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The Rikers Island jail, formally known as the Men’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, was branded “outmoded and inappropriate” by the Board of Correction, which advised phasing the jail out as a long-term detention facility. The board’s chairman said a phase-out would be “a matter of paramount importance” in the months ahead.
–Brought to you by Lights Out Summer, set in 1977, coming Oct. 1.
Agatha Christie is golden age, but is she cozy or bloody–hard boiled even? Okay, maybe not hard boiled, but according to a WSJ front page article, Christie staged “some of the world’s grimmest homicides” on paper that were then made bloodless for the screen. New TV productions commissioned by her estate bring back bloody Agatha.
The estate has its motive (in this crime, if you’re a cozy fan). By 2013, it had adapted nearly every Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot detective novel. “We were kind of staring down the barrel of ‘What do we do now?'” James Prichard, Christie’s great grandson and chairman of the estate, told WSJ.
This should set off some serious debate (hide the knitting needles and kittens) at Malice Domestic.
America, as reported on the nation’s police blotters:
“Received a report of a subject on the 400 block of Jersey Avenue on a bicycle ranting on a cell phone. Patrol spoke with subject, who stated they were having WiFi issues.”
—North Country This Week, Potsdam, N.Y.
Forty years ago today, Four of the men arrested for the break-in at the Watergate agreed to a $200,000 out-of-court settlement to be paid by former President Nixon’s campaign fund. The men, members of the anti-Castro community in Miami, had charged in a suit they were conned into believing the burglary was sanctioned by the CIA or some other government agency.
–Brought to you by LIGHTS OUT SUMMER, set in 1977, coming Oct. 1.
Forty years ago today: Two serious pros robbed an estimated $1 million from a Yonkers bank, including part or all of the receipts from three nights of racing at Yonkers Raceway.
–Brought to you by LIGHTS OUT SUMMER, set in 1977, coming Oct. 1.
I’ve been celebrating a winter festival of police blotter entries from Skagway, Alaska, in the great book “The Best of Skagway, Alaska” published by the Skagway News. With hints of spring around, I’m returning to reports from today’s blotters around the nation.
“Two men were arrested for a strong armed robbery incident.”
—San Jose Mercury News
Instead of putting her head down and moaning, fabulous photographer and great friend Brooke Fasani Auchincloss took her camera down to Powell Street and Naima in San Francisco and captured many different people and their many different one word reactions to the day after. Beautiful, stunning, compelling stuff.
Within the past two weeks, The New Yorker and The Nation have published long features on Ursula K. Le Guin. They’re following the New York Times back in the summer. One wonders why the house organs of the chattering classes picked now. She’s 87, after all. She’s been published since the early sixties. It may be because the Library of America put out a collection of her work. That’s happened to extremely few living authors. Philip Roth is the only other one alive right now.
The magazines waited this long, I’m sure, because Le Guin’s body of work includes much imaginative fiction (or science fiction and fantasy, if you will). That may be, but The Left Hand of Darkness, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Lathe of Heaven are stamped with greatness. They are NOT stamped “literary,” however. Rather they carry the taint of genre. You can even read in the New Yorker’s subhead—”The literary mainstream once relegated her work to the margins. Then she transformed the mainstream”—as an attempt to cover tracks. If she did transform the mainstream, she started doing it waaaaay back in 1968. In our present, I watch as literary fiction continues to swallow itself, searching for, if I understand the purpose of the exercise, the meaning of meaning becoming the meaning. Not the story. Not life lived.
Our grandest publications have finally noticed Ursula in her ninth decade. Her books will be here long after the sum total of all the novels reviewed by the Times and The New Yorker and The Nation this year.
Susannah Greenberg interviewed me on her Internet radio show Book Buzz about A Black Sail and other things crime writing. You can listen to it here.