The Crime Lady: Helen Garner; You're Wrong About; and More

Dear TCL Readers:

It’s fall, the news is terrible, I’m mostly hunkering down to work. So I’ll keep this newsletter on the briefer side.

This past spring, I got a phone call from Pantheon publisher Lisa Lucas, after a couple of DMs* that were most mysterious. She got right to the point: the division planned on reissuing several books by the Australian writer Helen Garner, and one of them would be her 2014 crime nonfiction book This House of Grief — would I be able to write a foreword on a crash deadline?

The answer was immediate and obvious. Of course I would, and did, and it’s excerpted at CrimeReads. Garner’s nonfiction is heavily influenced by Janet Malcolm and this book in particular brought to mind Malcolm’s best crime nonfiction, not only The Journalist and the Murder but also Iphigenia in Forest Hills.

This House of Grief was published Tuesday, in tandem with Garner’s 1984 novel The Children’s Bach (with Rumaan Alam’s foreword), a short novel that packs in everything and anything and is among my favorite novels that I read this year. (The Spare Room, published in 2008 and until now the only one of Garner’s books available in America, is also a standout.) Her debut novel Monkey Grip arrives in February, and a short story collection, as well as various volumes of her diaries, are forthcoming. It’s high time Garner’s body of work was available in the US and I for one am looking forward to engaging with it all.

And Wednesday, at a luncheon hosted by Lucas, I met Garner and got to tell her how much her work now means to me. She’ll be at McNally Jackson tonight (after last night’s 92Y appearance with Merve Emre), in conversation with Thessaly La Force, who interviewed her last year for The Paris Review.

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This month’s Crime & Mystery column mostly features debuts. I absolutely loved Glory Be by Danielle Arcenaux, who’s written a protagonist I hope to see in many more volumes. I admired a lot of Dann McDorman’s West Heart Kill but mostly wanted him to chill out with the cleverness. Edge of the Grave by Robbie Morrison was a fun historical noir series opener. And Vanessa Lillie’s Blood Sisters isn’t technically a debut, though it is (I think) the first in a series — and I liked it quite a lot.

Please note: The remaining columns for 2023 are locked and/or filed, and I am reading for 2024 now.

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The first week of October was, oddly enough, Podcast week around these parts. I was on You’re Wrong About with the beloved Sarah Marshall (whose essay I reprinted in Unspeakable Acts) chatting about the history of profilers (real and fraudulent), detectives, procedurals, and why so much of what we think we know about profiling is really Thomas Harris’s fault. To say I had a blast is an understatement.

It was also wonderful to be on Rabia & Ellyn Solve the Case, where Rabia Chaudry (who wrote the intro for Evidence of Things Seen), Ellyn Marsh, and I discussed the spree killings of Charles Starkweather and the insanely raw deal that his on-again off-again girlfriend, Caril Fugate, received from the media, the criminal legal system, and popular culture. Harry Maclean’s excellent forthcoming book Starkweather, which I mention at the end of the episode, is also worth reading, the most comprehensive account to date of the story.

Speaking of Evidence of Things Seen, there are two more upcoming events:

On Tuesday, October 24 at 4 PM PDT, I’ll be on a panel with Lara Bazelon and Justine van der Leun hosted by UC Berkeley’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center.

And on Thursday, November 2 at 7 PM EST, I’m giving a talk at the Darien Public Library. Barrett Books is the host bookseller.

READ/LISTEN/WATCH

• Any list purporting to detail the 100 Best Mysteries & Thrillers of all time is going to leave a lot out and include some choices I wouldn’t have picked. But overall, I thought TIME (with the help of some key crime writers) did a great job — big points for including Charlotte Jay’s Beat Not the Bones, which more people should read.

• Also last week, I was in conversation with Elizabeth Hand at the Brooklyn Heights branch of Books Are Magic about her newest novel, A Haunting on the Hill, which has been getting deserved rave reviews for inhabiting the world Shirley Jackson created but still resolutely part of Hand’s own literary universe. The archived video link to our event is right here.

• Did Camilla Läckberg hire ghostwriters for her most recent novels? I don’t know for sure, but the Guardian examines the whole imbroglio.

• This piece illustrates almost all of the problems I have with the true crime industrial complex as it stands, through the lens of Stacy Chapin, parent to one of the murdered Idaho students. (Also interesting that CrimeCon’s co-founders, Christopher and Kevin Balfe, used to be in deep business with Glenn Beck, from his radio show to various books, though it didn’t end well.)

• I’ve been asked more than once if I’ve ever submitted DNA to the various databases like 23andMe. I have not, and this confirms why I shouldn’t.

• And while I’ve yet to see the Unsolved Mysteries documentary, I did enjoy Dru Moorhouse’s conversation with UM co-creator Terry Dunn Maurer about the impact of the original show on solving cases.

Finally, it’s been good to be out and about, seeing friends and celebrating books, so let me leave you all with this rooftop shot from the awards ceremony I attended the other night:

Until next time, I remain,

The Crime Lady

*RIP what used to be Twitter. I’m not posting there anymore, by the way, but still at Instagram and Bluesky, so feel free to follow me (@sarahweinman) on either/both platforms.