The Jury is: You!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: To Kill A Mockingbird. Presumed Innocent. Defending Jacob. Twelve Angry Men. Oh, don’t even get me started. I adore legal thrillers, and devour them.

(And may I say? THE MURDER LIST was the NUMBER ONE legal thriller on Amazon this week. And here is the astonishing proof! Whoa. And um, now it is ON SALE! for 1.99. Whoa.)

But didn’t you adore Adam’s Rib? A Few Good Men. Compulsion. Witness for the Prosecution. Oh, as I said. Don’t get me started. But attorney/author Michael Kahn—welcome to Jungle Red!--has some faves of his own.

Great Legal Thrillers

by Michael Kahn, author of BAD TRUST: A Rachel Gold Mystery



"Do you ever wish you could write a real novel?"

Ah, yes. The Question.

Every writer of legal thrillers hears it. Usually served with a withering disclaimer, such as "I confess I haven't read any of your works" or "I'm just not what one might call an aficionado of the whodunit." As if the commandments Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai included, "Thou shalt place no Perry Masons before thee."

Welcome to the world of the literary snob, that rarified zone where the so-called genre fictions — mysteries, horror, romance — are the riffraff of fiction, grubbing out an existence in that noisy rock quarry far beneath that celestial realm known as "literature.” And no amount of examples from Erle Stanley Gardner to Scott Turow will convince our snob. That’s because, as he will snidely point out, you won’t find those books on the syllabus of any Great World Literature college course.

Okay. Let’s take him up on that claim. He may not realize that the legal thriller, with its courtroom clash of vivid personalities, compelling facts, and moral dilemmas, has inspired playwrights and novelists for centuries. 

Fictional lawyers and trials have played a significant role in literary classics since at least Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, whose cast of pilgrims includes the Man of Law. Others might point further back to the trial of Socrates in 399 B.C.E.

I’ve picked three of my favorite literary classics that use the courtroom as their dramatic engine. All three would make any snob’s list of great literature. The common theme in these three is a grim one: a courtroom is no place to seek justice, redemption, or satisfactory closure.

We readers watch from the courtroom gallery as the legal system grinds out injustice in the name of the law in these brilliant works of literature.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Bleak House is one of the greatest novels by one of the giants of English literature. It is also, in the words of one legal scholar, “the ultimate indictment of law, lawyers, and the legal system in the English language."
The engine of this novel is a massive trusts-and-estates case that has been slogging through the Court of Chancery for decades. In a novel filled with wonderfully Dickensian names—the money-grubbing attorney Vholes, the arrogant baronet Sir Dedlock, the sleazy loan shark Smallweed—it is fitting that the lawsuit’s name sounds more like a double dose of symptoms from a liver ailment: Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

The essence of what Dickens has to say about justice and the legal system is captured in the novel’s extraordinary first chapter—which, in my view, is the most vivid opening chapter in all of English literature. It starts with the equivalent of a Hollywood tracking shot through the streets of London on a cold and muddy November morning:

“As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."

The sky is overcast, the city shrouded in fog, as we approach the Court of Chancery:

"The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”

Dickens then introduces us to the proceedings underway. He captures that lawsuit, every bit as foggy and dangerous as London itself, in one magical paragraph, which begins:

“This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.

Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit.”

Finish reading that paragraph, and the rest of that enthralling first chapter, and you will be hooked.

Billy Budd: Foretopman by Herman Melville

The manuscript for this remarkable novella was discovered among Herman Melville’s papers after his death. Finally published three decades later in 1924, it’s now recognized as a masterpiece, second only to Moby Dick amount Melville’s works.

The pretrial plot is fairly straightforward: Set in 1797, the British Navy has been rocked by two mutinies. Billy Budd, a guileless young seaman, is impressed into duty by a warship in need of sailors as the Royal Navy struggles to confront Napoleon’s navy. The cheerful, innocent Billy, an orphan, is soon the favorite of the crew on his new ship. His only flaw: He stutters severely when under distress.

The malevolent master-at-arms, John Claggert, develops a hatred of young Billy, perhaps based on jealousy, and eventually accuses him of conspiring to mutiny—a profoundly serious charge in the aftermath of the other two mutinies. The ship’s decent and honorable captain, Edward Fairfax Vere, summons both men to his cabin, where he has Claggert repeat his false charge. Billy is literally rendered speechless—so upset that he is unable to respond to the accusation. The Captain, knowing the charge is false, tries to soothe him, but Billy, unable to speak, punches Claggert, who drops to the deck and dies.

Believing the law and the concern over the prior mutinies leaves him no choice, Captain Vere reluctantly convenes a drumhead court, i.e., a court martial held aboard a ship at sea. The trial, the jury deliberations, and the aftermath are among the most powerful and poignant scenes in all of Melville’s writings. Spoiler alert: the epilogue may make you misty-eyed as you read the words of the ballad sung by sailors around the world in memory of poor Billy.

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

The trial in Act IV of The Merchant of Venice has long been recognized as one of the most dramatic scenes in all of Shakespeare. It takes place in the Court of the Duke of Venice, where Shylock comes seeking to enforce a promissory note signed by Antonio, the merchant of the play’s title.

That note contains the infamous bond provision: If Antonio defaults, Shylock is entitled to the security pledged, namely, a pound of Antonio’s flesh. While that bond may seem absurdly grotesque outside the context of the play, by the time Shylock arrives in court he is by far the most complex and compelling character in the play, and the enforcement he demands makes sense within the play’s version of Venice.

Indeed, earlier in the play, when it appears that Antonio may default, one of Antonio’s friends asks Shylock why he would ever enforce such a bond. What is a pound of Antonio’s flesh good for? His answer, one of the most famous passages in all of Shakespeare, is “revenge”--revenge for the ways Antonio has abused him because of his religion:

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?

Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?

If you poison us, do we not die?

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?

Revenge.

If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?

Why, revenge!”

The great Shakespeare critic William Hazlett describes the courtroom scene in Act IV as “a masterpiece of dramatic skill,” explaining that “the legal acuteness, the passionate declamations, the sound maxims of jurisprudence, the wit and irony interspersed in it, the fluctuations of hope and fear in the different persons, and the completeness and suddenness of the catastrophe, cannot be surpassed."

Enjoy, in the theater or in one of the motion picture adaptations, including the most recent one with Al Pacino as Shylock.

So those are three of my favorite works of literature that qualify as legal thrillers. So here is my request: can you offer one or more legal thrillers from your own reading lists? Any language, any country, any century will do.

HANK: Oh, how wonderful! Loved reading this, and so wonderfully thoughtful. (Don’t you enjoy being here? Oh, we think about such wonderful things!) But I am in love with legal thrillers, as you well know, and listed above. I have left out SO many! So yes, Reds and readers, what are your favorites?

And hey--a copy of BAD TRUST to one lucky commenter, and THE MURDER LIST ebook to FIVE lucky commenters!






MICHAEL KAHN

A trial lawyer by day and a writer by night, Michael Kahn is the award-winning author of ten Rachel Gold novels (including his latest, BAD TRUST, the stand-alone novel THE SIRENA QUEST, another stand-alone novel THE MOURNING SEXTON (under the pen name Michael Baron); and several short stories.

His latest novel, PLAYED!, was published in July of 2017. As Kirkus Reviews wrote, “the spectacle of these ornaments of the Missouri bar attacking, undermining, and double-crossing each other provides brisk, sprightly entertainment, and the hapless defendant’s baseball background comes into play just when it’s most needed.”

A former elementary school teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, Mike wrote his first novel, GRAVE DESIGNS, on a challenge from his wife Margi, who got tired of listening to the same answer whenever she asked him about a book he was reading. “Not bad,” he would say, “but I could write a better book than that.”

“Then write one,” she finally said, “or please shut up. I don’t want to hear you fifty years from now telling your great-grandkids that you could have written a book.”

BAD TRUST

In this fascinating and fast-paced legal thriller, attorney Rachel Gold learns that family doesn't always come first...

An ugly trust fund dispute among siblings turns deadly when Isaiah, CEO of the family firm he stole from their father, is murdered in his office. St. Louis attorney Rachel Gold, hired to bring suit against Isaiah on behalf of his sisters, must now defend one against the charge of fratricide.

As Rachel and her team seek essential evidence, the widowed Rachel struggles with family issues of her own, including relationships with her young son Sam and her boyfriend Abe. The jury is still out on whether or not Rachel can create the work-life balance she is seeking.

Bad Trust, the 11th book in the fascinating Attorney Rachel Gold Mysteries, is the perfect pick for fans of Lisa Scottoline and Sara Paretsky.

. ..

Reds Confess!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: The fabulous Shelf Awareness asked me to do their wonderful "Reading With...." feature (hurray, such an honor) and you can read it here! It's fun.
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2897#m34768  

But one of the questions they asked me was "What book have you faked reading?"

This is a serious and fraught question, and requires one to confess any number of literary lapses. My answer:

"MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT by Charles Dickens. My high school class was assigned to read it in April of the year we graduated. It was 500 pages and we rebelled. We all got together and divvied up the book, each read part of it and then compared notes. Then we all wrote essays on Sairey Gamp. Sorry, Miss Godfrey. We loved your English class, and Dickens, but we were done with high school."

I also, in high school, fake-read ETHAN FROME. I thought it was ridiculous. (Sorry, Mr. Thornburg. I loved your English class, too. And sorry I said I read it. None of us did.) Now, of course, I love Edith Wharton, beyond all love, and  so it all worked out very nicely.)

Okay, Reds, confess!

LUCY BURDETTE: this is so embarrassing that I'm only admitting to one. It's bad for a psychologist to say this, but mine my fake (poorly done, since this was a small seminar and it was completely obvious who wasn't participating) was THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud. I was working full-time and this class was an extra, so time was an issue. But more important was the fact that the book was a mass market paperback about a foot thick. (Ok, an exaggeration, but still almost 500 pages.) Though I admire the man and found his theories fascinating, this book was impenetrable. (We weren't smart enough to divvy it up like you did Hank!) I was relieved to find this chunk of prose in an Amazon review:

"Freud successfully makes his point within the first 75 pages of the book - the remaining 400 pages are a dry, archaic, tiresome, and in my opinion are not worth the time to read. Much of the book is dedicated to analysis of the dreams of either Freud or Freud's patients. Since Freud lived in early twentieth century Germany, the dreams described are anachronisms and for the most part are irrelevant. Also, I think a lot of meaning is lost in the translation from German to English."

HALLIE EPHRON: This is why I did not even consider majoring in English. I'm a slow, very undisciplined, sloppy reader. I'd say MOST of my assigned reading in high school and even college I, ahem, skimmed. I got pretty good at going to the library and looking up criticism of whatever the assigned book was and rewriting it in my own words. Of course that was in the days before the Internet; it would be so much easier now. I remember it wasn't until I was out of college that I actually read a book for pleasure and remembered what fun it is.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I didn't major in English either, Hallie. What is REALLY embarrassing for

me is all the books I just plain haven't read, and I mean the books that literate people are supposed to have read. My list is scary. On the other hand, I read things that I liked obsessively, so am pretty well versed in a lot of odd things. But as for not having read things I said I'd read, hmm. JULIUS CAESAR in 10th grade English. I did not like that play. And I have no idea how I passed that class...

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Okay, here's mine, and it's a doozy for a self-proclaimed nerd: I've never read THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I loved THE HOBBIT as a young person, but the Rings just seemed so long and boring at the time. Then years passed, and the movies came out, and well - why bother wading through the endless descriptions of too-good-to-be true elves when you can look at Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen?

In the just-never-got-to-it category, I am still innocent of all the great Russian writers. Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak - I've ignored all the greats. This is even more embarrassing since one of my best friends love them so much she keeps Russian novels in the bathroom to read.

And my biggest miss in my own genre... I've never read any of the Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane books. (Ducks against incoming fire.)

HANK: Oh, Julia, you are in for a treat!  And I never read any Little House on the Prairie books, OR Anne of Green Gables. But I never  pretended to.  Debs, they should NOT start with Julius Caesar. It is so great, but 10th grade is not the time. And I did major in English! For which I am endlessly grateful. (Except I missed out on out physics, which I would have loved except for the math part. But that's another blog.)

Okay readers: Your turn! What books have you FAKE read?

It's Jungle Red Thank You Day!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Susan Elia MacNeal inspired me to this, she doesn’t know it, but she did. We were talking about the breathtakingly terrible events of last week—yes, other of the seemingly unending list of terrible events—but because it was journalists, it was…well, home.

Susan quoted Winston Churchill.  “These are stern times,” he said. And yes, they are.

And it made me wonder about legacy, and the tiny spit of time we each get, and  making sure we let people know things. I know Jungle Red is supposed to be fun and upbeat, and we are, so let’s...do this. 

Thomas Thornburg/Pike HIgh School 1967 

Tell us someone you want to make sure you thank.  Mom, of course, and Dad, goes without saying. But Mr. Thornburg, for instance, my high school English teacher who taught me about Shakespeare. And Alice Blitch, a college professor who took me aside and told me I was talented. She didn’t have to, you know? She just did.

Fred Heckman, the brusque-but-patient news director who hired 20 year old me, with zero experience, as a newbie radio reporter.

This is me on my very first day of work as a radio reporter at WIBC, circa 1971. You  can imagine how Fred felt about me, the very first female reporter at this station! But he taught me how to ask questions. 

My sister Nancy, who is always there. Red Hallie, who swooped me up in mystery world ten years ago, treated me like a real writer. And editor/author Paula Munier, do you know her? Nothing that’s happened to me would have happened without her. 

AnnLeslie Tuttle, editor at MIRA, who in 2005, said—can you rewrite your submission, same story but different sensibility? If you can, I’d love to publish PRIME TIME. And I did, and they did.

Oh, gosh, I could go on. My now-editor at Forge, Kristin Sevick, and agent Lisa Gallagher, and…Jonathan. SO patient! I wouldn’t put up with me, is all I can say.

Thank you thank you.

And here’s your bully pulpit. In these times of trouble, who deserves your thanks?

Julia's mom with Youngest and The Smithie

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: It sounds like an Academy Award speech, but first I need to thank my mother, Lois Fleming, who always made books more-than-plentiful for me, even when the money wasn't, and who taught me much of what I know about composition, and who thought I should be a writer before anyone else did, including myself.

All the SF fans at the long-defunct B5 Unrest who first got me interested in playing around with fiction, Lucy Zahray, aka "The Poison Lady, who recommended my manuscript to the legendary Ruth Cavin when I entered it into the Malice Domestic contest.

Meg Ruley! Love her. 

I'm incredibly grateful to my agent, Meg Ruley, who took me on when I was still in the middle of a three-book deal my first agent had negotiated! For those of you not in the publishing business, that meant she was supporting and advocating for me for several YEARS before she saw any income from my writing. Lots of want-to-be-writers ask, "Why should I give away 15% of my booksales?" The answer is: because an agent like Meg is worth a lot more than that.

And thanks also to Hank! We had a great time hanging around at the San Francisco Bouchercon, and after I got home to Maine, she sent me an email asking if I'd like to consider joining this blog group she was a part of... I said yes and have never regretted it!

HANK: Aw, I remember that! oxoo

HALLIE EPHRON: Hank, you are so generous giving credit. Thanks. And now turnabout is fair play and I thank the generous writers, especially Hank and Lucy and Paula Munier, who are there for me when I’ve written myself into another cul de sac or just feel mopey.

And thanks to… family.

For giving me my first break, my sister Nora who connected me with an editor at the Boston Globe when I’d written an op ed piece about leaving teaching. And my sister Delia who read my first attempts at storytelling and told me the bad news (it needed soooo much work) and the good (I had talent.) And my younger sister Amy who started writing long before I did and so I had to race to keep up. And my mother who blazed the trail for us all as women slash writers and in the process, exposed its pitfalls.

And my husband who rarely uttered the word *but* when I told him what I wanted to do next. And my fantastic daughters who are proof positive that I can do some things really really right, or at least be trusted not to gum up the works.

Hallie is second from right

Teachers: Mr. Gelms who taught journalism at Beverly High. And Barbara Ann Schenkel my 6th grade teacher. Both of them died before I got the chance to thank them properly. If there's a someone you want to thank, DO IT NOW!

HANK: Hallie, who's the guy on the right?? He was..framed.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Wow, I had no idea an email would turn into a post! Churchill actually edited "dark times" into "stern times." I do believe his word choice is important.

People to thank in my life? Mrs. Elizabeth Lewin, at the North Tonawanda Public Library, Iris Skoog of Nardin Academy, Father P.S. Naumann, SJ at Canisius High School, Susan Meyer of Wellesley College, Caitlin Sims, formerly of Dance Magazine. Idria Barone Knecht. 

Noel and Bear, circa 1998

My husband, Noel MacNeal, who didn't laugh when I said I wanted to write a novel and in fact supported me through all kinds of craziness and gifted me all of his Bear in the Big Blue House and Sesame International airline points to travel....

RHYS BOWEN: I'd like to thank all the little people......wait! I don't know any little people.  The ones to whom  I owe a lot are no longer with us. My grandmother and great aunt Min who raised me in my early years, surrounded me with love and taught me the art of story telling. My aunt Gwladys who whisked me away to strange and exotic places and gave me my love of travel.

Best photo EVER! Where is this, Rhys?

Then there are my college friends who have remained close until today. The many wonderful friends I have made in the mystery writing world. Dorothy Cannell who introduced me to my agent (also Meg Ruley) and the fantastic Meg herself. Having an agent and editor who wholeheartedly believe in me-i couldn't ask for more. 

John is seated, right, with adorable child on lap

And of course John who is my first, and most critical reader, who drove me coast to coast three times before any publisher sent me on a book tour, and my kids who keep my life sane and grounded , as in "can you watch the dog and do you have a sleeping bag we can borrow?" and my grandkids. There is no better feeling than having a small child running toward you, arms outstretched and face alight with joy.  I feel truly blessed.

LUCY BURDETTE: My family of course. My poor old dad supported everything I did, even though he could not fathom why in the world I was throwing away all those years of training as a psychologist for...writing mysteries. (I wasn't throwing them away, it turns out. The two careers dovetail brilliantly!) My sister Susan, who was the first writer in the family but consistently supports me nudging in alongside her. John, the best husband ever. How much harder it must be to be married to someone who pushes you away from your dreams instead of toward them!

Roberta and Mr. Dorhout

Mrs. Covey, my fifth grade teacher. Albert Dorhout, high school music teacher and Mr. Schneider, drama teacher, who both encouraged my enthusiasm for the subjects, in spite of a lack of native talent:). And Gabriel Asfar, my adviser in college, who was probably the first person to tell me I was a good writer.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Oh, Hank, this was hard. My first thought was, "How can I choose?" But here's a stab at it: First, always, my maternal grandmother, Lillian Dozier, who taught me to read and to love reading, who shared my dreams and nurtured tiny sparks of ambition, and who told me many times that I could do whatever I set my sights on. My 3rd and 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Schwann, who was the truly inspirational teacher that every child should have (and who read us A Wrinkle in Time, chapter by chapter, when we were in 6th grade. If I hadn't already been hooked on books that would have done the trick.) My writer uncle, A.C. Greene, who

A.C. Greene

told an awkward fifteen-year-old that her poetry was not too bad, and who supported my writing wholeheartedly from then on. Howard McCarley, my biology professor and my mentor in college, who encouraged me despite my obvious mathematical defiencencies. Warren Norwood, writing teacher, friend, mentor, who gave me the confidence to finish that first novel and send it out into the world. Nancy Yost, my incomparable agent of more than twenty years!

And so many more! My parents, of course. Writing friends, family, husband who puts up with me--and my daughter, who shares with me every day the great gift of loving books.

HANK PHILLIPI RYAN: I love seeing all these names. They’re people most of us will never meet, or know, and yet, kind of like the Bridge of San Luis Rey, you know, at some place and time they crossed our lives and made a difference, and it’s good that we simply state their names. Our own “Honored” Roll! And it seems to be about giving confidence, right? And encouragement?

So, reds and readers, who are you thankful for? And has anyone—anyone special and life-changing—ever surprised you with their thanks? (Lucy, music? Susan, and Hallie specifics! Julia, what’s B5 Unrest?)

A Midsummer Night's Dream Revisited

RHYS BOWEN: Tomorrow night will be midsummer night and I found myself thinking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s always been one of my favorite Shakespeare plays—one of the comedies I actually found funny.

We had to study one Shakespeare play each trimester at my school. We had to read them in class and I remember how painful it was to sit and listen classmates struggling with language we just didn’t understand. The comedies were worst. At least with the tragedies we knew that someone would get stabbed or poisoned in the end. 

We could appreciate Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. But those comedies. What was funny about them?

It wasn’t until I was working in BBC drama and a friend was stage manager for the Royal Shakespeare Company that I was backstage at a Shakespeare comedy AND the audience was laughing out loud. Roaring with laughter. Because the actors understood what they were saying, all the clever play on words and naughty double entendres.  Obviously our straight laced school mistresses either didn’t understand it themselves or didn’t want us to understand.

So I’m wondering, Reds, were there any books you hated in school and came to love and appreciate later in life? Or were there any subjects you couldn’t stand in school that later became passions for you? I didn’t like history the way it was taught, all dates and battles. But now I make my living writing about it, taking readers to historical periods.  Maybe if they’d given me historical fiction to read, I’d have been a history buff back then. So fess up, Reds…

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  They MADE me read Ethan Frome in High School. I cannot tell you how much I hated it. Later in lIfe, I fell in love with Edith Wharton, and the romance with her continues. It was just wrong place, wrong time.

Our Town was also wrong place wrong time. I thought it was RIDICULOUS, stupid and sappy. Now I cannot even think about it without crying. Dickens, too. who I now love, but we all shared the Cliffs Notes about Nicholas Nickelby.

I always loved Shakespeare, from moment one, even though they started with Julius Caesar, which is a silly one to get kids to like.
And you are so right about teaching history, Rhys. It's a STORY, a great story, with compelling characters and fascinating motivations and incredible action and outcomes.  If they would only teach it that way.

HALLIE EPHRON: Believe it or not, my first attempt to read an Agatha Christie novel ended in abject failure. Summer of high school, I had not a clue why my mother loved her books. Later, of course, we connected in a serious way.

And for my 16th birthday my mother gave me a copy of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and I could not see at all what she was going on about. It was several decades before I got back to it and, listening to it as a book on tape, I loved it. Then I waded into Mrs. Dalloway... I had to read it out loud to myself in order to stick with it. Dense prose. Serpentine sentences.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Why do they start kids on Julius Caesar, I ask you? At least teenagers could understand Romeo and Juliet!  I don't remember reading a single thing in high school English that I liked. Hated The Old Man and Sea. Hated Gatsby (although I read Tender is the Night on my own and did like that one.) HATED Of Mice and Men. Hated The Grapes of Wrath. If I hadn't been a voracious reader before high school, I would never have read another book.

What have I come back to? Read/reread many Dickens novels while researching In a Dark House--loved them. Rediscovered Hemingway when I ran across A Moveable Feast a few years ago, although I still can't bring myself to reread The Old Man and the Sea. Fell madly in love with Shakespeare when I saw Ken Brannagh's version of Henry V (muhltiple times...)

So, should I give Edith Wharton a try?

HANK: Definitely, Debs! Try CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY. I loved it! And HOUSE OF MIRTH. Which is way too sad, but fabulous.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Debs, DEFINITELY give Edith Wharton a try! I can't remember any books I didn't like in high school or college — but that's good, right? Oh, wait — James Joyce's ULYSSES. Never really figured that one out... LOVED Shakespeare because the first play I read in school read was MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. So funny! I remember the TV show Moonlighting was popular at the time and I pictured Cybil Shephard and Bruce Willis as Beatrice and Benedick.

RHYS: So do share, everyone... have you ever come to love a book or play you once hated?

The Green Eyed Monster

Courtesy Essdras Suarez

Hank Phillippi Ryan:  Someone asked me once if I could write a mystery without a romance. I said: not if the characters are real people. Then they asked: could you write a romance without a mystery?

This one was tougher. "Well, I asked, if there's no mystery to solve, what would the characters DO?"

(Now you probably know too much about me.)

Anyway,  the real point is, authors are always contemplating the work of other authors. And Samantha Wilde has been looking at us! Well, at mystery authors. And she says:

Everything I Learned About Writing Came From Mystery Authors (Almost)

SAMANTHA WILDE: One day I sat staring at a mostly blank page, some distance through a novel, and thought, what would a mystery author do? I grew up the daughter of a novelist. My mother, Nancy Thayer, saturated my childhood home with novels. What’s a room without a bookshelf or a stack of books? What’s a room without floor to ceiling bookshelves? And among those thousands of stories, some of her most favorite, most absorbing, most addictive reads, heaps upon heaps of them: the mysteries.

I can’t be the first person to write that no one can plot like a good crime writer. You pick up the novel, read the first line, and for the next twenty-four hours your children run around screaming and begging for food. When you remerge, it’s like you just got off a plane from a trip abroad. You take a big gulp of air and remember your actual life.

I try to engage that genius of plotting I learn from suspense, although when you’re dealing with cranky mothers and envious friends and you can’t kill someone because it’s not that kind of book, you sometimes wish for another genre. In my most recent novel I wrote about envy. This led me into some research on envy, one of the seven deadly sins. I won’t say that envy makes the world go round (it doesn’t sound very good, does it?), but what’s a good story without it?

Shakespeare was the one who coined the phrase “green-eyed monster” in Othello: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;/ It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on.” Envy is so powerful, so universal, that I decided it must have plagued even the dinosaurs. One can only imagine the envy Tyrannosaurus Rex experiences looking at his long-armed companions.

I asked an artist friend of mine, Sara Prentice Manela, to draw a cartoon of the envious T-Rex to accompany some of my essays on envy; she drew him “losing his envy.” Self-love for dinosaurs!

It should be a surprise than that I, writing about envy, would have to wrestle my own green-eyed monsters, particularly when reading other novels or finding out about the successes of other authors. It has always struck me, subtly, and without malice, this small pinch of envy, when I read mystery, as I follow an incredibly orchestrated and executed plot that literally bewitches me out of my life and into the pages. I do want to plot like that, and, of course, it’s not impossible, even in my world of women’s fiction, writing as I do about the ordinary lives of women.

In the end, the cure for envy lies in one’s willingness to learn, to appreciate, admire and be a beginner. Of course, I don’t read books to learn how to write. I read books because I love to read. But any good book I read, particularly when I recognize a gift in the author I feel is weaker in me, offers a good education. Which is why, as my mother knows and certainly taught by example, a good writer always reads. And reads. And reads.

Tell me what you envy. Have you ever read a book that awakened your green-eyed monster?

HANK: And Sam is offering a copy of her book (in the US. only, okay?). How about--what--if anything--are you envous about?

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 Samantha Wilde is the author of I'll Take What She Has and This Little Mommy Stayed Home (both from Bantam Books).  Here's the trailer! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2bJ-glbr0
 The at-home mother of three young children, she moonlights as a minister and a yoga teacher. She's the graduate of Smith College and Yale Divinity School and lives in Western Massachusetts.

Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/AuthorSamanthaWilde

In I'll Take What She Has... Best friends since kindergarten, Nora, a reserved English teacher, and Annie, an out-spoken stay-at-home mother, wrestle with the green-eyed monster when the new history department hire at the suburban Boston prep school where they teacher, Cynthia Cypress, arrives on campus. A missing grandmother, depressed sex therapist, and a financial crises add to the comedy in a novel about imperfect friendships, mixed up families, messy motherhood, and the quest for the greenest grass.

"Like an Eagle in a Dove-Cote" - Gregg Hurwitz on Thrillers and Shakespeare

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  Today on Jungle Red Writers Thrillerfest edition, we have the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed author of thrillers like You're Next and They're Watching. We also have a pop-culture expert, a man who's written screenplays for many of the major studios and who pens comics for Marvel and DC. And finally, we have we have a Harvard scholar with a master's in Shakespearean tragedy from Trinity College, Oxford who has published and lectured on Shakespeare and writing in the United States and England.



It's probably not going to be that clever a reveal when I say all three men are Gregg Hurwitz. (Although if he were three separate persons, it would explain a great deal about his prolific output.) Today he's going to answer the burning question:

              “What the Hell’s a Shakespeare Scholar Doing Writing Thrillers?”

Aside from Where do you get your ideas? which is easily answered (I don’t know. Where do you get yours?), the above is the question I’m most frequently asked.

As my master’s degree focused on Shakespearean tragedy and I published a few sleep-inducing essays in scholarly journals, interviewers and interlocutors like to zero in on the perceived disparity between my study of so-called high culture and my production of so-called entertainment. The truth is, the distinction doesn’t hold up.

 Shakespeare was, above all else, trying to put asses in seats and sell out the Globe night after night. He wrote convention-bound, highly plot-driven narratives, tales of lust, greed, murder, and ambition. Sound familiar? And he was always careful to alternate tone and mood within the plays—a philosophical aside for the Queen, a dick joke for the groundlings (thank God for groundlings). Noir has oft been referred to as blue-collar tragedy, depicting not falls from kingly thrones, but from the curb into the gutter (to paraphrase Dennis Lehane). I just watched Body Heat again last night and good God does the parallel hold true there. In fact, methinks this is an essential parallel for every type of good crime narrative.

Tragedy is shaped most often by the tragic flaw of the hero. Something inside him, often the very trait that propelled him to greatness, becomes the very thing to drag him down to his mortal fate. Our blessings become our curses. Our best traits are also our worst. We know this from our own lives, and tragedies show us the same, blown up onto a grander stage and trotted out under the Proscenium arch.

When I’m writing a thriller, I think about a misstep my protagonist makes—or a flaw inherent to his or her personality—that sets the plot into motion and calls forth unforeseeable and often disproportionate consequences. Something in them opens the door to the barbed and torturous journeys I drag them through. In the absence of that, I’d not be writing fiction, I’d be writing stories about bad things happening to good people. And what’s to be learned from that?

 

The Survivor, my next book (August), opens with Nate Overbay

 standing on an eleventh-floor ledge outside a bank, about to end his life. He a decent guy who—for a variety of reasons—is at the end of his rope. He sets one foot out into the weightless open when he hears gunshots from within. A spray of blood paints the window to his side. Rather than jump, he crawls back through the window, picks up a gun set down on the bank counter by one of the heist men, and—

 You get the picture. But the point for our purposes here is: If Nate wasn’t on that ledge, if he hadn’t decided to commit suicide while leaving some personal matters—matters involved an estranged wife and daughter who he still dearly loves—unresolved, then he wouldn’t have been in (literal) position to go into that bank and face those gunmen. And if he hadn’t done that, then none of the holy hell that faces him over the next four hundred pages would have happened. A tragic flaw or misstep opening a world of unforeseen consequences. That’s what defines tragedy—and thrillers of every stripe.

You can find out more about Gregg, read excerpts, and listen to audio of his books at his website . You can also friend him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and explore his channel on YouTube.