It is this intimacy that Anna McDonald, the protagonist of Mina’s latest murder mystery Conviction, is craving. Anna listens to the first episode in the kitchen of her elegant house in Glasgow’s West End: the podcast is a twisty tale of a sunken yacht, family annihilation and a super-rich heiress. Then it dawns on her that this story revolves around the death of a man she once knew, who links her back to a crime she has been running from for more than a decade. Conviction is Mina’s 15th book since her 1998 debut Garnethill, but to describe her as a crime novelist can seem limiting. She is also a playwright, for stage and television, and is currently adapting the lesser known Brecht play Mr Puntila and His Man Matti for Edinburgh’s Lyceum. She has scripted many graphic novels, becoming the first woman to write 12 instalments of the comic-book series Hellblazer, and is planning a second series of a roadtrip for Sky Arts in which she and Frank Skinner explore Scotland in the footsteps of Boswell and Johnson. She’s writing another novel, based around notorious murders of sex workers in Glasgow in the 1990s, while a top secret true crime project will be revealed later this year.
“I’ve got a little bit too much on,” she concludes. “But it’s great isn’t it? I think it’s really important to remember to be grateful. The longer I go on I realise what a miracle it is to have a career as a writer.”
When he checked in at the front desk on the night of Feb. 28, 1982, John Belushi was a time bomb, a waste site, a mess. Sweaty, flabby, edgy, pale, disheveled, worn to a stump at the age of 33, he had called ahead to reserve his favorite bungalow, No. 3, one of the ones Al Smith had purchased that stood close to the private entrance on Monteel Road. Like other members of the extended Saturday Night Live family, Belushi had been introduced to Chateau Marmont by the show's producer, Lorne Michaels, who stayed there when he was a comedy writer for a variety of TV shows and who liked to joke that he moved around the place as his fortunes in the business ebbed and flowed: "I lived all around in the hotel, moving from room to room. If I had the money, I moved to a larger suite. If not, I took a smaller one."
Belushi had been in residence at the hotel for more than a month earlier that winter, at first in a suite in the upper floors, No. 69, only to abandon it when he and his neighbors found one another noisy: them complaining about Belushi's music and carousing, him being woken by their crying baby. He moved to a penthouse, No. 54, and then, after a visit from his wife, Judy, who found the setting depressing — "Are you sure you want to stay here?" she had asked him, after finding a quaalude on the floor of his room — he moved into the bungalow, with his script drafts, his research materials, a new stereo system, and the rest of his belongings. He was going to get a movie written. He was going to create a hit.
Tony Leys is a newspaperman. He has covered murders. He has worked the copy desk. He has knocked on doors and taken verbal battering. Most reporters evolve to become editors, but Leys, bored behind a desk 20 years ago, did the opposite. After spending much of his career assigning stories—as city editor, state editor, politics editor—he returned to writing them. His beat became health care, and he owned it, reporting with soul-wringing realism on the flaws of the American medical apparatus. He has won numerous awards, including two years ago for reporting on the impact of Medicaid privatization, as told through the eyes of poor, suffering patients, and last year for authoring a stellar package of Sunday print edition stories about mental health.
There will be no such series this year. Not because Leys has lost his job, but because he’s being reassigned—sort of. He’ll continue to cover health-related stories. But for the next 10 months, his priority will be covering presidential politics. Leys is used to this. It happens every four years. Because this is Iowa. Because this is the Des Moines Register.
One truth goes to the heart of death in our community: You can’t fall out of love with something. Having known two of the three men who died on Howse Peak, I know that climbing made them feel alive. The question is — could we feel alive enough if we stopped? Most climbers think not.
I agree.
It's always tempting for writers to loudly telegraph their characters' motives, desires and fears; it takes a special kind of talent, and an implicit trust in an author's readers, to let stories quietly speak for themselves. Croley manages to pull this off in each of the stories in Any Other Place. It's a beautiful collection and a remarkable debut effort from an author with a rare and compassionate understanding of the human condition.
It is obvious that Li has a keen intellect, but this novel also has devastating emotional implications as Li says something very profound about grief.
This is an exciting and sobering account of how freedom, which was never in the internet code in the first place, can be effectively curtailed with the tools that were supposed to liberate us. Towards the end of the book, Griffiths shows how China has in turn helped Russia with its own efforts at internet censorship, and is now exporting the same technologies to Africa. These are alarming developments, to be sure; yet at the same time western liberals increasingly demand that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al become censors themselves, removing certain kinds of content, and deleting the accounts of users. Griffiths quotes Xi Jinping as saying: “Cyberspace is not a domain beyond the rule of law. Greater effort should be made to strengthen ethical standards and promote civilised behaviour.” Well, it should, shouldn’t it?