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The Art of the Obituary

…a wry, witty, deeply researched survey of the art and history of the obituary, reflecting on why obituaries matter and what it’s like to be charged with writing them … Roberts ponders the origins of the obituary, muses on the peculiarities of word choice (“In some newspapers, people still ‘pass’ or meet their ‘demise’ or ‘untimely end’ ”), and explores how different publications decide who will be memorialized in their pages and how to address their cause of death. He confides that landing on a succinct description of the latter is often challenging, as illustrated by a list of “actual, incredulous comments from Times obit writers” that includes gems like “Can we say, ‘In a crocodile accident’?” Read more

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Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence

South African journalist de Greef (Poacher), who has spent years reporting on global psychedelic movements, delivers a chilling saga about a former doctor who spearheaded the rise of toad smoking in the 2010s.

Part exposé, part Mexican travelogue, the narrative profiles Octavio Rettig, who claimed that he cured himself of cocaine addiction by smoking the dried secretions from the Sonoran Desert toad in 2012. The author details how Rettig stripped the rituals of the Indigenous Seri peoples for parts, claiming that the Seris had a long history of smoking the secretions. In addition to the trippy high the practice achieved, Rettig claimed the “medicine” could cure suicidal tendencies, PTSD, and alcoholism, drawing huge crowds to Sonora to attend his rituals. But even at the pinnacle of Rettig’s fame, stories circulated about people dying—including Rettig’s girlfriend—during those rituals. As de Greef digs into those deaths and Rettig’s motives, he takes the narrative on intriguing side quests, including a look at the heaps of corporate money being poured into the development of synthetic toad venom. Propulsive and rigorously reported, this wild work of true crime grips from first page to last. Read more

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Here Is Your Scandi Noir Syllabus Courtesy Of Renowned Author, David Lagercrantz

“If Agatha Christie asks, ‘Who did it?’, Nordic crime fiction is more interested in ‘Why did it happen? – and what does it say about our society?” Lagercrantz tells me. “The only thing that’s certain nowadays—or almost certain—is that the protagonists have more problems than the crimes they are trying to solve. There are few happy detectives in Scandi Noir.” Read more

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On the Booming Field of Biographies of Characters From Literature

Following Turner’s study of the Wife of Bath, similar books have hit shelves covering the lives and afterlives of Juliet (from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), Bigger Thomas (from Richard Wright’s Native Son), Jim (from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn), Haman (from the biblical book of Esther), Hannibal Lecter (from a series of Thomas Harris novels and films, most famously The Silence of the Lambs), and finally Margaret of Anjou (our own contribution to the burgeoning genre). Still others are forthcoming—the scholar James Shapiro is apparently at work on a biography of Shakespeare’s Othello. Read more

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Winner of Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Revealed

The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths, which follows a detective working for a time-travelling police cold case team, has been named crime novel of the year. The book is the first in a new series and sees investigator Ali Dawson travel to Victorian London in 1850 to explore a series of killings that have 21st century consequences for politicians and her own family. Read more

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