Murdaugh, He Wrote: “Crime Of

The Century” Opens In South Carolina

I don’t usually report on current crime stories, but this one is taking place right in my backyard. [Also, I couldn’t resist the cheesy headline.] By now, almost everyone has heard that prominent South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh is on trial for murdering his wife and son eighteen months ago, in an attempt to gain sympathy and turn the spotlight away from his financial crimes.” As noted by numerous news outlets, prosecutors argue that around 8:50 p.m. on June 7, 2021, Murdaugh killed his son with a rifle before fatally shooting his wife. In their opening arguments, they stated that Murdaugh called 911 the night of the killings to report that he’d found his wife and son fatally shot at the family’s home. They insist the evidence shows that Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes were “about to come to light” when his wife and son were killed. “You’re going to hear some of what was going on in Alex Murdaugh’s life, leading up to that day – stuff that happened that very day, stuff that was leading up to a perfect storm that was gathering,” lead prosecutor Creighton Waters said. Defense lawyers for Murdaugh have long insisted their client is innocent of the murder charges, claiming he was with his ailing father at the time the grisly crime was committed and had no motivation to kill his family. In his opening statements, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian stressed it was his “honor” to represent Murdaugh, whom he asked to stand in front of the jury.

Malice Domestic Announces This

Year's Agatha Award Nominees

Malice Domestic announced the 2022 Agatha Award nominees last Saturday, January 28. The awards recognize the “traditional mystery,” as typified by the works of Agatha Christie and others. The genre is loosely defined as mysteries that contain no explicit sex, excessive gore or gratuitous violence, and are not classified as “hard-boiled.” Some of the nominees include:

Best Contemporary Novel:

  • Bayou Book Thief, by Ellen Byron (Berkley Prime Crime)

  • Death By Bubble Tea, by Jennifer J. Chow (Berkley)

  • Fatal Reunion, by Annette Dashofy (Level Best Books)

  • Dead Man’s Leap, by Tina de Bellegarde (Level Best Books)

  • A World of Curiosities, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)

Best Historical Novel

  • The Counterfeit Wife, by Mally Becker (Level Best Books)

  • Because I Could Not Stop For Death, by Amanda Flower (Berkley)

  • The Lindbergh Nanny, by Mariah Fredericks (Minotaur)

  • In Place of Fear, by Catriona McPherson (Mobius)

  • Under A Veiled Moon, by Karen Odden (Crooked Lane Books)

Best First Novel

  • Cheddar Off Dead, by Korina Moss (St. Martin’s)

  • Death In The Aegean, by M. A. Monnin (Level Best Books)

  • The Bangalore Detectives Club, by Harini Nagendra (Constable)

  • Devil’s Chew Toy, by Rob Osler (Crooked Lane Books)

  • The Finalist, by Joan Long (Level Best Books)

  • The Gallery of Beauties, by Nina Wachsman (Level Best Books)

What Did Shakespeare Mean When He

Wrote “Let’s Kill All The Lawyers”?

Did Shakespeare really mean it when he wrote the line, “Let’s kill all the lawyers? And, if so, in what context was it used? Approximately four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, this pithy phrase has become one of his most famous literary witticisms, appropriated often to disparage the legal profession, or at least acknowledge the ubiquitous caricature of the crooked, overpriced counselor. As Olivia Rutigliano wrote last week in Crime Reads, it was said by a character called Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, which most historians believe was written between 1596 and 1599. Dick is a villainous character, a large, threatening murderer and the right-hand-man of Jack Cade, who is leading a rebellion against King Henry. Jack and Dick are aggressively anti-intellectual, interested in killing anyone who can read, and burning all the books and documents they encounter. They know they’ll be able to take over an ignorant population with greater ease than one where everyone understands their rights. The line suggests that Dick believes that, in order for their coup to prevail, they must eradicate the defenders of justice who could both stop the revolt he intends to help spur and then remove the power he hopes to grab for Cade. In other words, it appears Shakespeare was representing lawyers as the most fundamental defense against the grossest manifestations of power-hungry antics wrought by the scum of humanity, rather than the scourge of society some people today believe them to be.

It’s Elementary: The Prolific Life

Of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Mystery fans know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of perhaps the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. But as significant as the Holmes character is, he appears in only a fraction of the author’s literary works, which range from fantasy to science fiction to humor to historical fiction. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1859, Doyle spent much of his upbringing in the household of Mary Burton, a family friend who took the boy in because of his father’s struggles with alcoholism. As noted by Emily Martin in Novel Suspects, at the age of nine he was sent to school in England and attended the Jesuit school Stonyhurst College, where he was bored with the school’s curriculum and religious dogma and became an agnostic. Doyle went on to study medicine with Dr. Joseph Bell, whose incredible ability at diagnostic deduction became the model for Doyle’s most famous character, Sherlock Holmes, who appeared (with Dr. Watson) in over 60 stories. During that time, however, he became actively involved in the Spiritualist movement and, in fact, attempted to kill off Holmes so that he could focus on other things. That lasted until 1901, when Doyle revived the sleuth in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” the money from which allowed him to continue his missionary work. Over the course of his career, he wrote nearly 200 novels, short stories, and poems, and also enjoyed a remarkable medical career. In 1902, King Edward VII knighted him for services rendered to the Crown during the Boer War. Rumor has it that the king also was a big fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Kubrick’s First “Mature” Film Was

The 1956 Heist Movie The Killing

One of the most overlooked American crime movies is Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 noir classic The Killing, written by Kubrick and Jim Thompson and based on Lionel White's novel Clean Break. Starring Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, and Vince Edwards, it’s considered Kubrick’s first “mature” film (he was 28 when it was released) and gave audiences and reviewers at the time a look at the talent the director would ultimately bring to the screen. Essentially a heist film, The Killing focuses on a race track robbery that is both simple and labyrinthian, following veteran criminal Johnny Clay (Hayden) who is planning one last heist before settling down and marrying his sweetheart Fay (Gray]. He plans to steal $2 million from the money-counting room of a racetrack, and assembles a team that consists of a corrupt cop, a betting window teller to gain access to the backroom, a sharpshooter to shoot the favorite horse during the race to distract the crowd and keep the winnings from being paid out, a wrestler to provide another distraction by provoking a fight at the track bar, and a track bartender. As the late film critic Roger Ebert pointed out, “This heist is worth a lot of planning, and Johnny has gone the distance. In his mind his plan is superb. All it depends upon is everybody doing exactly what is required of them, exactly when and where. The word that occurs to me in describing Kubrick's approach to Johnny and the film, is ‘control.’ That may suggest the link between this first mature feature and Kubrick's later films, so varied and brilliant.”

NOW AVAILABLE!!!

Greenwich Mean Time

“A globe-spanning, mind-spinning thriller that will delight fans of Jason Bourne. Rōnin Phythian, an assassin with extraordinary powers and a code of his own, deserves a sequel. Make that sequels.” —Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of House on Fire

“Greenwich Mean Time is a rollicking good time of thrills and skills.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry

"Over-the-top action..." —Publishers Weekly

When photojournalist Monica Cross literally stumbles into the site of an old airplane crash at the edge of a Himalayan glacier, she is exposed to a dark and deadly secret that was meant to remain hidden forever. Unaware that her life is in grave danger, she attempts to get home to New York while the Greenwich Global Group—a dark-web, murder-for-hire outfit—pulls out all stops to make sure she never gets there. Spanning ten time zones, nine countries, and four continents, Greenwich Mean Time is a tightly spun thriller that plays out against a sinister plot designed to change the course of history for all time.