Barnes & Noble Reports

CyberSecurity Attack

Last week I was one of millions of Barnes & Noble customers who received an email saying the bookseller had experienced a cybersecurity attack on October 10, resulting in unauthorized and unlawful access to its corporate systems. The message specifically said that, while payment card and other financial data were not compromised by the attack, systems affected by the hack did contain email addresses and, if supplied by the customer (which I did not), billing and shipping address and telephone number. “We currently have no evidence of the exposure of any of this data, but we cannot at this stage rule out the possibility,” the email said. According to Publishers Weekly, restoration of B&N’s networks has taken some time. "We acted as quickly as we could given the circumstances and notified customers once we were able to give credible information of what happened," a statement read. "As of this writing, the cybersecurity consultants have detected no evidence of data having been exposed.”

Who Was The Stony Blonde

In Hopper’s Noir Paintings?

We usually think of noir as the province of dark crime novels or films, but the genre extends to other art forms—and nowhere is its moral ambiguity and fatalism visualized with greater clarity than in the works of painter Edward Hopper. Perhaps best known for his disengaged customers at a neon-lit diner counter (Nighthawks), he depicted social isolation before a pandemic made it a way of life. As crime writer Stephanie Kane notes in an article in CrimeReads, “[Hopper] binged on movies when he was creatively blocked, read pulp fiction, and had a lasting impact on film noir. He even influenced Alfred Hitchcock: the house in Psycho is modeled on a Hopper painting. [But] the subject to which he returned over and over was a hard-featured blonde with pointed breasts. Hair upswept in a Gibson girl bouffant, cut in a flapper’s marcel bob, or flaming across the stage to the beat of a stripper’s burlesque, she’s the same stony blonde….[While] the classic noir anti-hero is cynical and alienated, his counterpart is the femme fatale, whose predatory sexuality drives the plot. The stakes are love or death; mutual destruction lies at the end. For 50 years, Hopper painted his blonde.” So, who was she…?

True Spy Stories For Those

Obsessed With John le Carré

As a teenager I was an avid reader of anything that smacked of espionage and counter-intelligence. Alistair MacLean, Eric Ambler, and Ian Fleming were some of my favorites, but none—at least in my mind—rivaled John le Carré (David Cornwell). The first of his works I’d ever read was (naturally) The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and I recently finished his most recent novel, Agent Running In The Field. Yes, at age 88 he’s getting a bit tired, but the writing is superb and the plots intricate and always driven by wonderfully defined characters. Hence, when I came across this list titled “7 Real-Life Spy Stories for People Obsessed with John le Carré,” I had to check it out. I’ve always been captivated by what it was like to be a spy during wartime, or even a spymaster running the show. As writer Larry Loftis says, “The books give you a bird’s-eye view of the harrowing life of a spy, or the travails of a spymaster, from the greatest era of espionage—World War II.”

Congrats To The 2020

Macavity Award Winners

The winners of the 2020 Macavity Awards, named for T.S. Eliot’s “mystery cat” (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats), were announced at opening ceremonies at Virtual Bouchercon 2020 Sacramento last week. Each year the members of Mystery Readers International nominate and vote for their favorite mysteries in five categories. This year’s winners are:

• Best Mystery Novel: The Chain by Adrian McKinty (Mulholland)
• Best First Mystery: One Night Gone by Tara Laskowski (Graydon House)
• Best Mystery Short Story: “Better Days,” by Art Taylor (EQMM, May/June 2019)
• Best Mystery Nonfiction/Critical: Hitchcock and the Censors by John Billheimer (University Press of Kentucky)
• Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery: The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott (Vintage)

Gaslighting May Not Mean

What You Think It Means

As I was spending too much time on Facebook the other day, I was struck by how some people have no idea what the term “gaslighting” means, nor where it comes from. The most common misinterpretation(s) I’ve come across are from people who believe it refers to someone who is too sensitive or unable to take a joke, and those who accuse politicians of spreading lies. To clear things up, gaslighting refers to a form of psychological manipulation in which a person (or a group) covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes. For the grossly underinformed, the term has its origins in the 1944 American film Gaslight, adapted from Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light (1938), about a woman whose husband slowly manipulates her into believing that she is going insane. Directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, and 18-year-old Angela Lansbury, it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won two (Best Actress and Best Production Design). In 2019 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Psycho’s Sound Design Set

The Horror Film Benchmark

When you think about the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho, your brain probably flashes on the iconic shower scene with Janet Leigh (whom we tend to forget has just absconded with $40,000 and is certainly no saint). You remember the house on the hill and the name of the motel, as well as Norman Bates and his mysterious mother. But you may not recall that the film also was a milestone in sound design. In fact, as film historian Kevin Hilton says, it may be the only film with a music pattern so effective and evocative it became shorthand for a very specific state of mind. Hitchcock “realized that music and sound could help tell his stories or make a big impact for one of his set pieces,” he says. “While The Birds, with its electronically treated sounds, is the most obvious example of the Master of Suspense pushing the sonic boundaries, Psycho shows that Hitchcock was already trying to break away from the conventions of a score that underpinned most scenes plus the occasional spot sound effect. [Thus], he created the sounds of death that set the benchmark for every horror and slasher film that followed.”

Ten Of The Most Terrifying

Short Stories Ever Written

In my youth I was a fan of horror stories, a fascination that stems from having read Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in the same small town in Maine where it was set, at the same time it took place. I followed it up with paperback versions of Carrie and Cujo, the latter of which was based at the same rural auto repair shop where my mother too-frequently took her car. (True story; I still remember the dogs.) To this day I occasionally engage in a horror binge, which is why I found this list of “the 10 most terrifying short stories ever written” from the Irish Times particularly compelling. Darryl Jones, who compiled it, insists that “horror works most effectively in concentrated, intense bursts—which is why the short story has always been its great literary medium. The horror short story flourished in great anthologies, often containing unforgettable works by forgotten writers, or by familiar writers straying into unfamiliar territory, as well as by established genre titans.” [Note: I have not read any of these, but I’m starting to track a few down.]

“Raw, irreverent, and witty, Reed Bunzel’s story of a tattooed war vet turned temporary private eye snaps, crackles, and pops with authenticity. War-tested, street smart, and sassy, Jack Connor is someone you want with you in a foxhole or the bloody back roads of South Carolina.”

—Former Secretary of Defense

William S. Cohen, bestselling author of

Blink Of An Eye and Dragon Fire