Timothy Jay Smith

From a young age, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that had him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.

Smith has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the de Groot Prize) for his novel, Checkpoint (later published as A Vision of Angels). Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.

Smith's latest novel is Istanbul Crossing.

One novel on his recent reading list:

Havoc by Christopher Bollen

The best way to hide a secret is to keep it from yourself, or so muses Maggie Burkhardt, an octogenarian who’s perfected the practice of ignoring the dark secrets in her own life. Widowed when her “perfect” husband Peter died, and only days later losing her daughter, Maggie has fled her once-idyllic but ultimately grief-filled life in Wisconsin to live in Europe, where she develops a penchant for meddling in other people’s – mostly couples’ – lives.

Occasionally, a couple’s problems arise from infidelity, but in most cases it’s Maggie’s perception that they are temperamentally mismatched, and she sets out to liberate them from relationships in which they don’t even know they’re stuck. Frequently, she concocts evidence of extramarital sex that she backs up with false accounts of what she’s witnessed. She has a remarkable list of success stories in breaking up couples, preventing marriages, and stopping adoptions; but when one situation becomes homicidal, she needs to flee again.

Eventually, she ends up at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel, a colonial grande dame on the banks of the Nile River, where she’s been living for three months when the story opens. She’s continued her meddlesome activities and is caught red-handed by eight-year-old Otto, a recent arrival traveling with his flappable mother.

Otto, smart and devilish, quickly realizes that what he’s witnessed gives him power over Maggie. He blackmails her to pay for an upgrade from a shabby room to a royal suite. He demands expensive gifts. The boy seems to be everywhere; spying on her, stealing sentimental objects from her room, and unnerving her to the point that she fantasizes killing him. Adept at internet research, the boy also unearths things from her past that lead to her confronting long-buried secrets, in the process unleashing a madness that she’d barely managed to keep at bay.

Bollen is a master storyteller and he’s at his best in Havoc. Told entirely from Maggie’s point of view, the reader is shoulder-to-shoulder with her as she slides into a state of murderous paranoia. Her battle of wits with Otto remains dark and dangerous all the way to its gut-wrenching end.

If there were a single book defining psychological suspense, Havoc is it. Trigger warning: once you start, you can’t put it down.

Visit Timothy Jay Smith's website.

Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith (May 2019).

My Book, The Movie: The Fourth Courier.

The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Courier.

Q&A with Timothy Jay Smith.

The Page 69 Test: Fire on the Island.

The Page 69 Test: Istanbul Crossing.

Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith (October 2024a).

Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith (October 2024b).

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Lampedusa's The Leopard:

Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, the dominant force in the Sicilian aristocracy of Palermo in 1860, made the floor shake by the “sudden movement of his huge frame,” and “a glint of pride flashed in his light blue eyes at this fleeting confirmation of his lordship over both human beings and their works.” There is a reason the Prince is known everywhere as The Leopard. Or so we would believe if we read in translation the marvelous novel by Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa and did not know that the Italian title, ‘Gattopardo,’ is not ‘Leopard’ but the African ‘Serval,’ a wildcat hunted to extinction in Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century, the same fate that was to meet the Sicilian aristocracy at nearly the same time.

Lampedusa, the 11th Prince of Lampedusa, Duke of Palma, was born in 1896 and died in l957. The Leopard, the only novel he wrote, was published the year after his death. It had been rejected by the two publishers to whom he submitted it during his life, and, such is the occasional idiocy of publishers, one of them continued to defend its decision even after the novel had gone through fifty-two editions in less than six months, which, if it is not a record, must be close to it. Lampedusa spent several years writing The Leopard, but, it could be argued, spent most of his life in preparation. A voracious reader who owned eleven hundred books on French history alone, he read — and more than read, studied and made notes on — everything of importance in English literature, notes which were later published as a thousand page critical analysis beginning with the religious reflections of the Venerable Bede to the secular mysteries of Graham Greene. The original plan for The Leopard was to follow what James Joyce had done in Ulysses and tell the story as the events of a single day. He told it instead over eight days, or rather eight months, each a subject of a separate chapter, the first four in l860, the fifth and sixth in the following two years, the seventh a quarter century later in July of l898, and the final chapter twenty-three years after that, in May of 1910, nearly half a century after the central episode.

The Leopard is a novel about a place, Sicily, the “secret island” where “a known evil” is always preferred to “an untried good,” and where the memory of the past has destroyed any hope for the future. Fabrizio, considered an “eccentric” because of an interest in mathematics that was considered “almost a sinful perversion,” was still respected because he was Prince of Salina, “an excellent horseman, indefatigable shot, and tireless skirt chaser.” He watches with something close to indifference when Garibaldi lands with his red-shirted army to unite Sicily to Italy as part of the bourgeois revolution. Nothing will change. His nephew, Tancredi, an “aristocratic liberal,” wounded at the battle of Palermo, will marry his daughter, Concetta, who is madly in love with him. Tancredi will continue the line. There will always be Salinas, and the Salinas, whatever the form of government, will always rule.

The great novelty of the year 1860, as much as what Garibaldi was doing, is the rapid rise to fortune and importance of Calogeri Sedara whose income would soon equal, and perhaps eventually surpass, that of the Prince. When Sedara entered a room, his “quick eyes were…insensible to the charms, intent on its monetary value.” When he and his daughter are invited to dinner, the Prince begins to understand that things may begin to change after all. He sees in Don Calogero, climbing the stairs in his ill-fitting tail coat, everything that is wrong with the bourgeoisie revolution; he sees in the extraordinary beauty of his daughter, Angelica, the inevitable destruction of his daughter Concetta’s only hope for happiness. He knows from his own reaction what his nephew, Tancredi, will do; he knows by a sure instinct that Tanceredi will fall in love, and not just because of how the girl looks. Tancredi is “drawn along by the physical stimulation that a beautiful woman was to his fiery youth, and also by the (as it were) measurable excitement by a rich girl in the mind of a man both ambitious and poor.”

Tancredi’s choice is not difficult. Marry Concetta and eventually inherit a worthless title and the diminishing fortunes of a family that would soon be without power; marry Angelica and be assured of “an ephemeral carnal satisfaction and a perennial financial peace.” He makes his decision without hesitation or regret, or any sense of the injury to his cousin Concetta’s feelings. The Prince’s wife insists that, by his decision, Tancredi has proven himself a traitor: “Like all liberals of his kind, first he betrays his King, now he betrays us!” The Prince’s attitude toward Tancredi’s marriage to Angelica was, “as is proper to every man not yet decrepit, that of carnal jealousy.”

Tancredi wants to marry Angelica and Angelica wants to marry him. She is in love with him, but that does not mean she loves him, a distinction Lampedusa understands far better than most writers. Angelica, he explains, though capable of passion, was incapable of love because, “she had too much pride and too much ambition to be capable of that annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality, without which there is no love.” In Tancredi, she saw her chance of gaining a “fine position in the noble world of Sicily, a world which to her was full of marvels very different from those which it contained in reality; she also wanted him as a lively partner in bed.”

While they are engaged, Tancredit likes nothing so much as to take Angelica on long tours of the Prince’s palace, a palace that is as endless as the history of Sicily itself. With a short facade — just seven windows on the square — it “gave no hint of its vast size, which extended three hundred yards back.” The seven windows are what is seen from the outside; what is not seen takes time to discover. What is not seen goes back so far that there were places, “not even Don Fabrizio had ever set foot.” He used to say that “a place of which one knows every room wasn’t worth living in.” The palace is like the mystery of Sicily, the vast obscurity of the past that has made Sicily what it is.

The days meandering through the almost limitless building were the best days of their lives, the days “when desire was always present because it was always overcome…when the sexual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were in preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation which, however, was in a way sufficient in itself, exquisite and brief; like those melodies which outlive the forgotten world they belong to and hint in their delicate and veiled gaiety themes which later in the finished work were to be developed without skill and fail.”

And then one suddenly remembers that Lampedusa had mentioned Nicias. A mention, that is all, a single word, a name that, forgotten everywhere except among those fortunate enough to have read Thucydides and his history of the Peloponnesian War, but a name still present in the mind of any Sicilian who had gone beyond the sixth grade in school. Nicias, the Athenian commander when the Athenian army was destroyed; Nicias, who had opposed the Sicilian Expedition but could not stop the Athenians from their dreams of conquest and empire. Everyone wanted Sicily and, after Nicias, after the Athenians, everyone who wanted her had her, for a while.

“We are old,” Fabrizo explains, “very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own…for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.”

Everywhere a Sicilian looks he sees the past, monuments, like the Greek ruins in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento on the southern Sicilian coast, the oldest Greek ruins in the world, “magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their own expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well….” All this history, an endless chronicle of slavery and defeat, thousands of years the victim of “foreign domination and ill-assorted rapes,” has given Sicilians the very opposite of what we might expect, an exalted sense of pride. “We think we are gods,” insists Fabrizio, “having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples,” Sicilians “consider they have an imperial past which gives them the right to a grand funeral.”

The seventh chapter of The Leopard jumps twenty-six years ahead to July of 1898 when Fabrizio is dying. Summing up his life, he comes to the conclusion that out of his seventy-three years he has lived at most two or three. In a brief catalogue of happiness, he remembers the two weeks before his marriage, a half hour when his son was born, and a few hours of talks with his son before his son moved to another country. His only real, that is to say lasting, happiness had been the many hours he had spent in his observatory, “absorbed in abstract calculations and the pursuit of the unreachable.” His only happiness, in other words, had been when he was engaged in what, because Sicily is an ancient place, the ancients understood as the highest calling of a human being, the timeless contemplation of timeless things.

Fabrizio, the Prince, had always believed that his family would endure, that there would always be Salinas, but he was the last. Twenty-three years after his death, in May of 1910, his daughter, Concetta, who had lived a life of anguished disappointment after her cousin, Tancredi, abandoned her for the beautiful and rich Angelica, a woman who later became “one of the most venomous string pullers” in Italian politics, passed away. A nephew had often called her in private Catherine the Great, “an unsuitable name made innocent by the complete purity of Concetta’s life and her nephew’s total ignorance of Russian history.” Her furniture, which she had thought “antiquated and in very bad taste,” was sold at auction and “is today the pride of a rich shipping agent when his wife gives cocktails to envious friends.” The palace, that labyrinth of rooms as difficult to discover as the real truth about Sicily was partly, though not entirely, destroyed by an allied bombing raid in l943.

The Prince of Salina, The Leopard, who thought himself part of an “unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new,” had the good fortune to know the difference. The 11th Prince of Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, had the good fortune to write a novel that explains, better than any history book ever could, what being a Sicilian really means. It was, my father told me, the only book he ever read that made him begin to understand what his own Sicilian father had really been.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.

Third Reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Third Reading: Fiction's Failure.

Third Reading: Hermann Hesse's Demian.

Third Reading: Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July.

Third Reading: Caesar’s Ghost.

Third reading: The American Constitution.

Third Reading: A Tale of Two Cities.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Kenna

Alex Kenna is a prosecutor, writer, and amateur painter. Before law school, Kenna studied painting and art history at Penn. She also worked as a freelance art critic and culture writer. Originally from Washington DC, Kenna lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and giant schnauzer, Zelda. When she’s not writing Kenna can be found nerding out in art museums, exploring flea markets, and playing string instruments badly. Her debut novel, What Meets the Eye, was nominated for a Shamus Award for best first PI novel.

Kenna’s new novel is Burn this Night.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Kenna's reply:

I just finished No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder, which is an in-depth exploration of domestic violence and familicide in our culture. As a crime fiction writer, I explore themes of good and evil, and how people are affected by tragedy and despicable acts. Right now, I’m working on a project that involves domestic violence, so I’ve been doing my homework.

This book is incredibly thorough and insightful. When writing about victims, Snyder treats them with the respect they deserve. She delves into the profoundly complex emotional and physical landscape that victims and survivors navigate – both before and after abuse. Most importantly, she explains how the question ‘why doesn’t she leave,’ greatly oversimplifies the situation that many women face.

Snyder also interviews and spends time with convicted batterers. Without skirting around or minimizing the horrifying acts they committed, she explores the psychological and sociological factors that can make men violent.

I highly recommend this book, which is extremely heartfelt and informative.

Lately, I was also treated to early previews of work by a couple of talented writers. I just finished reading a draft of the third book in James Queally’s Russell Avery series, which is a banger. It’s not out yet, so there’s plenty of time to catch up on the first two books. I’m also reading a not yet published novella by Terrence McCauley, which is terrific.

Visit Alex Kenna's website.

Q&A with Alex Kenna.

My Book, The Movie: What Meets the Eye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Andrew Welsh-Huggins is the Shamus, Derringer, and International Thriller Writers-award-nominated author of the Andy Hayes Private Eye series, featuring a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator, and editor of Columbus Noir. His stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, the 2022 anthology Paranoia Blues: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon, and other magazines and anthologies.

Welsh-Huggins's newest novel, the eighth Andy Hayes mystery, is Sick to Death.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:

I read widely, from narrative nonfiction to celebrity memoirs, but most regularly crime fiction from a continuing ed standpoint.

My first selection is This is Why We Lied by Karin Slaughter, one of my favorite writers. Slaughter rotates between stand-alone novels and her series books about Georgia medical examiner Dr. Sara Linton and her now-husband, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent. Slaughter’s books are often dark, often with themes involving violence against women and children, to the point I’ve likened her style to Stephen King without the supernatural element. She also writes the most honest portrayals of policing, good, bad, and ugly, that I’ve encountered outside of Michael Connelly. Finally, she can be laugh-out-loud funny. All those traits are present in this new book, her version of a locked-room mystery as Linton and Trent interrupt their honeymoon at an isolated luxury tourist camp to solve a vicious murder and uncover horrific family secrets.

My second selection is The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley. I picked up this 1978 private eye classic mainly because I’d read the first line so often in collections of the best crime fiction openings: "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." For me, the book bridged old and new gumshoe fiction in its dark tour of the American West, with twists I didn’t see coming. His protagonist, private eye C.W. Sughrue, is morally challenged to say the least, a conceit that doesn’t usually work for me but in this case kept me reading.

My third selection is Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke, in which Locke introduces ethically compromised Texas Ranger Darren Mathews. Mathews’ unorthodox investigation of the seemingly unrelated deaths of a poor white woman and a well-off male Black attorney rips the lid off simmering issues of racism, class, and injustice in East Texas. Locke writes beautifully and movingly of the landscape and the dilemmas faced by Mathews, who is Black. Sadly, Locke is sticking to a trilogy; I thought the second book, Heaven, My Home, was good if not better, and am eagerly awaiting the conclusion, Guide Me Home.

Visit Andrew Welsh-Huggins's website.

My Book, The Movie: An Empty Grave.

Q&A with Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

The Page 69 Test: An Empty Grave.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (April 2023).

My Book, The Movie: The End of the Road.

The Page 69 Test: The End of the Road.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nikki May

Born in Bristol and raised in Lagos, Nikki May is Anglo-Nigerian. Her critically acclaimed debut novel Wahala won the Comedy Women In Print New Voice Prize, was longlisted for the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award and the Diverse Books Award, and is being turned into a major BBC TV drama series. May lives in Dorset with her husband, two standard Schnauzers and way too many books. She should be working on her next book but is probably reading.

May's new novel is This Motherless Land.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. May's reply:

I’ve just finished Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson. One of the best things about being a published author is you get to read books before they come out. So you’ll have to wait until January 2025 to enjoy this multi-generational epic tale that examines how the past informs our present. Charmaine is a master at the stories we inherit and in this one, she explores grief and the deep scars of slavery.

I inhaled The Wedding People by Alison Espach over two nights. I’m a sucker for books that feature beautiful people in beautiful locations and this million-dollar wedding delivers both in spades. It’s riotously funny but there’s surprising depth too. Phoebe’s candidness and vulnerability pulled me in, this is a story of hope and how chance encounters can change lives.

Liane Moriarty is an auto-buy author for me and I can’t wait to start her new one – Here One Moment. But I’m forcing myself to wait, this is a holiday book, I want no distractions, no emails and ideally I want to be reading this under a blue sky with my toes in warm blue water. Might be a long wait!

Visit Nikki May's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Nikki May & Fela and Lola.

The Page 69 Test: This Motherless Land.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sung J. Woo

Sung J. Woo's short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, PEN/Guernica, and Vox. He has written five novels, Lines (2024), Deep Roots (2023), Skin Deep (2020), Love Love (2015), and Everything Asian (2009), which won the 2010 Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Literature Award. In 2022, his Modern Love essay from The New York Times was adapted by Amazon Studios for episodic television. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.

Recently I asked Woo about what he was reading. His reply:

Right now I'm more than halfway through the writing of my sixth novel, and it's been a bit of a bear. More than the usual bear, that is -- the creation of fiction has never been easy for me, but this one has had additional unexpected difficulty. I knew going in that I would be writing about a pair of unpleasant men (one is way worse than the other, but neither are boy scouts), but I did not expect to feel so unpleasant myself while doing so! Naive, I suppose -- it should've been obvious that stepping into the shoes of unsavory characters would bring me down, but it's too late now. I'm in it and that's all there's to it.

So what am I reading now to make myself feel better? Don't laugh, but I'm very much into two novels related to Bret Easton Ellis. One is his most infamous, American Psycho, starring Patrick Bateman -- the most well-dressed serial murderer in literary history. Contrary to what you might believe, I'm not a glutton for punishment. I'm genuinely curious how Ellis writes his evil protagonist. The other novel is one recommended by Ellis, We're So Famous, written by Jaime Clarke, about three fame-obsessed teenage girls who form a rock band but then become suspects in a pair of murders, which of course catapults them to fame.

I may be reading these books as a form of empathy, too. I imagine both Ellis and Clarke went through what I'm going through now. Misery loves company?

Visit Sung J. Woo's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Sung J. Woo & Koda.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Asian.

My Book, The Movie: Skin Deep.

Q&A with Sung J. Woo.

The Page 69 Test: Skin Deep.

My Book, The Movie: Deep Roots.

The Page 69 Test: Deep Roots.

Writers Read: Sung J. Woo (September 2023).

The Page 69 Test: Lines.

My Book, The Movie: Lines.

--Marshal Zeringue