/ 6 Pick of the week: A natural-born Romanian killer http://www.salon.com/2011/07/01/aurora_2/ http://www.salon.com/2011/07/01/aurora_2/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/06/30/aurora It's tough to say where Romanian director Cristi Puiu's dark and mesmerizing new film "Aurora" ranks on the "cultural vegetables" scale. On one hand, it's a bone-dry existential comedy, or perhaps a reverse-engineered murder mystery, that runs almost three hours and is far more concerned with capturing the rhythms and rituals of everyday life than with delivering a plot. On the other hand, "Aurora" tells an inherently dramatic story about the moment when an ordinary guy snaps the tether, goes out and buys a gun, and proceeds to wreak bloody vengeance on the world. This is something like "Falling Down," that Joel Schumacher movie with Michael Douglas, as remade by Andrei Tarkovsky or Chantal Akerman.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/07/01/aurora_2/feed/ 8 Heiress’ long-hidden art will go on display http://www.salon.com/2011/06/24/huguette_clark_fortune/ http://www.salon.com/2011/06/24/huguette_clark_fortune/#comments Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:25:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/06/24/huguette_clark_fortune Mysterious multimillionaire Huguette Clark was born into privilege and died, more than a hundred years later, in almost total solitude. While there was plenty of interest in her death last month, very little information could actually be reported: She hadn't been seen in public for decades, and few could guess what might happen to her $400 million fortune and uninhabited luxury properties in California, New York and Connecticut.

In her May obituary, the Los Angeles Times described Clark as "a copper tycoon's daughter with a taste for exquisite French dolls, baronial homes and solitude;" the New York Times labelled her "the last link to New York’s Gilded Age" -- a relic from "the city’s glory days of Astors, Guggenheims and Vanderbilts." Clark had been raised in a different world, and (or so the papers implied) she seemed to have stayed there, isolating herself from the twenty-first century and its inhabitants.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/06/24/huguette_clark_fortune/feed/ 3 The mystery of the comic book hipster cops http://www.salon.com/2011/04/22/comic_book_hipster_cops/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/22/comic_book_hipster_cops/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:50:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/04/22/comic_book_hipster_cops Here's a riddle for you: How can the same two characters appear multiple times in different comic books without anyone noticing their existence?

Give up? By hiding in plain sight, dressed as police officers. It sounds as unlikely as a man more powerful than a locomotive, I know, but it's true: Just check out what "Detective Comics'" head writer Scott Snyder discovered while leafing through some of the newer superhero comic books.

He is right, these "hipster cops" are everywhere: Scott's found examples in both DC and Marvel series like "Batman" "Spider-Man," "Iron Man" and "Wonder Woman." The duo looks relatively the same in every copy: a redheaded dude with a soul patch and glasses and a dark-haired gentleman with a perpetual 5 o'clock shadow. Scott notes that these comics all come from different publishing houses, and are illustrated by different people. So just who are these comic-hopping extras?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/22/comic_book_hipster_cops/feed/ 7 10 year time capsule: The puzzle movie hits made possible by DVD http://www.salon.com/2011/03/22/10_year_time_capsule_memento_donnie_darko_muholland_drive/ http://www.salon.com/2011/03/22/10_year_time_capsule_memento_donnie_darko_muholland_drive/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:37:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2011/03/22/10_year_time_capsule_memento_donnie_darko_muholland_drive In 2001, DVD players outsold VCRs for the first time ever. I can't claim that this advent of home technology was the reason that "puzzle films" like Christopher Nolan's "Memento," David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" and Richard Kelly's "Donnie Darko" caught on, but it's a reasonably sound guess. With VCRs, you could watch a film at home, you could pause it, and you could rewind it. But DVDs were made to withstand intense scrutiny: high-res freeze-frames, replaying and jumping chapters, and of course those neat little bonus features that held the promise of providing supplemental material to the film.

Before "Memento" was released to the public on March 16, 2001, the most popular thriller mysteries of the past several years had been films like "The Sixth Sense" and "The Usual Suspects." Both great movies, sure, but both included clear expository endings to make sure the audiences understood what the hell they had just paid good money to see. But when Andy Klein wrote his definitive "Everything You Wanted to Know About 'Memento'" essay for Salon and created a numerical and alphabetical system to use to watch the scenes of the film in chronological order, it was only because DVDs had recently given us the ability to do so. As Andy says:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/03/22/10_year_time_capsule_memento_donnie_darko_muholland_drive/feed/ 20 Have scientists found the lost city of Atlantis? http://www.salon.com/2011/03/14/atlantis_found_national_geographic/ http://www.salon.com/2011/03/14/atlantis_found_national_geographic/#comments Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/03/14/atlantis_found_national_geographic Legend has it that the the ancient civilization of Atlantis was engulfed by waves in the days of yore. But historians have long cast doubt on the verity of that myth, its lone historical reference in Plato's dialogues 2,600 years ago. One University of Hartford professor, however, thinks he found the fabled island nation. In a documentary special that aired last night on the National Geographic Channel, Dr. Richard Freund claims his research team found the resting place of the antiquity's biggest mystery in a vast marshland in Southern Spain, just north of the Strait of Gibraltar.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/03/14/atlantis_found_national_geographic/feed/ 3 Artifacts found in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office http://www.salon.com/2010/09/20/ml_iraq_antiquities_1/ http://www.salon.com/2010/09/20/ml_iraq_antiquities_1/#comments Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:46:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/09/20/ml_iraq_antiquities_1 More than 600 ancient artifacts that were smuggled out of Iraq, recovered and lost again have been found misplaced among kitchen supplies in storage at the prime minister's office, the antiquities minister said Monday.

The 638 items include pieces of jewelry, bronze figurines and cylindrical seals from the world's most ancient civilizations that were looted from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. After their recovery, the U.S. military delivered them last year to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office, where they were misplaced and forgotten about.

The artifacts, packed in sealed boxes, were misplaced because of poor coordination between the Iraqi government ministries in charge of recovering and handling archaeological treasures, said Tourism and Antiquities Minister Qahtan al-Jabouri.

He blamed "inappropriate handover procedures" but did not go into detail.

Iraqi and world culture officials have for years struggled to retrieve looted treasures but with little success.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/09/20/ml_iraq_antiquities_1/feed/ 3 “Faithful Place”: Tana French turns the detective story inside out http://www.salon.com/2010/07/04/faithful_place/ http://www.salon.com/2010/07/04/faithful_place/#comments Sun, 04 Jul 2010 23:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/07/04/faithful_place You know Frank Mackey's type. You've met him many, many times before, in hundreds of films and TV series and in dozens of crime novels. He's a police detective, in Dublin, and he's street-, rather than book-smart. He Doesn't Play by the Rules, which means that he's always ticking off The Brass, and, yes, he's something of a hothead, but that's because he can't stand the politics, and justice is so hard to come by for the innocent victims of this dirty world. He Gets the Job Done, Whatever the Cost, and his obsession with this has left him with a broken marriage under his belt. He has a lot of dark, haunted moments. But then there's Holly, his 9-year-old daughter, the one unsullied thing in his life; he'd do anything to protect her from the ugliness he's witnessed.

In other words, Frank looks like one of crime fiction's stock crusader types (although, thank god, he hasn't got a murdered family to avenge, the cheapest, tiredest device in the TV screenwriter's toolbox). He's the guy Raymond Chandler was talking about when he wrote, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/07/04/faithful_place/feed/ 19 “The Killer Inside Me”: Much ado about misogyny http://www.salon.com/2010/06/17/killer_inside_me/ http://www.salon.com/2010/06/17/killer_inside_me/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/06/17/killer_inside_me As was already clear when I wrote about the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of "The Killer Inside Me" two months ago, Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's legendary 1950s crime novel is likely to provoke a strong, and strongly divided, response. "The Killer Inside Me" tells the story of Lou Ford (played by Casey Affleck), who presents as an all-American deputy sheriff in small-town Texas but gradually slides into psychotic, misogynistic violence.

Since Lou narrates the Thompson novel, and film is by its nature a more detached and objective medium than fiction, there are limits to how well Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran can capture the book's eerie, haunting power, or Lou's willful lack of self-knowledge. But the novel's most notorious scene, in which Lou calmly pulls on a pair of black gloves and sets about beating his hooker girlfriend to death, all the while apologizing to her and telling her he loves her, is rendered in explosive and terrifying detail. It serves as a rupture in the film's narrative of reality, one almost as dramatic as the moment when the film appears to break in the projector during Bergman's "Persona."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/06/17/killer_inside_me/feed/ 53 “Dead, brutalized women sell books” http://www.salon.com/2009/10/26/misogynistic_crime_fiction/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/26/misogynistic_crime_fiction/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:27:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//feature/2009/10/26/misogynistic_crime_fiction I recently ran across a blog post in which the author solicited recommendations of crime fiction that was, if not explicitly feminist, then at least not explicitly misogynistic. As a fan of the genre, I read the comments eagerly, only to find the most common response amounted to: "Uhhh...." And nearly every title that was suggested as at least mostly fitting the bill was historical crime fiction, not anything with a contemporary setting. (Laurie R. King, who's written a series about a female apprentice to Sherlock Holmes, got far and away the most nods.) I was bummed to come away with so few new book recommendations, but since I'm also a fan of many other genres and it was just one blog post, I didn't think too much about the disappointing result.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/26/misogynistic_crime_fiction/feed/ 35 Summer reading: Killer thrillers http://www.salon.com/2009/06/02/thrillers/ http://www.salon.com/2009/06/02/thrillers/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/summer_reading/2009/06/02/thrillers When the days grow long and hot, some readers reach for fizzy novels about sex and shopping, or warm-hearted accounts of potato peel societies and ya-ya sisterhoods. Not me. I want blood and murder, intrigue and treachery, dark secrets and paranoia. A good thriller is what keeps me devouring the pages through summer's sultry afternoons and long flights.

Yet despite the vast popularity of the genre, decent thrillers are hard to come by. Even a writer who's delivered the goods in the past (I'm looking at you, Carlos Ruiz Zafon!) can disappoint. Some of the worst specimens have hokey plots whose "twists" you can spot a mile away; others feature characters so flimsy and dialogue so clichéd they make your average Stephen Seagal movie look like Ingmar Bergman. Most are just plain dull -- and can there be anything more dispiriting than a thriller that fails to thrill? Yes, there can: the knowledge that said thrill-less thriller is the only book in your beach tote or carry-on bag.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/06/02/thrillers/feed/ 9 “The Birthday Present” http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06/rendell/ http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06/rendell/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:44:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/03/06/rendell Barbara Vine's new novel, "The Birthday Present," is a tale of two monsters -- monsters of the entirely human and not especially exotic variety, that is. One is Ivor Tesham, a young, rich and handsome Tory M.P. who, in 199o, arranges the pretend kidnapping of his married mistress, Hebe, as a sex game. The other is Jane Atherton, Hebe's drab and resentful school friend, who has been providing the adulterous wife with alibis for the evenings she spends with Ivor. The "kidnapping" results in a fatal accident on a London street, leading in turn to two crucial choices. Neither Ivor nor Jane, apparently the only ones left who know what Hebe was doing handcuffed in the back of a van, come forward with that knowledge. Each is motivated by pure selfishness, and a terrible machinery of chance and fate is set into motion.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06/rendell/feed/ 0 Salon Book Awards 2008 http://www.salon.com/2008/12/08/2008/ http://www.salon.com/2008/12/08/2008/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:29:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/awards/2008/12/08/2008 The conventional wisdom in publishing holds that tough economic times are good for books, because books provide more hours of entertainment per dollar, more life-enhancing education and more grist for post-materialistic soul-searching than any other form of purchasable culture.

Then again, 2008 was a year when all conventional wisdom went south, and we end it with layoffs in many of the largest publishing companies and an announcement from Houghton/Harcourt, a recently merged fusion of two venerable houses, that, for the time being, they will not be acquiring any new manuscripts. (Publishers have imposed informal buying freezes in the past, but announcing it publicly is almost unprecedented.) On the other hand, the Hachette Book Group, its coffers fattened by the "Twilight" series of teen vampire romance novels and James Patterson’s unnervingly productive thriller-industrial complex, is dishing out bonuses at a time when even hedge fund managers feel lucky to still be getting a paycheck.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/12/08/2008/feed/ 29 “When Will There Be Good News?” http://www.salon.com/2008/09/23/atkinson/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/23/atkinson/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:38:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2008/09/23/atkinson In real life, violent crime is a horror; in popular fiction it's the occasion for light entertainment. English novelist Kate Atkinson has been fruitfully exploring the chasm between the two for several years now, inventing new ways to write about murder and its aftermath in three books featuring the same protagonist, Jackson Brodie. The latest is "When Will There Be Good News?" and it is, like its two predecessors, a work of fancy, genre-bending footwork in which a rueful, cranky, modern comedy-of-manners dances an intricate minuet with an unlikely partner: a kidnapping plot. You don't need to have read the earlier two books to appreciate this one, but I can't think of any reason to deny yourself the delights of all three.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/23/atkinson/feed/ 9 A murdered wife who isn’t dead http://www.salon.com/2008/06/30/tell_no_one/ http://www.salon.com/2008/06/30/tell_no_one/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:52:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/06/30/tell_no_one

Revolver Entertainment

François Cluzet in "Tell No One."

Adapted from a novel by best-selling American mystery writer Harlan Coben, Guillaume Canet's hit French thriller "Tell No One" has a certain mid-Atlantic hardness about it, an undercurrent of profound psychological or spiritual disturbance that doesn't quite seem French but isn't exactly American either. Canet, a 35-year-old acting-writing-directing phenom, has transposed the book's upscale and downscale New York locations to Paris and environs, packed the cast with top-notch Gallic acting talent, and made a film that clicks along efficiently from one hair-raising discovery to the next (although at two hours-plus, it's both longer and denser than most Hollywood genre pictures these days).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/06/30/tell_no_one/feed/ 6 Summer reads http://www.salon.com/2008/05/26/summer_reads1/ http://www.salon.com/2008/05/26/summer_reads1/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 11:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/05/26/summer_reads1 Memorial Day brings the promise of summer: languorous days spent lounging at the beach or by the air conditioner with the perfect page-turner. A mesmerizing potboiler, a heady historic tome, a gripping memoir -- you want a book that transports you to exotic places without making you go through airport security. You want something you can really sink your teeth into, but that won't leave you feeling overstuffed. In the coming weeks, Salon's staff will recommend a selection of summer reads -- mysteries, chick lit, memoirs and fiction with a historical twist.

This week's focus is thrillers: a suburban family is menaced by shady secrets and unexpected dangers; an art forger gets sucked into a bizarre conspiracy; a Stalin-era communist apparatchik seeks to redeem himself by uncovering a crime; an enigmatic college professor asks his class to unravel a hypothetical (or is it?) murder; and a divorcee becomes a mother-avenger as she searches for her missing teenage daughter.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Hold Tight"
By Harlan Coben

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/05/26/summer_reads1/feed/ 26 The witty detective http://www.salon.com/2008/04/18/fowler/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/18/fowler/#comments Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:26:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/04/18/fowler "If only she would stop speaking French. Or go to France, where it would be less noticeable."

"It occurred to her belatedly that Oliver's judgments were not a sound foundation for her own actions. He was, after all, in a spectacular lapse of judgment, dead."

"Every woman in Cleveland was in love with him -- the number of women who wished to date him was directly inverse to the number of boys who wished to date Rima, if negative numbers could be applied, and Rima felt they could. And he wasn't even completely real. (But when has that ever stopped a woman in love?)"

In a Karen Joy Fowler punch line, the punch seems to land a couple of beats after the line, hurling you backward and forward, with no collateral damage to anyone. That equipoise is a function of the author's ear, and in her last book, the bestselling "The Jane Austen Book Club," the pitch rarely wavered, right up to and including the title, which managed in a single swipe to siphon off its target demographic. Presented with that book cover, pretty much every straight man in America executes a 180-degree pivot, scanning the horizon for Colin Harrison titles, while his bookish girlfriend -- the one with the Colin Firth screen saver and the cats named after the Brontë sisters and the serious stash of tea -- stays rooted in place, eyes shimmering. She's home.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/18/fowler/feed/ 1 Richard Price’s criminal intelligence http://www.salon.com/2008/03/10/richard_price/ http://www.salon.com/2008/03/10/richard_price/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/03/10/richard_price After years of hanging out with cops, Richard Price has developed uncanny powers of mimicry and observation when it comes to the lives of small-time criminals. Only the novelist George Pelecanos, a fellow screenwriter for "The Wire," and their mentor, Elmore Leonard, are his rivals, and I doubt even they hear as many kinds of crazy music in American speech as Price does. Most of his books and screenplays since "Clockers" seem driven by a wish to glorify the endlessly creative ways English is pulverized and recast in the mouths of black and Latino teenagers and white law enforcement. He is as enamored of police bureaucratese (of shorthand terms like "vics" and "eye-wits") as he is of raunchy slang. I pity his foreign-language translators.

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