Audiobooks: What's my problem?

I want to be an audiobook user. Reader? Listener? OK, I don’t even know the correct term. I love the idea of experiencing books in a different way, of having someone literally tell me a story. And I like the potential multitasking, too. I could be reading and knitting. Or cleaning. Or driving.

But it just keeps not happening. This despite the fact that I have once joined Audible, multiple times laboriously downloaded books on CD from the library, then transferred them to various iDevices and even tried Playaways, those self-contained audiobooks.

My most recent attempt was with The Quick by Lauren Owen. It’s a book that appears to be in my wheelhouse and the only format the library had it in was audio. So I got it. On a trip up the Keys last week, I started listening.

But the problem was that my attention just kept wavering. And it wasn’t the story’s fault — the story was interesting! I want to read this book. In fact, I want to read it so much that I requested the library purchase it as an ebook, which they did. The rest of you who are into historical/supernatural/British/literary fiction can thank me later. I’ve already got it checked out.

A similar thing happened over the summer, when I tried so many times I’m embarrassed to admit it to listen to The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. I love Sarah Vowell. And she reads the book, along with a bunch of special guest stars like John Hodgeman and Stephen Colbert. I love history, and don’t mind if it’s got a bit of snark to it. It should have been like the best extended episode of  This American Life ever. But again, my attention kept drifting. And this despite the fact that some of the time I was listening to it I was on buses of various species, traveling across the state of Massachusetts. There could not be conditions better suited to listening to that book.

Another work about some of the same characters, John Barry’s book on Roger Williams, is very useful for putting me to sleep on plane trips, I have learned. But I still don’t feel like i know much about Roger Williams. And I’d like to. And I like John Barry.

I’ve only found audiobooks really successful a couple times in my life. During really long car trips where you just have no choice. During long, boring projects like painting a room. And back in the 1990s when I used to cover the county for the Miami Herald and spent a lot of time driving up and down the Keys. The two-cassette abridged versions of John D. MacDonald novels were perfect for a single trip — and maybe it didn’t matter so much if I zoned out a little along the way. They were abridged anyway.

Even though I’ve given up on The Quick, I’m going to keep trying. Though it might take me until my next long car ride, or painting project.

After they're gone

It happens every time -- I wind up obsessed with the writers who appeared at the Key West Literary Seminar for months after the event. Perhaps it's just the inevitable effect of spending four days in their company, or thinking about their subjects. I at least have a valid excuse for reading After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman after the Seminar -- because it wasn't published until February. What a great read it is -- an unconventional crime novel in many ways, more of an examination of what happens to a family when its center mysteriously disappears. In this case it was first Felix Brewer, and later his mistress, who disappeared exactly 10 years after her lover. Many assumed she had gone to join him -- until her body showed up 12 years after that.

Another decade has passed by the time it gets taken up as a cold case by Sandy Sanchez, a retired homicide detective now working as a consultant for the Baltimore Police Department. But the real pleasure of the book is not just following Sandy's investigation, but in learning the story through chapters that move fluidly among characters and in different times. It provides a portrait of Baltimore in the second half of the 20th century, for the most part, in a particular upper middle class Jewish circle. And it never flags -- while in some books that alternate viewpoints you just can't wait to get away from some characters and back to others (ahem, George R.R. Martin), in this one every single chapter was interesting in its own right and I was always glad to pick up with whomever Lippman wanted to tell us about next. The whodunit aspect is satisfying, in the end (I hadn't guessed it) but the real pleasure of this book, for me, was the people.

Speaking of compelling characters, I've just caught up to Malla Nunn's series of Emmanuel Cooper novels (s0 far) with an advanced copy of Present Darkness, which publishes in June. The books are set in South Africa in the early 1950s, just as apartheid is being instituted, and it's a fascinating, horrifying, fraught time period especially for a man in Cooper's position. I don't want to offer any spoilers but suffice it to say that Cooper's background and upbringing means he's in a position to cross a lot of lines. He's also a World War II vet with a nasty case of PTSD decades before that term would be applied -- in his case it manifests as migraines and the voice of his Scottish drill instructor issuing orders and advice inside his head. Start with the first in the series -- A Beautiful Place to Die -- and read them in order.

I had always considered apartheid the most outrageous social atrocity of my high school and college years, and its ending a miracle of my adulthood -- but I had never really sat back and thought about 1) how insanely recent it was 2) its endless complicated consequences for the people who actually had to live with it and 3) how bizarre it was in a country that had just sent soldiers to World War II -- fighting against and defeating a regime built on ethnic hatred. Cooper is a classic crime fiction hero in many ways -- a flawed but admirable man who seeks to do good in a deeply screwed up world. It's a tribute to Nunn's skill that I find myself missing his world when I finish one of her books -- because who would really want to live under those conditions? Yet her people and the plots are so compelling that want to know what happens next for Detective Sergeant Cooper. Like Matthew Shardlake (C.J. Sansom's Tudor series), Gaius Petraeus Ruso (Ruth Downie's Medicus series) and Jackson Brodie (Kate Atkinson), I am eager to hear how he will get out of his next tight spot and figure out a way to, improbably, do some good.

The Searchers on page and screen

During this year's Key West Literary Seminar, Percival Everett, who teaches a course on Western movies, described The Searchers as a movie that both "admits to American racism and practices it." I had noticed a recent nonfiction book about the film, and the true story behind it, published last year. Everett's mention, plus the knowledge that we had the movie in the Monroe County Library collection, was enough for me to get hold of both. The Searchers by Glenn Frankel is an excellent nonfiction book, one of those books that uses a focused lens to examine an important slice of American history. It starts with the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, the real girl whose family was killed in a Comanche raid in Texas. She was kidnapped and, essentially, became Comanche, bearing three children. Some 25 years later, she was recaptured, along with her young daughter, by Americans in a raid on a Comanche camp -- an experience that appears to have been just as traumatic for her as the original kidnapping. She and the young daughter died a few years later. She never saw her teenage sons again.

One of those sons, named Quanah, grew up to be a leader of the Comanche and a peacemaker with whites. Teddy Roosevelt even had dinner at his house.

After telling Quanah's story, Frankel moves into how the Cynthia Ann Parker story reverberated through the culture -- with almost no regard to historical accuracy, naturally, and culminating with Alan Lemay's novel The Searchers. That novel, roughly, was the basis for the John Ford/John Wayne film that is the most prominent remaining reminder of the story. And what a weird film it is. I really wanted to admire it from a pure film appreciator point of view. But perhaps because I had just read the real story behind both the Cynthia Ann Parker life and the making of the movie, I just couldn't buy into it. All the side stories, like the nephew's romance with Laurie, seemed like a forced comic relief. And I've never gotten the John Wayne that so many people admire -- not his politics, particularly, but his persona. I'm glad I saw it, since it is obviously a significant piece of popular culture (the American Film Institute even includes it in its top 100 list of movies). But it didn't make sense to me, as a story. So thanks, Percival Everett. I guess.

Key West Literary Seminar: The Dark Side, Final Chapter download

It's always a risk when the Key West Literary Seminar puts on a double session, meaning two separate Seminars two weekends in a row. We want to accommodate as many people as possible, and we're limited by the seats available at the San Carlos Institute. But it's exhausting for the staff and other organizers. And worst of all for those of us with the terrible duty of attending both weekends, it can get repetitive so you feel like you're stuck in some literary version of Groundhog Day.

To everyone's great relief and delight, this year that did NOT happen. Probably because only one panelist -- James W. Hall -- appeared on both weekends and truly, he's the kind of guy you could listen to tell funny stories all day. The two weekends felt quite different, but both offered illuminating and diverse discussions of crime fiction in its many and varied and forms. Having superstars Lee Child and Michael Connelly in the house for the Final Chapter certainly added to the excitement and they were both great. Child, in particular, was an erudite speaker, who set the tone Friday morning with an entertaining talk about the roots of suspense fiction going back into human history. Evolutionary history.

With Child, Connelly, Lisa Unger, Tess Gerritsen and other big names on board -- and two, count 'em two Edgar nominees for Best Novel (William Kent Krueger and Thomas H. Cook) -- this week might have felt more commercial, to apply an overly broad adjective. Maybe because of that we had less of the old genre-vs.-literary discussion which I am alternately fascinated and bored by (I've got a bunch of links on my Readme page if you feel like delving into it). John Banville, Mr. Literary Himself with a Booker Prize to prove it, said he dislikes the genre stuff and wishes bookshops would shelve everything alphabetically -- mainly because he feels like it ghettoizes literary fiction and consigns it to a dark and forbidding corner. We shelve all the fiction alphabetically at the library, I'm happy to say.

Once again, though, it was the women who really caught my interest -- I've already posted about my bordering-on-embarrassing-fangirldom of Lyndsay Faye, whom I interviewed for Littoral. I had seen Sara Gran last summer at ALA, and she was even smarter and cooler than I remembered. Malla Nunn was a terrific new voice for most of the people in this crowd and her stories of writing about mixed-race people in South Africa as apartheid was being instituted were riveting. Elizabeth George's keynote was great, setting a wonderful tone -- and making me realize that I must have some kind of sick voyeuristic Protestant fascination with hearing about miserable Catholic childhoods. Mary McCarthy, Mary Gordon, Frank McCourt, you name the writer -- I just never get tired of hearing about them. Or reading about them.

I tweeted a lot less this time. Not sure why, but I do know partway through Elizabeth George's keynote I put down my notebook and just allowed myself to sit back and listen -- she was not speaking in tweetable nuggets and I did not want to distract myself by focusing on listening for them.

Coverage of panels and links to audio are available at Littoral, the Seminar's blog. Here are some snippets I did write down:

Elizabeth George:

"Each of us, with very few exceptions, has a darkness within us though mine, admittedly, is probably a little larger than the average individual."

"The darkness from which I write has its genesis in religion and family."

"The Cold War made us wary of perils that we weren't sure we'd recognize if they came knocking on our doors."

"I have to write as I have to breathe, as I have to eat, as I have to drink."

On how the advent of the personal computer with its ease of deleting, adding, moving text allowed her to get over her fear of writing a novel: "It was like being released from an iron maiden."

"A crime novel is a novel that knows where it's going."

"I write about the dark to make sense of things. I look for answers to the whys of life in its most extreme and painful moments."

"The beauty of the crime novel is that it actually knows no bounds."

Lee Child

"The way to tell a story is to not start when the earth cooled."

"Language completely saved our species," and gave us the edge over Neanderthals. "They died out and we didn't because of language."

On how storytelling made it "slightly more likely that you'd be alive next week" and thus become incorporated into human behavior: "The only good it could have done is to be a bit encouraging or empowering or consoling."

"People imagine that thriller fiction and crime fiction as a whole is some kind of side issue. That is completely ass backward." On literary fiction: "You're like the barnacles on our boat. By all means, feel free to ride along. But don't tell me you're more central than we are."

"We love to experience fear and danger and peril as long as we know it's going to be all right."

"When it comes right down to it there are only two kinds of books -- there are books that make you miss your stop on the subway and there are books that don't."

"Reacher is me when I was 9 years old."

On whether he will write books outside the Reacher series: "I'm the guy that writes Reacher and I probably always will be."

"People are way too civilized to admit it but every person has a list of 50 people they would cheerfully shoot in the head."

On the controversial casting of Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher: "I'm incredibly grateful that anybody cares."

"Most people have this unspoken assumption that a book isn't quite enough until it becomes a movie."

His response to people unhappy with the Cruise casting: "I'll make you one promise: Tom Cruise will not come to your house and steal your books."

On the film itself: "I didn't want to see an imitation of what I had done. I wanted to see somebody else's interpretation."

Sara Gran

"I am unhappily and dementedly obsessed with books."

Mystery stories are "our shared secular mythology."

"I love books that are written from a place of compulsion rather than a place of literary ambition."

"I never know what my books are about until they're done."

John Banville

"I feel as if research is the death of fiction." Though his character Quirke is a coroner, Banville has never seen an autopsy: "I just make it up." Imagination, he said, is our most powerful tool. "It's what makes us human, so we should use it as frequently as we can."

"Sex is the only subject that is absolutely impossible to write about. It can't be done."

On writing his Benjamin Black series: "To embark on a frolic of my own at that age seemed like a wonderful thing to do."

"We have this illusion that we are unitary beings. .. We are a collection of poses and attitudes, versions of ourselves … We make ourselves up as we go along. This is what makes life interesting."

On why he writes the crime novels under a pen name: "I didn't want people to think it was an elaborate post-modern joke."

"The greatest invention of humankind is the sentence."

"A relatively happy childhood is a distinct disadvantage."

On how his Roman Catholic upbringing affects his character Quirke: "It's as if he were in an ink bottle and I just poured all that stuff into him."

"The 1950s was a fascinating time in Ireland, a fascinating time in the world. The 1950s was a very dark time, especially in Ireland. It's a wonderful time to set noir fiction."

"We imagine we're these autonomous beings moving through a neutral world. We're not."

"We are the creatures who are constantly aware that we're mortal, that we will die."

Percival Everett

"No one would ever ask John Updike why his characters are white."

"By talking about post-racial America, you've already introduced the topic of race."

On starting a novel: "It's like knowingly entering a bad marriage. You have no good reason to do, but no one can talk you out of it."

"I have a plan for a bestseller. I'm going to write a courtroom drama with vampires on a submarine."

On The Searchers, a movie he uses in a class he teaches about the Western: "It's a movie that at once admits to American racism and practices it."

Tess Gerritsen

"For me, writing is all about finding the monster beneath the mask."

On having her work optioned for TV and movies: "Don't pay attention to Hollywood because it will break your heart. Just cash the checks and walk away."

On her Rizzoli & Isles series: "To me, it's more of a running soap opera with a lot of crime thrown in."

Lisa Unger

"The reason we often turn to crime fiction is not to escape life but to understand it better."

Michael Connelly

"To Kill a Mockingbird is, to me, a legal thriller."

"Almost every time I go away from Harry Bosch I can't wait to start writing about him again."

Michael Koryta

"Using the supernatural was a way for me to alert my family that I have deep-seated mental illnesses."

"I think an absolute genius of suspense is David Sedaris."

Lyndsay Faye

"Character is the only thing that drives my novels."

On research for historical novels: "I sort of cultivate a vitamin D deficiency in the microfilm department of the Bryant Park Research Library."

"We have a certain power now to give voice to people who would have been voiceless at the time."

"Writing Timothy Wilde is not me doing a thought exercise."

"Human nature has not fundamentally changed since the 19th century."

Malla Dunn

"Just because people didn't talk about things in the past doesn't mean they didn't exist."

Recommended Reading

Val McDermid, Place of Execution (recommended by Lee Child, I am 93 percent sure)

David Sedaris, The Santaland Diaries (recommended by Michael Koryta as "a clinic of suspense")

James Sallis' insect series (recommended by Sara Gran)

Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends (recommended by Lyndsay Faye)

Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (I honestly can't remember who recommended this and I didn't write it down. Bad reporter!)

Michael Koryta, The Apex Predator (a Kindle Single, recommended by Mary Morris)

Tana French, Broken Harbor (recommended by Elizabeth George and Lyndsay Faye -- after which Thomas H. Cook and Michael Koryta who were also on the panel agreed that we should read anything by Tana French)

Suzanne Berne, A Crime in the Neighborhood (recommended by Thomas H. Cook)

Fun Facts

Michael Koryta's novel The Cypress House was inspired by the 1935 Labor Day hurricane that devastated Islamorada.

James W. Hall's first novel Under Cover of Darkness was inspired by the Key Westers who fought against the building of the Reach hotel in the 1980s.

Christine Falls, John Banville's first book published under the name Benjamin Black, started as a TV mini-series that didn't get made. "Every single line of dialogue had to be changed" when it went from script to novel, Banville said.

Jane Rizzoli, from Tess Gerritsen's popular Rizzoli & Isles series, started out as a side character in a medical thriller called The Surgeon. She was supposed to die but Gerritsen found she couldn't kill the character. Dr. Maura Isles, the other half of the team, started out as a charity name, a device authors use to help raise money for nonprofits. They are both what Gerritsen called "accidental characters."

Key West Literary Seminar: The Dark Side, Chapter One download

I was confident the Literary Seminar was going to be great. First of all, it always is and second, with this line-up, how could it not be? Carl Hiaasen brought down the house Friday night, just as you'd expect. Joyce Carol Oates was eerily mesmerizing, like she always is. Still, it's the unexpected that brings me the most pleasure. And though I hoped (see previous post, below) that the women were going to be my favorite parts of the event, they managed to eclipse my expectations.

The highlight was a Sunday morning panel titled "Fatal Vision: The Imprint of True-Crime Movies." The panel consisted of Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman and Gillian Flynn. They set out by telling us that the panel's title had been classed up and what they were going to talk about was their unironic love for Lifetime movies. And then they did. It's already on the Seminar's Audio Archives page and it's worth the listen even if you've never seen or wanted to see a Lifetime movie in your life. Laura Lippman has already written a great essay expanding on the panel's central theme -- the lack of meaty roles for middle-aged women in Hollywood and how the true crime genre, frequently derided as trashy, allows women to express their full dark sides. Clearly it speaks to great numbers of people -- mostly but not all women -- and it goes beyond the camp value of seeing Meredith Baxter or Farrah Fawcett enter a homicidal fugue state. Several female friends and I agreed immediately after this panel that we need to have a Netflix movie viewing binge weekend. I also think Lifetime should consider hiring these three to host a show about the genre.

Gender was on my mind a lot through the weekend -- and not in a preachy, academic kind of way. Perhaps because we started off with a keynote from Sara Paretsky, a pioneer of kickass female P.I. fiction. Cara Canella wrote a nice piece about it for Littoral and the address itself is on the Audio Archives page. And BTW, keep an eye on Littoral in general for great Seminar coverage, words and pictures, throughout. Many people were kind enough to say nice things about my program intro Friday morning and it's also excerpted on Littoral.

The other great revelation to me during this Seminar was not a younger woman at all, but an older gentleman -- Alexander McCall Smith. He's easily dismissed as a writer of gentle cozies. He is, in person, hysterically funny and one of the Seminar highlights was when he would crack himself up reading his own work. Hopefully the audio will appear soon; when it does I'll post it here.

I was tweeting a lot during the Seminar (I'm @keywestnan; the Seminar itself is @keywestliterary) and so were a few other people, mostly under the hashtag #kwls. If you're Twitter-averse, here are some of the Chapter One highlights in snippets I managed to jot down:

Sara Paretsky:

"In any situation, I anticipate the worst outcome, which by no means prepares me for the worst when it actually arrives."

"Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech."

In crime fiction she read as a young person, the most defiant of female stereotypes, "in a cheerful Jell-O eating way, was Nancy Drew."

"I write, I chronicle, but I retreat from personal confrontation. People ask if [V.I.] is my alter ego. She is not. She is my voice."

Paretsky aspires to write like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell -- storytellers who used social issues as backdrops and used their fiction to tell essential truths about our emotional lives, "what we fear, what we want, what we need."

Joyce Carol Oates:

"It's a rare homicide that destroys only one person."

Scott Turow:

"What people really want to know desperately is why it happened, why a crime occurred."

"Recognizing that crime was a subterranean passion changed my life."

Gillian Flynn:

She is often asked "Does Gillian Flynn hate women? No. I think that's a misogynistic question, actually."

On whether she'll write a sequel to Gone Girl: "I think it's very important for me to get away from Nick and Amy for a little bit. It might be interesting to visit them in 10 years or so and see how they're doing. Not well, I assume."

John Katzenbach:

"My books are about people who are caught up in great moral and ethical quandaries, which they solve with a volley of gunfire."

"What ordinary people can think up to do to each other is far worse than anything I can come up with in my worst mood."

Journalism is "a wonderful way to channel yourself into becoming a writer, because you learn so much so damned quickly."

Laura Lippman:

"Fiction is a better vehicle for truth than journalism."

Journalism is good training for writing because it makes you a professional. "You meet deadlines. You don't take yourself too seriously. You get up, you write. It's a job."

"I have limitations. I don't think the genre does."

"I'm really happy to be in a genre where people read."

"Things that make men cry are considered profound. Things that make women cry are considered sentimental. … You wouldn't have to have a panel defending the gangster film."

Joseph Kanon:

On a favorable review of his first book, which praised him by saying has had "enough talent to write a serious novel" : "I did write a serious novel. It just happened to have a body on the first page."

After being criticized by a reader for his description of a gun: "From now on, I'm just pushing people out of windows. … The only interesting thing is why they did it, not how."

Stephen L. Carter:

"There's a big downside to writing historical fiction. The big downside is running into people who know the history better than you do after you've written the book."

William Gibson:

"Neuromancer is just a caper plot. … I personally think it doesn't quite make sense … which one finds out when one tries to write a screenplay of it."

Of the book he's currently writing: "I still don't know who did it. I'm really close to the end of the book and I'm going to have to decide who did it."

"The Wire may be as close as anything we have to Dickens today."

"I've continued to resort to mostly MacGuffin plots … the simplest little Rube Goldberg plot mechanisms but they seem to get me through to the end and they don't get in the way of doing all the wacky stuff I really love to do."

Billy Collins:

"I don't do dark very well. I don't do crime. But I can do creepy and I can do freaky."

"I tell my students if you're majoring in English, you're majoring in death. It's all about the mortality."

Attica Locke:

"America is a great freedom experiment that has to keep testing its results."

Carl Hiaasen:

Key West's own convicted drug dealer turned fugitive fire chief Bum Farto is "a character no novelist could have plausibly created."

"In my books, the alligator usually wins."

On discarding sections of writing: "You don't want to throw away anything good in case you never come up with anything good again."

"Not thinking you're good enough is the only thing that makes you better."

On writing sex scenes: "You don't want to go someplace your significant other has never been."

"Every writer's office sort of becomes a tomb for awhile."

"The job of any writer is to entertain. That's what we're paid to do."

Alexander McCall Smith:

"It's very important to get your first line right because it's the only line many people read."

Jonathan Santlofer:

"There are just as many good and bad literary novels as there are good and bad crime novels."

At Yaddo, copies of books by Dennis Lehane and Lee Child were circulating among resident artists … in a brown paper bag. "It was as if people were delivering drugs to people's rooms."

Les Standiford:

"The Great Gatsby is structured as a detective novel. … In its form, in its structure, it's a suspense thriller."

Regarding literary short stories by writing students: "Nothing ever had to happen and nothing usually did."

"The only place that very many people read books they are not interested in is college."

James W. Hall:

All fiction starts with some sort of crime: "The normal social order, the equipoise of the world, has to be knocked out of balance."

Plot is what distinguishes crime novel from literary fiction, "a coherent, causally connected series of events. … People respond to that."

On the mid-century change from the novel as popular entertainment to highbrow art form: "They injected this sense of guilt, that you had to have an education to really appreciate what the novel was about."

Arthur Conan Doyle is the father of British detective fiction, but Edgar Allan Poe is the father of American crime fiction, which includes horror along with ratiocination. So a British Agatha Christie-like mystery starts with "an embarrassment on the rug" while an American crime novel starts with "a horror on the rug."

Megan Abbott:

On discomfort with the darker side of teen girls, ie. desire, hunger, aggression, jealousy: "Teen girls are supposed to be the objects of desire. They're supposed to be looked at. They're not supposed to desire."

"What is a more noir terrain than high school? When you're in it, there is nothing more powerful or more monstrous."

"I would not want to be a teenager today. I didn't want to be one then."

"It's a time when you're most curious about the world -- and most poised to have your illusions shattered."

"You bluff your way into situations you can't handle -- and the consequences can be dark and dire."

On the intensity of female adolescent friendships, even after you move on to adulthood: "It remains this invisible tattoo on you."

"Girls have always wanted to read icky things and probably always will … Dark young adult books did not start with The Hunger Games."

Recommended Reading:

D.R. MacDonald (recommended by Scott Turow)

Iain Sinclair (recommended by William Gibson, who said Sinclair is considered part of the London Project and sometimes described as "Peter Ackroyd on acid.")

Ned Bauman, specifically The Teleportation Accident (Gibson again, who described it as "the craziest thing I've read in 20 years.")

Gary Shteyngart (recommended by both Carl Hiaasen and Gillian Flynn)

Ian Frazier, specifically Coyote vs. Acme (Hiaasen)

Flattened Fauna, a book of photographs of roadkill (Hiaasen)

P.G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain (recommended by Flynn for the funny)

Rose MacCauley, The Towers of Trebizond (recommended by Alexander McCall Smith and I honestly could not tell if this was a tongue-in-cheek recommendation or not -- but after reading a little more about it I'm inclined to think it was sincere and the book is worth checking out.

Lois Duncan, Daughters of Eve (recommended by Megan Abbott)

Until the Twelfth of Never: The Deadly Divorce of Dan and Betty Broderick (recommended by Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott and Gillian Flynn)

Evidence of Love by John Bloom (Lippman/Abbott/Flynn again -- another true crime book that was the basis for a Lifetime movie)

Very Much A Lady by Shana Alexander (this is the Jean Harris/Herman Tarnower story, specifically recommended by Abbott)

Fun Facts:

To unwind after a long day of writing dark material, Gillian Flynn plays video games for 10 minutes or so -- or else watches YouTube snippets from cheery musicals like "Singin' in the Rain." She also has a plaque on her desk that says "Leave the Crazy Downstairs." Carl Hiaasen, meanwhile, has a doormat outside his office that says "LEAVE."

Attica Locke's husband was delivered by Scott Turow's father (who was a Chicago ob/gyn)