#Best crime and thrillers of 2023

[justforbooks]

Best crime and thrillers of 2023

Given this year’s headlines, it’s unsurprising that our appetite for cosy crime continues unabated, with the latest title in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die (Viking), topping the bestseller lists. Janice Hallett’s novels The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, which also features a group of amateur crime-solvers, and The Christmas Appeal (both Viper) have proved phenomenally popular, too.

Hallett’s books, which are constructed as dossiers – transcripts, emails, WhatsApp messages and the like – are part of a growing trend of experimentation with form, ranging from Cara Hunter’s intricate Murder in the Family (HarperCollins), which is structured around the making of a cold case documentary, to Gareth Rubin’s tête-bêche The Turnglass (Simon & Schuster). Books that hark back to the golden age of crime, such as Tom Mead’s splendidly tricksy locked-room mystery Death and the Conjuror (Head of Zeus), are also on the rise. The late Christopher Fowler, author of the wonderful Bryant & May detective series, who often lamented the sacrifice of inventiveness and fun on the altar of realism, would surely have approved. Word Monkey (Doubleday), published posthumously, is his funny and moving memoir of a life spent writing popular fiction.

Notable debuts include Callum McSorley’s Glaswegian gangland thriller Squeaky Clean (Pushkin Vertigo); Jo Callaghan’s In the Blink of an Eye (Simon & Schuster), a police procedural with an AI detective; Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy (Pushkin Vertigo), featuring queer punk nun investigator Sister Holiday; and the caustically funny Thirty Days of Darkness (Orenda) by Jenny Lund Madsen (translated from the Danish by Megan E Turney).

There have been welcome additions to series, including a third book, Case Sensitive (Zaffre), for AK Turner’s forensic investigator Cassie Raven, and a second, The Wheel of Doll (Pushkin Vertigo), for Jonathan Ames’s LA private eye Happy Doll, who is shaping up to be the perfect hardboiled 21st-century hero.

Other must-reads for fans of American crime fiction include Ozark Dogs (Headline) by Eli Cranor, a powerful story of feuding Arkansas families; SA Cosby’s Virginia-set police procedural All the Sinners Bleed (Headline); Megan Abbott’s nightmarish Beware the Woman (Virago); and Rebecca Makkai’s foray into very dark academia, I Have Some Questions for You (Fleet). There are shades of James Ellroy in Jordan Harper’s Hollywood-set tour de force Everybody Knows (Faber), while Raymond Chandler’s hero Philip Marlowe gets a timely do-over from Scottish crime doyenne Denise Mina in The Second Murderer (Harvill Secker).

As Mick Herron observed in his Slow Horses origin novel, The Secret Hours (Baskerville), there’s a long list of spy novelists who have been pegged as the heir to John le Carré. Herron must be in pole position for principal legatee, but it’s been a good year for espionage generally: standout novels include Matthew Richardson’s The Scarlet Papers (Michael Joseph), John Lawton’s Moscow Exile (Grove Press) and Harriet Crawley’s The Translator (Bitter Lemon).

Historical crime has also been well served. Highlights include Emma Flint’s excellent Other Women (Picador), based on a real 1924 murder case; Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s story of a fortune teller’s quest for identity in Georgian high society, The Square of Sevens (Mantle); and SG MacLean’s tale of Restoration revenge and retribution, The Winter List (Quercus). There are echoes of Chester Himes in Viper’s Dream (No Exit) by Jake Lamar, which begins in 1930s Harlem, while Palace of Shadows (Mantle) by Ray Celestin, set in the late 19th century, takes the true story of American weapons heiress Sarah Winchester’s San Jose mansion and transports it to Yorkshire, with chillingly gothic results.

The latest novel in Vaseem Khan’s postcolonial India series, Death of a Lesser God (Hodder), is also well worth the read, as are Deepti Kapoor’s present-day organised crime saga Age of Vice (Fleet) and Parini Shroff’s darkly antic feminist revenge drama The Bandit Queens (Atlantic).

While psychological thrillers are thinner on the ground than in previous years, the quality remains high, with Liz Nugent’s complex and heartbreaking tale of abuse, Strange Sally Diamond (Penguin Sandycove), and Sarah Hilary’s disturbing portrait of a family in freefall, Black Thorn (Macmillan), being two of the best.

Penguin Modern Classics has revived its crime series, complete with iconic green livery, with works by Georges Simenon, Dorothy B Hughes and Ross MacDonald. There have been reissues by other publishers, too – forgotten gems including Celia Fremlin’s 1959 holiday‑from-hell novel, Uncle Paul (Faber), and Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (Vintage). Finished in 1942 but only now published in its entirety, the latter is an account of an innocent man who takes refuge from racist police officers in the sewers of Chicago – part allegorical, part brutally realistic and, unfortunately, wholly topical.

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[wamathai]

Maurice Muendo's debut feature film "BOBO" to premiere on Showmax on May 23

Kenyan filmmaker and MultiChoice Talent Factory alumni Maurice Muendo is set to have his directorial debut film, BOBO, premiere on Showmax this May. The film comes to the African streaming platform following its premiere at the 2025 Joburg Film Festival. BOBO follows a promising young woman who misses a chance to secure a bursary and discovers her family is at the brink of losing their land to a…

[macrolit]

NYT's Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

[staydandy]

Desire Catcher (2023) - 无眠之境 - Whump List

List by StayDandy Synopsis : In the world of hypnotism, Lu Feng Ping is known for being one of the country's best hypnotists. Naturally, when the city is rocked by a string of crimes that all seem to be conducted under the influence of hypnotism, it is Feng Ping the police turn to for help. As the officer assigned to the case, Luo Fei has no choice but to consult with Feng Ping. A criminal detective plagued by his own inner demons, Luo Fei is highly suspicious of Feng Ping and his work. Putting their mutual suspicions aside, Feng Ping and Luo Fei take on the case with equal fervor. Working together, the two come to find that something other than their work connects them: a decade-old case that, to this day, has gone unsolved. (MDL)

Whumpee : Lu Feng Ping played by Zheng Ye Cheng (left) • Luo Fei played by Xin Yun Lai (right)

Country : 🇨🇳 China Genres : Thriller, Mystery, Psychological, Crime, Bromance

Notes : This is a Full Whump List • Adapted from the novel "Xie E Cui Mian Shi" (邪恶催眠师) by Zhou Hao Hui (周浩晖) • Right in the first few episode, from the first scene, this show starts with a SA attack of a minor, then continues with cannibalism, and a dead animal .. soooo, yeah, let that set the pace & be cautious going forward • TW : SA, Suicide, Animal Cruelty

Episodes on List : 14 Total Episodes : 24

*Spoilers below*

01 : TW : SA

02 : Luo Fei has a PTSD trauma nightmare

03 : (near end) Lu Feng Ping is thrown to the floor & put in an arm lock

06 : Luo Fei & Feng Ping have a kickboxing match, each getting their share of beatings (song : Two Heroes, by Zheng Yecheng, Xin Yunlai, and Dasang Gyatso)

07 : Luo Fei is drunk asleep, carried

08 : (near end) Feng Ping pushes Luo Fei out of the way of a car, injures his ankle

09 : … continued from previous ep. ... Feng Ping is limping … hospitalized … almost falls off a building saving someone, held by his injured leg.. using his pain to get attention 😆, carried

10 : Luo Fei is in a fight

14 : (at end) Feng Ping detained

15 : [flashback] Fight … [present] Detained, handcuffed, interrogated

16 : Arrested again, handcuffed, interrogated … locks himself in a room, fills it with gas & causes an explosion, Luo Fei knocked to the ground from the explosion

18 : TW : SA

19 : Feng Ping detained again, handcuffed, interrogated … [flashback] fight … thrown to the ground, arm wrenched (comedic) … TW : suicide

21 : Luo Fei attacked by a group with knives, fight, Feng Ping blurry vision, ear ringing, hypnotised into almost stabbing himself, passes out … wakes in hospital

23 : Luo Fei fights a large group … Luo Fei & Feng Ping fight against a large group; Feng Ping beaten with bats

24 : (near end) Imprisoned

[petercapaldi-press]

INTERVIEW

Interrogating Peter Capaldi, Who is (Actually, Disconcertingly) Very Nice

A cordial conversation with the British character actor—still best known for spewing some of TV's greatest insults on The Thick of It—about his new AppleTV+ series Criminal Record, Doctor Who, and his punk-rock past.

January 18, 2024

By Joe Gross

It is surprising to talk to Peter Capaldi and hear him refrain from yelling wildly specific, increasingly horrifying oaths at you.

It is in no way surprising that people who run into the 65-year old Scottish actor want him to do just that.

“People come and ask me to swear at them and tell 'em to fuck off,” Capaldi says via Zoom. Dressed in a black suit jacket and white shirt buttoned to the top, he smiles a smile that does not, in fact, seem full of coiled malice, but instead looks quite genuine: “Which is nice.”

Though his 40-plus year career in film and television has seen him play all sorts of folks —most of them a little odd, spectacularly coiffed and more than a little chatty—Capaldi is best known for two roles.

He played the absolutely demonic Malcolm Tucker, profanity-driven communications director and hilariously merciless political enforcer for the Prime Minister in the BBC series The Thick of It and its terrific 2009 spin-off movie, In the Loop. (Both the series and the film were created by Armando Iannucci, who went on to savage U.S. politicos with Veep; Iannucci's writing staff included Succession creator Jesse Armstrong.)

And from 2013 to 2017, Capaldi played the twelfth incarnation of the chaotic, immortal Time Lord Doctor Who, making a mark on the British sci-fi franchise which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2023.

In Criminal Record, an eight-episode series whose third installment premiered this week on AppleTV+, Capaldi plays a completely different kind of fellow from the above: a sullen, angry cop, and a secret-keeping, interior one at that.

Co-produced by Capaldi’s wife Elaine Collins (Vera, Shetland) and written by BAFTA nominee Paul Rutman (The Virgin Queen), Criminal Record stars Capaldi as DCI Daniel Hegarty, a gaunt detective with decades of sketchy law enforcement under his belt and a whole mess of secrets he'd prefer to keep locked away.

When an anonymous domestic violence call comes into a London police station—a panicked woman accusing her partner of a murder long thought solved—it puts Hegarty up against the young and hungry detective June Lenker (Cush Jumbo of The Good Wife and The Good Fight fame), whose view of The Job is radically different from the hostile Hagerty’s. Framed by the 2011 London riots and more recent scandals that have rocked the city’s Metropolitan Police Service, Criminal Record is a blend of noir thriller and canny drama, focusing on race and crime in 21st century Britain.

Capaldi usually plays characters who speak their mind vigorously and often, whose words and actions are a direct link to the audience’s understanding of the story. In some ways, Hegarty lets you know exactly what he’s about: when interviewed by Lenker, he refers to the Black man he jailed as “a poor man’s OJ.”

On the other hand, he is also a mighty unreliable narrator, when he is compelled to share at all. “[Hegarty] hides all the time,” Capaldi says. “He hides how he feels and he hides what's happening. In screen acting, people say that when you're in front of the camera, you’ve got to do nothing. But you can't really do nothing, you have to have something going on. We cannot reveal to the audience Hegarty’s true self. We can’t wink and nudge. I'm not really used to playing that kind of character.”

With his wife producing, Capaldi got into the development process early. “She was also looking for something for Cush Jumbo at the same time,” he says, “so the material was able to be developed with [both of] us in mind. It's very unusual to be involved so early on, and also very unusual for writers, I guess, to know exactly who they're writing for.”

Capaldi is brilliant here, cold and angry and defensive in a dangerous way, especially in the scenes with Cush, which bring the intensity of two professionals—one earnest and increasingly pissed off, one cynical and skilled in manipulation—who are both trying to decide if they are enemies or allies while trying to get over on one another in different ways. It’s a tension that lasts until literally the last scene of the last episode.

“Cush and I both decided, without really discussing it, to not really rehearse,” Capaldi says, “We stuck to the lines but we didn't really know how we were going to deliver them. So we just went at each other and our responses were completely in the moment.”

Capaldi’s career is that of a journeyman character actor whose singular charisma and look has increasingly put him in leading roles in the past 20 years -- like Christopher Walken, if a part calls for a Peter Capaldi kind of guy, he’s kind of your only option. So it’s fascinating to see him cast against type in Criminal Record. A long-standing Hey, it's that guy! actor whose screen presence is stickier than most; he says he’s been recognized in America ever since his first role in Local Hero at age 23 but only found a truly wide audience with Doctor Who and Malcolm Tucker. (Though like Tucker and the Doctor, Hegarty is full of rage, sublimated though it may be.)

“The Thick of It is old now, but there's a contemporaneous quality about Malcolm Tucker that makes people think he’s still around,” Capaldi says. “I meet people working in politics or whatever who feel that that show is some kind of balm for them.”

Doctor Who, on the other hand, is both a British institution and a property thought dead and buried in the 1990s, only to come roaring back to life and find a new audience starting in 2005. “That show goes on and expands and people get into it and it sort of never fades away,” Capaldi says. “I’m still Doctor Who, even though I haven't done it for a long time.”

And like many a Brit of his generation, Capaldi sang in a post-punk band, a quartet with the rather unfortunate name of the Dreamboys (Craig Ferguson was their drummer for a spell).

“Worst name in the world,” he says, “Might as well have been called the Chippendales. We thought we were Caligari-esque, Kafkaesque, strange, nightmarish. Not with that name.” (That said, any tune from their self-released EP -- “Béla Lugosi's Birthdáy” b/w “Outér Limits” and “Shàlle We Dànce” -- would fit right in on a compilation of goth-pop deep cuts.) For Capaldi, being in a band wasn't just about making music: “You would evoke a worldview, and then you could dress accordingly and it was wonderful. But the more and more effort we put in, the less and less distance we'd go.”

The DIY vibe, in turn, influenced Capaldi’s work as an actor. “I was very uncomfortable around actors for a long time because they might as well have been smoking pipes, wearing cravats and talking about Shakespeare,” he says. He never went to drama school so he had no idea how to approach a script or how to get from point A to B in a scene.

“But the cauldron of chaotic creativity that is being in a band is how I like to work,” he continues. “Like being in a band, in acting, you have to be able to say, ‘I don't know what it is, but I can feel something going on over here. I'll try something in that direction. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn't.’ I think that's all very musical.”

[viola-verse]

Get to know Viola

*Songs and albums names are made up and not actual songs. Everything here is fictional.

Main Masterlist | Kprofile | Background | More Facts - coming soon

Viola Kwon ❨ Kwon Ha-Neul; born Dec 26th 1993 ❩, is a Korean-New Zealand former singer and dancer. Born in Wellington New Zealand, she lived there until she was 9 when she moved to her father’s hometown in South Korea. She was a member of the k-pop girl group Le Fleurs that disbanded three years after they debuted in 2014. After much convincing from Hybe/Big Hit and a lot of encouragement from her friends and family, she debuted as a solo artist in 2023. 

BASICS:

Birth Name: Viola Ha-Neul Kwon 

Korean Name: 권하늘 (Kwon Ha-Neul) 

Stage Name: Viola 

Birthdate: Dec 26th, 1993 

Birthplace: Wellington, New Zealand 

Nationality: Korean-New Zealand 

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn 

MBTI: INFJ 

Hobbies: photography, crocheting, painting, writing, gaming, looking up useless facts, going to the beach

APPEARANCE:

Height: 164cm ❨ 5’3" ❩ 

Weight: 45kg ❨ 101lbs ❩ 

Hair Color: Brunette (natural), does occasionally dye her hair.

Eye Color: Brown 

Piercings: She only has her ears pierced. She doesn’t wear earrings often. 

Tattoos: She has a 7 in roman numerals on her wrist, because it's her favourite number and what she thinks is her lucky number.

Unique Features: She has a light scattering of freckles across her nose which are easily seen when she’s not wearing makeup. Fox-like eyes, heart shaped lips and small ears.  

Medical Conditions: Migraines, she broke her ankle three years after debuting, social anxiety

FAMILY: 

Parents: Kwon Myung-Dae & Jessica Nelsen (Divorced - 1998), step-mother Kim Na-eun (married Myung-dae in 2001), step-father Brad Smith, married Jessica in 2012)

Siblings: a younger brother and a younger half-sister. Seong-Yu (2003) and Georgia (2016). 

Other Relatives: Kwon Soonyoung (Hoshi) from SEVENTEEN is her cousin. Their dads are brothers. They are super close and act more like siblings and best friends than cousins. They’re often seen together and are pretty much everyone’s favorite cousin duo.

LIKES & DISLIKES:

Likes:

Colours: Black & Green are her favourite colours but she also likes blue, purple, peacock, teal.

Food: Pasta, beef, pavlova, strawberries, sweet and sour wontons, lemon chicken, fish & chips, mochi ice cream, spicy ramen, salads, korean fried chicken, hot chips (fries), soup, anything Yoongi cooks.

Drinks: Soju, Jack Daniels, Bacardi, peach iced tea, green tea, herbal teas, water, Dr. Pepper.

Music/Bands/Singers: BTS and their solo music, The Rose, Seventeen, Stray Kids, Ateez, TXT, Le Sserafim, Twice, Jessi, Hwasa, Blackpink and their solo music and many more. She's also a big fan of heavy rock music and listens to it every time she works out or needs physical motivation. She has Halestorm, Nightwish, Pantera, Metallica, and others on her playlist. Some of her favourite groups and singers of all time are Fleetwood Mac, Queen, The Eagles & Stevie Ray Vaughn. She also loves the older music and was raised on it.

Seasons: Summer & Spring. In New Zealand she's a summer baby.

TV Shows: She watches mostly K-Dramas. She loves the psychological crime thrillers the most. Mouse, Mr. Plankton, Squid Games, Missing: The Other Side, The Uncanny Counter, Hi Bye, Mama, Bulgasal Immortal Souls, Bloodhounds, Move to Heaven, Taxi Driver. She'll watch anything with Lee Je-Hoon in it.

Dislikes:

Colours: Orange

Food: bags of mixed veges, corn, peas, pumpkin, potato in the form of anything but fries, sweet potato. She's very much a texture eater. She doesn't look mushy foods.

Drinks: Coffee, hot chocolate

Seasons: Winter, she hates feeling cold.

Will add more when I think of them.

IDOL CAREER: 

Group Debut:

Group Name: Le Fleurs  

Fandom Name: Bouquets  

Company: Big Hit/Hybe 

Debut Date: 16th Jan 2014 

Disband Date: 09th Sept 2017

Number Of Members: 5 

Concept: Fantasy - fairy-like, sweet, innocent, whimsical 

Debut Album Name: Flower Garden - 2 versions - Flora & Fauna 

Debut Song: Flowers. 

The Most Popular Song: I'll be her. 

Members:   

Lee Jun-Ha/Aster (1992 - leader/rapper)  

Lee Su-Jo/Daisy (1992 - rapper/songwriter),  

Kwon Ha-Neul/Viola (1993 - main dancer/songwriter/vocal),  

Seo Na-Mi/Poppy (1995 - main vocalist/visual),  

Kim Eun-Sa/Lily (1996 - maknae/dance line) 

Solo Debut: 

Stage Name: Viola 

Fandom Name: Violettes 

Company: Big Hit/Hybe 

Debut Date: 3rd Feb 2023

Concept: Changes every comeback

Debut Album Name: Self-titled - Viola

Debut Song: Welcome Home

The Most Popular Song: It's My Turn

©️2025 @viola-verse & @dancinglikebutterflywings - Do not copy. modify and/or repost anywhere.

[maximumwobblerbanditdonut]

Stuart Martin the latest Scottish actor rumoured to be connected with the highly coveted 007 role.

Stuart Martin, is a leading Scottish actor, and the latest actor rumoured to be connected with the highly coveted James Bond role, and will continue to make headlines. Stuart hails from Ayr, Burns country, on the West Coast of Scotland, an hour south of Glasgow. He studied drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS)

Best known for playing a leading role in both films in the epic Netflix ‘Rebel Moon’ series directed by Zack Snyder, ‘A Child of Fire’ (2023) and ‘The Scargiver’ (2024) in which he played Den. Babylon, Jamestown, Crossing Lines (2015) – Game of Thrones (2014) Medici: Masters of Florence and Miss Scarlet and The Duke. He has recently been announced as a leading cast member in the new Channel 4 crime thriller series 'In Flight' which will be released in 2025.

Richard Madden as Cosimo de Medici (he is on the right in the second picture) Stuart Martin as Lorenzo de Medici is on the left.

In 2016 playing the leading role of Lorenzo de Medici in the first series of Netflix’s Renaissance drama ‘Medici’, starring opposite Richard Madden. Interestingly, both actors are on the list of contention' to become the first Scottish Bond since the legendary Sean Connery.

Apparently impressed Eon Productions owners Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, who produce the Bond films his tough guy role of Bradley Cage in Zack Snyder’s 2021 heist comedy “Army of Thieves” which has sparked the Bond interest, thanks to his impressive shoot out scenes which involved throwing himself at vehicles in high-octane stunts.

Stuart Martin is 39 years old, and six foot two, this makes him the exact height Sean Connery was when he played Bond. And at just shy of 40, he's the perfect age. But, Still, This is a rumour, We won't know for sure who the next James Bond is until EON and Amazon make the official announcement.

It's hard to miss the fact that Scotland is full of experienced actors, and above line talent in order to create sustainable characters at the moment. But, For now, the possibility of Stuart Martin feels not only plausible but a classic choice, too.

Posted 5th February 2025

#StuartMartin

[williamrikers]

Some Personal Favorite BL Moments of 2023

this is inspired by @lurkingshan's post, thank you for that 😊

Best Show

be my favorite, hands down. this show hooked me right from the very beginning, and each week it kept outdoing itself. the kindest, most compassionate storytelling mixed with some absolutely amazing character journeys and a strong message at its heart, bmf will stay with me forever (and not only because i managed to snatch one of the utterly gorgeous box sets for my collection). 12/10 puffball music boxes

Best Scene

alan and wen pre- and post-breakup at the start of episode 5 of moonlight chicken. i've rewatched these nine minutes more times than i can count. both first and mix do some incredible acting here, and it's such an utter joy to watch. 5/5 crying firsts sliding down a wall

The Scene That Came For My Life The Most

look, i've talked about only friends episode 6 [4/4] before. you all already know that i desire mew carnally for what he did with that audio tape. i have also rewatched this scene an embarrassing amount of times. 96/69 illicit sex tapes

Most Rewatchable Show and Best Main Couple

this one goes to a boss and a babe. i have already rewatched this show twice this year, and i love it more on every single rewatch. i regularly lose my mind about how much i love this silly little show and start waxing poetic about how much this love story means to me, how much i adore gun and cher's weirdness, their communication, their commitment, their gentleness, their mutual respect, the way they help each other and heal each other, the way they make each other feel safe and loved, which my friends from the bl besties server can attest to. maybe one day, i'll put all of my ramblings into a coherent format, but for now please trust that this show is absolutely wonderful and extremely special to me. 1000/10 gaymer friends sleepovers

Best Premise (That Was Utterly Ruined By The Show)

i've got to say dangerous romance, although step by step comes in at a close second. after the second episode of dr, i was out here writing hundreds of words worth of meta, and then... well, then the show became what it unfortunately is, now. i still want to see the show that i was promised (a thriller about two poor brothers who get into hot water because of money issues and end up having to turn to crime to survive, all while the younger brother slowly falls in love with the biggest bully at school, and over the course of the show the bully needs to learn to become a better person and help sailom overcome the trust issues he should have had from growing up constantly threatened and sometimes physically abused by members of the mafia.) -20/10 stupid fucking windmills for ruining something that could have been amazing

Best Side Couple

tiwpor, you will always be famous to me. my school president itself might just have given us crumbs, but i licked those tiny crumbs right off the floor with delight, and when our skyy 2 made it canon, i lost my entire mind. i could not have asked for more. 2/2 couples t-shirts

Best Date

yang and phumjai on their practice date in episode 4 of love in translation was probably the sweetest thing that happened on any bl in 2023. in the later episodes, they had many more beautiful moments together as well as some incredibly amazing physical intimacy (plus, in the extended iqiyi cut, one hell of a foreplay scene), but their sweet date before they had even confessed their feelings has stayed with me. 11/10 slices of pandan

Best Beach Scene(s)

never let me go wins this one. no other show was as devoted to showing off their beautiful beach locations as nlmg this year. watching this show made me yearn for the sea. 1/1 tattoo of your boyfriend's name

Best Rooftop Scene

despite the stiff competition in the form of bmf and cherry magic thailand, last twilight has this one in the bag. the pain, the pining, the heartbreak, the complicated feelings, the desperate kiss... they even lampshaded this trope in the dialogue. stellar scene. 12/10 sunflowers

Best Sensuality

we've had a lot of high heat bls this year, some of them still ongoing, and since billy infamously said "a lot and deeply", i feel like the next episode of the sign might just blow all of our minds. i'm not awarding a best sex scene here so i won't have to eat my words in a few days—however, i feel confident in saying that when it comes to raw sensuality, no one is going to beat ray and sand in only friends this year, no matter how hard the characters on pit babe, playboyy and the sign might be trying. truly, nobody embodies sensual attraction like first and khaotung do. 69/10 sausages that represent blowjobs

Best Minor Character That Stole The Show

gotta agree with the masses here and say nawin laws of attraction. what a guy. every day i miss him. ∞/10 unhinged ex boyfriends

Best Viewing Experience

this is not bl, but it might as well be: midnight museum still feels like a fever dream, i have no idea what the plot even was, i understood maybe 10% of what was happening at any given moment, and i've never had more fun watching anything. this truly is the show of all time. 5/3 roles played by gun atthaphan

Wildest GMMTV Moment

also not a bl, but the piploy pissing in the car scene as an act of revenge in wednesday club would go down in history, if, you know, people had actually watched this show. what can i even say. 3/3 gratuitous pissing scenes

Most Anticipated Show Of 2024

i just had to find a way to mention my golden blood in this post. i am yearning for this show with an intensity i cannot describe. i literally need to see joss bridal carrying gawin as much as possible, it is on the baseline of my hierarchy of needs. no matter whether this turns out to be trashy fun, high camp, an actually serious show, or all three, i win. gmmtv could not have given me anything better to look forward to next year 💖

[adamwatchesmovies]

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Of all the legal thrillers I’ve seen, Anatomy of a Fall feels the most genuine and relatable. While there are big revelations about the people involved and technically, they come suddenly, this isn’t a story of accidental confessions, surprise witnesses, or even earth-shattering pieces of evidence. Something happened while there were no witnesses present. The court must decide whether a crime was committed or not based on the evidence. That's it. In the process, the film peels back layers to reveal the truth and half-truths that comprise relationships.

Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is woken from a nap by her son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). Her husband (his father), Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), has fallen from their roof and died. She insists it must have been an accident - he was working on the roof when she went to sleep. The authorities are not convinced and she is indicted on charges of murder.

There’s a particular line in the film that summarizes what a nightmare this situation is. It's something like “What you hear, it’s just a small part of the whole”. As we're presented with testimonies from experts and people who knew Samuel, as more evidence is brought forth, we're given a version of Sandra and Samuel's relationship. In a way, it’s not even Sandra who’s on trial; it’s her marriage. If she and her husband fought a lot, if someone was unfaithful, if someone was planning on leaving, then it probably means Sandra killed him. It’s not even if the whole relationship was bad; it’s if it was bad recently. We're not talking about "a rough patch" or something they could've overcome. This fragment is now the whole.

In a way, the trial is a matter of life and death. The jury is deliberating whether Sandra killed her husband. It’s also about an intimate subject you could call mundane in the grand scheme of things: two people’s marriage. Drawing a conclusion from the snippets presented is an unfair way to judge their relationship but it’s also the best way to see what it was like because you get the “highlight reel”. By the time this film is over, you feel like you know these people so well that they're no longer characters in a film. Then, you remember that quote from earlier and you second-guess everything. Do you really know? That sentiment is amplified by the revelations that come up during the trial. They’re not the sort of bombshells you’re used to seeing in these legal dramas, but they’re just as earth-shattering and revelatory.

The film is as absorbing as it is because of the excellent script by Justine Triet (who also directs) and Arthur Harari and the performances. There are so many character moments in Anatomy of a Fall that I see it as the kind of film you would come back to in the future, despite so much of the suspense coming from the uncertainty of the final verdict. Even some of the minor characters I keep thinking back to, like the two forensic analysts who bring to the stand completely different interpretations of three drops of blood found outside. It makes you wonder if they - despite having no investment in this narrative whatsoever - somehow made up their minds about the case anyway and brought in their biases. Why else would they be so combative? Many characters are deliberately unlikable, but not in a way that makes them villains. Wait. Did I dislike them because of who they really are, or because of the way I perceived them based on the evidence presented? hmm.

Anatomy of a Fall is a film of complex emotions. There are so many details in the case, the way the characters behave or relate to each other that you forget everything else around you. The performances are excellent, as is the script. You've never been put on trial for murder before but you'll know what it must feel like once the end credits roll. (March 27, 2024)

[eddieredmayneargentinablog]

"Day of the Jackal: Why Eddie Redmayne Couldn't Resist Returning to TV".

"I had massive trepidation," Redmayne tells emmy, but reading Ronan Bennett's scripts convinced him to join Peacock's adaptation of the classic thriller.

by Benji Wilson, for Television Academy, June 4, 2025.

📸 Photos by: Charlie Gray / TRUNKARCHIVE

In Frederick Forsyth’s classic thriller, The Day of the Jackal, the titular “Jackal” is a master of disguise. So when it came to casting Peacock’s TV adaptation, the first requirement was a lead actor who could transform .

“We all knew that Eddie Redmayne was a fantastically talented, ferociously intelligent actor who had chameleon-like qualities,” says director Brian Kirk (Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones). "But we were most taken with what he did in The Good Nurse; he was playing very aggressively in a contemporary space. And he was playing a character who was inherently unknowable and very dangerous — perfect for the Jackal.”

“With Eddie, it’s not just what you can do with prosthetics and how you can change looks, but also his physicality, his gait and all of those things,” says executive producer Nigel Marchant. “He has that ability for you to empathize with him, but then he can also play very, very cold. You believe he could be an assassin that can kill people. So, we were thrilled he came on board. It's an iconic role. We've got an iconic actor for it.”

In the last decade, Redmayne has played a transgender pioneer in The Danish Girl, a genius diagnosed with motor neuron disease in The Theory of Everything (for which he won the best actor Oscar), a gentle and eccentric wizard in the Fantastic Beasts film franchise and a psychotic serial killer in the Netflix film The Good Nurse. What he hadn’t dabbled in, at least since 2012’s Birdsong (a 2012 BBC limited series available on Netflix), was series television.

“All of it was slightly new to me,” Redmayne says, speaking from his home in the U.K., “because I hadn't done TV for a good decade.” But Redmayne, who was educated at Eton and Cambridge, is a fast study. “In that time, I'd watched friends work in television and seen shows like Succession and The White Lotus and become a massive fan of this ‘golden age.’ So I was always curious a bout how the system worked.”

Back in 2023, three scripts entitled The Day of the Jackal, written by Ronan Bennett, arrived in his inbox. “I had massive trepidation because I admired the original movie, but when I started reading them, I loved the fact that they were modern," Redmayne says.

Producer Christopher Hall (Showtrial, Bloodlands) explains how the series differs from the movie: “We're making 10 episodes, so it's a much bigger, richer canvas. It's the Jackal’s backstory; it's his personal life. In the film, you didn’t know who the Jackal was, even to the last frame. He’s on a mission to carry out a single hit, to kill [French President Charles] de Gaulle, but the Jackal himself is always a mystery and a cipher. Obviously, we play into that, but we do answer some of those questions.”

Bennett — whose latest show, MobLand, is on Paramount+ — has a very particular view of the world, according to Hall. “When you talk about AI writing scripts, I don’t think AI could come up with Ronan Bennett. He’s an original and a one-off. Look at [crime drama] Top Boy. He has that piercing intelligence and a particular worldview that’s really interesting. If I were to encapsulate his worldview, it’s that everyone has both good and evil in them. The Jackal is ultimately a sociopathic killer, but there’s something that we warm to in him enormously.”

In this series, the Jackal echoes classic action heroes, and for Redmayne that was part of the appeal. “This is a genre that I love, you know? The Bournes, the Bonds and those ’70s thrillers like The Parallax View — but it was never necessarily a genre that I thought would come my way.”

He says his success in roles such as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything had sidelined him from consideration as a gun-toting action hero. “Sometimes people go, ‘Oh, you’re the sort of actor that always transforms,’ and I really was never that actor. I just got cast as Stephen Hawking and had to play a real person, and suddenly it’s that cliché that after something successful you get sent more of the same thing. It was, ‘You’re the guy that plays real people.’”

Ironically, playing the Jackal required multiple transformations, personas and prosthetics — but it was undoubtedly a move away from introverts in tweed jackets. “I love that he’s a more physical character. He’s a peacock,” Redmayne says. "I love that every time you see him, he’s wearing something different, going somewhere different."

Playing the Jackal required Redmayne to portray several different roles: He speaks German as a janitor who roams silently through the 30-minute, wordless opening scene; he plays an urbane family man back in his Cadiz villa with his wife, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó, Money Heist, Snatch); he jousts and parries with Bianca Pullman, an MI5 operative played by Lashana Lynch (The Marvels, No Time to Die).

He also had another role on this production: executive producer. Being an exec on a TV show is often a trophy title, but Redmayne was a committed and passionate fan of the original story, and of English actor Edward Fox, who starred in the 1973 film. So if he was going to be an EP and the star, he wanted to do The Day of the Jackal justice.

“Control freakery,” is how Redmayne describes his character type, adding, “There’s a control freakery to the Jackal that perhaps bled into my producorial role.”

In film, the director is usually the control freak, the person in charge. But The Day of the Jackal runs 10 episodes with four different directors using different cinematographers and multiple noncontiguous locations. (A second season has been greenlit.)

"That was all new to me, and I wanted to understand how one found the continuity, or who was overseeing the whole thing," Redmayne recalls. “The answer was: There were tons of eyeballs on it, but it became clear that for Lashana and I, we were the continuity — we were the tissue between it all.”

According to Corberó, being that connective tissue meant a lot of hard work for Redmayne during the shoot. “I was a little bit worried about him, because he was carrying all the pressure. He was shooting every day, spending hours putting on all these prosthetics. It was hard work. I remember, at like 9 p.m., he was texting me asking, ‘Should we rewrite the scene for tomorrow?’ So we were having a lot of conversations.”

Corberó says Redmayne is demanding of himself and of other people. “But the craziest thing is that at the same time — maybe it’s because he’s British — he knows how to do it in an elegant way. He’s charming. And he fights for you. I know that I’m in this show because of him, because he was the one who insisted, ‘We need Úrsula for this.’ I will always be grateful to Eddie for that.”

Corberó’s role in the drama is a new one, but a vital one. As the Jackal’s wife, Nuria, she adds a home life, a backstory and a modicum of compassion to a character who in the book and film is just a stern-eyed shadow. “Nuria is the Jackal’s weakness,” she says. “It’s good for the viewers to see him being a very bad man, like super professional and dangerous, but then just being afraid of his wife. I think that’s what humanizes the Jackal.”

Humanizing the Jackal was the intention from the outset, Redmayne says. “The archetype of the empathy-less assassin whose blood runs cold couldn’t work in this version.” Television demands character depth. This new telling of the Jackal’s story offers explanations for why he is how he is. “We have him as a family man with a military background. Is he also sociopathic? I believe there was a juncture in his life from which point he has held those two things at the same time,” Redmayne says.

Part of the puzzle that Bennett’s scripts unlock is the Jackal’s logic of empathy. How does he square his love for his young child with the brutal demands of his job?

“He had assumed he would be alone all his life, and that’s how he was always going to function,” Redmayne says. “And yet when he meets Nuria and is floored by her charisma, you know that it’s an Achilles heel. When we meet him, he’s made a huge amount of money, he’s married with a child and he wants this to end. He’s lied to his wife from the word go but thinks he can wrap it up if this thing ends, so they can start a new life. And that’s his weakness as an assassin. We’ve been leaning into their love for each other and his love for his kid. That’s really important, and I hope that, again, what slightly differentiates the piece is that you’ll believe all that and you’ll care.”

The Day of the Jackal is executive-produced by writer Ronan Bennett along with Gareth Neame, Nigel Marchant, Sam Hoyle, Sue Naegle, Brian Kirk and Eddie Redmayne. The series is a production of Carnival Films, part of Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group.

*This article originally appeared in emmy Magazine, Issue #7, 2025, under the title: "Assassin's Lead."

[nitrateglow]

Halloween 2023 marathon: 12-15

Rope (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

Brandon and Philip do everything together: share aesthetic philosophies, go on road trips, and commit thrill kills in their living room. After strangling a classmate, they hide the body in a chest. They also happen to be throwing a dinner party that night. The thrill of possibly being caught excites Brandon, but Philip is on the verge of a breakdown all night. And when their old prep school headmaster Rupert shows up and starts to notice their combined strange behavior, matters grow potentially deadly.

I watched this one with my grandmother, who had never even heard of it before. She ended up really liking it, which made me happy because I think Rope is Hitchcock's most underrated film. Hitchcock himself dismissed the movie as a failed experiment. The central gimmick is that the film appears to be shot in a single take, lending the story the sense that it's all unfolding in real time. It's not a seamless illusion, but it is effective, so sorry Hitchcock, you're wrong.

Rope is a great companion piece to Dial M for Murder. Both are based on plays and both feature debonair, egomaniacal killers who seem more excited about the plotting of their crimes than any material benefit they could get from them. (Someone please write a crossover where Tony and Brandon compete to commit the best perfect crime ever. Like that is the fanfic content I want!)

Jeopardy (dir. John Sturges, 1953)

Doug and Helen are an ordinary American couple vacationing in Mexico with their young son Bobby. They go to a remote fishing spot to picnic. The pro of this spot is its nostalgic quality for Doug. The con is that its remoteness is inconvenient when you get trapped under heavy ass timber just as the tide's coming in... which happens to Doug. With only four hours to save him from drowning, Helen drives off to find help. Instead she gets kidnapped by Lawson, an escaped criminal who isn't shy about murdering people. He's uninterested in helping Doug, so Helen has to find a way to either escape her captivity or manipulate Lawson into helping her before it's too late.

What an underrated thriller! I mainly watched it for Barbara Stanwyck, but Jeopardy is a great suspense film with a fiendishly simple set-up. It's the perfect example of writing advice I once received about how to deal with writer's block: just keeping making your main character's life worse. Got a husband about to drown? How about being kidnapped by an escaped criminal while you're trying to get help?

It runs at just 69 minutes and not a second of that runtime is dull. I had planned on only watching half of the movie before going to bed because it was very late, but I was so wrapped up in it that I said "Screw it" to getting a good night's sleep.

Stanwyck is of course amazing. Her character Helen is written as a terrified housewife susceptible to "hysteria" (hello casual 1950s sexism), but she's actually pretty crafty. Stanwyck plays her as a fighter and even when her captor gets the upperhand, you can see in her eyes that she's scrambling for the next potential escape plan.

The best scenes are between Helen and Lawson. There's both an antagonism and undeniable sexual tension between them from the start. When she seduces him in a shack, she starts lounging about and puffing at her cigarette like her character Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, which is both funny and awesome. In addition, it's ambiguous how into Lawson Helen exactly is. You could say she seriously considers running away with him once he helps her husband out, but the opposite might be true as well.

In this kind of story, it would be easy to make the husband a wet rag in comparison to the attractive villain, but Doug is super likable, keeping a cheerful face on his increasingly hopeless situation, and his attempts to keep his son calm and optimistic are truly touching. And that just adds to the suspense-- you don't want to see that guy drown, even if Lawson is also charming and charismatic.

And hot. Cannot deny, Ralph Meeker is super hot in this, like holy shit. He's got some definite Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire vibes going on.

Also this promotional image of Stanwyck and her two male co-stars cracks me up. It's the polar opposite of the film's actual tone.

The Sealed Room (dir. DW Griffith, 1909)

In an unspecified century in an unspecified country, an unspecified king finds out his mistress is having an affair with the court minstrel. What's worse, they have their trysts in a hidden room the king likes using as his love cave. He decides to brick the two up alive, just as a gotcha.

The Sealed Room is one of my favorite nickelodeon era movies. It's got a great Poe-themed story, enjoyably hammy acting (the king makes so many reaction image worthy faces and poses, I just CAN'T--), and a pretty sophisticated use of composition and space that emphasizes the claustrophobic terror inherent in the premise.

This movie also features a great example of what I often call "silent movie logic." It's those scenes where something happens that would technically make a hell of a lot of noise but other characters don't notice and most of the time, I don't notice unless I think about it too hard. But in this case, it's hard to miss-- the king's servants start bricking up the exit to the hidden room while the mistress and the minstrel are like five feet away. Those servants are either very good at their job or the lovers are too horny to pay attention to anything else.

It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2014)

When high school girl Jay loses her virginity at the end of a date, she expects her life to change. And it does-- but not in the way she expects. Her date tells her he's just passed on a curse to her-- a mysterious figure will follow her around until it gruesomely kills her and the only way to get it off her trail is to transmit the curse to someone else via sex. Terrified and hurt, Jay and her friends try to find a way to stop the monster permanently.

It Follows had so much hype around it back in 2014. It was the horror movie du jour, with everyone praising the hell out of its old-school vibe and intriguing premise.

I'm sad to say I was underwhelmed. The premise IS cool, as well as a fun meta commentary on the traditional sexual politics of the slasher genre, and the lead actress Maika Monroe is very good as the soulful young Jay. I was never really scared though-- and if you're a regular of this blog, then you know it's not because I don't like slow-burn horror. I love it, especially when there's a bare minimum of crappy jump scares. This one just felt meandering, slow for the sake of resembling artsier classics of cinematic horror, and I lost interest halfway through. Even the monster ceased to creep me out by the end.

And that makes me sad, because I loved the score and the atmosphere of the film. There's a weird out of time quality to it-- the score is very 80s synth, characters watch old horror movies on the TV (Jay and her date even go to see Charade at a movie theater), and there isn't much in the way of teens staring at their phones (though one of Jay's friends has a cool clam-shaped e-reader). However, I just could not get into the story. It just lacked that extra something to make me love it. Or maybe I just wasn't in the proper mood.

I don't know. It could very well be a "me" problem.

[twstgarden]

✰ ❝ match-up trade for @imjustabeanie ❞

━ match-up trades are open. for more information, please visit the catalogue and the rules. ━ a florist sorting through the flowers to find your perfect match. according to the red tulip’s petals, your match is…

━ 𝙟𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙡𝙚𝙚𝙘𝙝 ━

➻ according to the blessed petals, the mountain lovers' club founder appears to be your best match!

➻ he does not mind your brutally honest personality, in fact, it is one of the things he likes about you. he knows he can rely on you to tell the truth no matter how harsh it sounds.

➻ when you require someone to intellectually stimulate you, whether through discussions, debates, or research defences, he's your man. he would entertain you and finds it amusing whenever you try to prove him wrong in your little discussions.

➻ when you read a book of mystery or thriller, he would casually sneak up behind you and try to scare you out of your wits, only to be greeted by a shriek and a scolding for scaring and interrupting your reading. of course, he politely apologises with his usual gentle smile and "promises" not to do that again next time. you don't buy it.

➻ he shows your appreciation for you in several ways but acts of service would be one of them. when he sees you in the lounge, he would bring over a beverage of your choice even before you order and would tell you not to pay for it as it is on the house.

➻ though he is not a fan of exercising or anything related to it, he would not mind supporting you when you have a sparring or shooting session.

➻ it comes as a slight surprise when you reveal your love for baking. well, it was more like he stumbled upon you in the kitchen of ramshackle or octavinelle baking up some treats you would munch on for the night. since then, he would occasionally accompany you and bake treats together to share over a cup of your favourite beverage.

➻ as calm and polite as he seems, he actually is much more intense than his twin brother. he would randomly give you gory or morbid statements in the middle of you watching a true crime series, or share some dark stories disguised as humour while you read a mystery book. all with a gentle smile on his face.

➻ overall, your relationship with him would be a wild ride. there is a good amount of affection and intellect, a great balance that you two would need. you don't have to hold hands and be super physically affectionate to show your love for one another as you both tend to show it in different ways, and that satisfies you. he is willing to share new things or learn new things with you, and he does not mind how moody you can get.

━ possible matches: ➻ azul ashengrotto (an intellectual and equally ambitious. will have a good partnership, but may face problems due to the lack of emotional connection) ➻ rook hunt (romantic and finds beauty in your personality, but may come across as a little too intense when it comes to emotions) ➻ lilia vanrouge (caring and gives you the love and attention you might have craved for)

© twstgarden 2023 || please do not steal, translate without my permission, or use this to train a.i.

[amosnaomi]

my rankings for all the books i read this yr + my thoughts

RE-READS

The Thief (Megan Whalen Turner) - No lie, every year I choose one book (if not more) from this series to reread. It's just so rewarding to reread. God bless good fantasy.

Fire and also Graceling (Kirsten Cashore) - For WOMEN.

BEST

Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin) - One of the best novels ever written in English and it's not even a lie. Everything he did with his characters to contextualize one coming of age is just breathtaking.

The Color Purple (Alice Walker) - What Walker does with the epistolary novel is incredible. Moved me to tears many times over.

The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead) - PLEASE read this before the movie comes out. On every fundamental level this book is amazing.

Open Veins of Latin America (Eduardo Galeano) - So well-written I was shocked to discover it was translated. Also made me sick to my stomach.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (himself) - As a memoir it's amazing, as a persuasive essay it's amazing, as the art of writing - you guessed it.

Cannery Row (John Steinbeck) - Sorry I am a Steinbeck guy. And he does an incredible "place-as-character" novella here. And his character work is great.

The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison) - To write a story this heartbreaking and also this compelling . . .

A Raisin in the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry) - I need to see this live.

GOOD BUT NOT GREAT

A Room with a View (E. M. Forster) - Sorry I am a Forster guy. It's not his best, but man I had fun. His Forsterisms are so charming to me.

Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles (Rosecrans Baldwin) - I like the structure of his chapters and the manner he weaves information. I've just read too many books on L.A. for this to be great.

The Pearl (John Steinbeck) - He's a good writer, so this still hit, but it's a straightforward novella. Not his best.

Severance (Ling Ma) - As I read it, I thought it was fine; the longer I think about this book after the fact, the more I like it lmao.

Fingersmith (Sarah Waters) - For me, this felt like the perfect mix of Dickensian and gothic genres. However the ending drags on way too long. (The Handmaiden truly is one of the best movies ever made.)

The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickinson) - The first 200 pages are so compelling and the last 200 pages were much harder for me. The story clogged too many characters and nations without enough room to breath . . . but oh my god the ending is crazyyyyy.

Watchmen (Alan Moore) - The ending of this is so dogshit I can't believe we let Alan Moore get away with this. It's compelling until then tho. The visuals alone are amazing.

Martyr! (Kaveh Akbar) - The ending to this really sucks and depletes my enjoyment of the whole book. We need to bring back sitting on a book for a decade until it's refined. Made me excited to read his poetry though.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Best American Short Stories of 2023 (multiple authors) - Favorite stories: "Peking Duck" by Ling Ma, "Bebo" by Jared Jackson, and "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin

As You Like It (Shakespeare) - Not his best fr. But man his gender shenanigans will always be fun.

Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea (multiple authors) - Favorite chapters: "Gendered Violence, Crisis of Masculinity, and Regressive Transgression in Postmillennial South Korean Crime Thrillers" and "A Spunky Girl Meets a Queer Boy: Neoliberal Remediation of the Post-Authoritarian Period in the Korean Reply TV Series." The second one has actually changed me fundamentally lmao, I can't watch kdramas the same anymore.

"The Composite Nation" by Frederick Douglass - One of my favorite essays ever written, and so ahead of its time that it's painful.

MID-OFF

Tom Lake (Ann Patchett) - The issue with making two-timeline stories is that one timeline may be more interesting than the other. Such is the case with this. However, this was the first book I read in one of my book clubs, where every book after was awful, and my running joke after every new book was, "Wow, isn't Tom Lake amazing?"

The Wren, The Wren (Anne Enright) - The issue with making two-narrator stories is one may be more interesting than the other. Such is the case with this.

The Guest (Emma Cline) - Amongst many problems this book has, priority #1, can we PLEASE LEARN HOW TO END NOVELS?!

First Lie Wins (Ashley Elston) - Has enough twists to be a page-turner, but it should be sexier by 100. Also better written.

Remarkably Bright Creatures (Shelby Van Pelt) - Remarkably boring novel.

I LEGIT CAN'T REMEMBER THESE

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (Lorrie Moore) - I had to look this up to remember it. All I know is the writing isn't my style.

Ghosts (Dolly Alderton) - You could tell she transitioned from nonfiction to fiction. Boring.

GOD-AWFUL

Hench (Natalie Zina Walschots) - I understand what this author is trying to do re: disability, but it can't convince me of its basic argument that the novel rests upon. Also, boring.

Idlewild (James Frankie Thomas) - I truly hate this book. It should be a sin to be this boring in both writing style and plot. Worst of all I could FEEL the insecurity of the author as an AUTHOR in the backtracking style of writing, either stand on your characters being pieces of shit or write something else! I actually apologized to my friend for suggesting this book for book club because I was so embarrassed by how bad it was.

[swansstuff]

Uhhhh

OK so I haven't posted a chapter of my fic for a while so have some ramblings about fankids (anyone remember those fandom trends?) and other silliness <3 some I have thought about more than others but enjoy a tasty little morsel until I can actually produce something of substance lmao

Steph and Pete: get engaged when they graduate college in 2023. Get married when they both have steady income in 2026. Have Owen in October 2029. Have Amy in December 2034. Owen starts highschool in 2044. Amy skips 4th grade, starts highschool in 2047.

Pete: becomes a highschool physics teacher at hfh. Grows a moustache, sometimes double takes that he looks like Ted in the mirror. Takes Steph’s name.

Steph: becomes a 3rd grade teacher.

Owen: got the combo of autism and adhd, thanks mom and dad, had a 1:1 in elementary school (Mrs Keane). Art kid. May or may not be in love with his best friend (Will Green). Could be mistaken for Pete on a bad hair day. Inherited the Spankoffski family watch. Favourite colour is blue.

Amy: only got the autism but it's the freaky smart kind. Loves space, obsessed with planets. Probably also in love with her best friend (Elsie Chasity). Absolutely knows more than she should about the LiBs. Favourite colour is yellow.

Skrzynka: (Box in Polish) this fucked up, mixed breed cat that wandered into their backyard at some point. May or may not be a Tinky vessel

Grace and Ruth: get engaged in 2024. Get married in 2026. Have Joseph in 2031. Have Elsie in 2034. Have Abe in 2038.

Grace: criminal psychologist. (Major true crime fan)

Ruth: musical writer and director.

Joseph: quiet nerd kid, but has the same weird, threatening aura as Grace does. Into some real left field shit. Will debate the extended family on religion, one of those smarmy reddit atheists.

Elsie: non-verbal until like 7, Amy helped her communicate at school. Autism. Gentle, sweetheart. Creative girly, into her art, will forget to move until her piece is done.

Abe: nightmare toddler, Grace and Ruth regret having a third. Hair untamable.

Watson: ratty ass Irish wolfhound. Ruth had her childhood dog called Sherlock who passed so decided to get a puppy when Joseph was 3. They are inseperable.

Max and Richie: get engaged in 2024. Get married in 2028 once Max's dad finally fucking dies. Have Marie in 2033.

Richie: film critic (specifically horror movies)

Max: park ranger and highschool football coach

Marie: her middle name is Asuka, Richie had to be restrained and this was the compromise. She fucking hates this. Mini goth kid but also quite athletic, more into running than football. Did not inherit Richie's asthma but did inherit his insomnia.

Totoro: Named by Richie. Marie calls him Toto. Golden retriever.

Oscar: Named by Max. German Shepherd.

Suzie: Named by Marie after Suzie and the banshees. Rescue.

Lex and Ethan: get engaged in 2021, get married in 2026 once everything settles down. Have William in 2029.

Lex: actor at the Starlight

Ethan: runs his dad's garage

William: Will. Sort of takes after his dad, perceived as a bad kid but just likes sticking up for people. Quite creative as well, but more on the music side. Plays the piano and the violin, doesn't own either but plays at the highschool. Also very much in love with his best friend. Also raging adhd.

Hannah and Daniel: get married in 2040, have Meghan in 2043.

Hannah: guidance councillor

Daniel: ccrp worker

Meghan: can speak, doesn't until she's about 5. Her first word is Webby. This doesn't worry anyone at all. She may genuinely be a Webby conduit.

Emma and Paul: get married in 2022, have the twins in 2024. Have Jane in 2029.

Paul: this poor man will be with ccrp until the day he dies

Emma: "plant biologist"

Henry: yes he was named after hidgens. like a slightly more outgoing Paul, does end up working at Beanie's during his highschool years. Bit of a nerd for sci-fi thrillers. Has strong opinions on Working Boys.

Penny: named after Richie’s late mom, ie Paul's older sister. Manic anxious energy, doing everything all of the time, bit like cousin Tim. Has a Ted like sense of humor, Paul regrets letting him babysit.

Jane: named after Emma's older sister. Couldn't be more different. Absolute mess, reminds Emma of a younger her. Persued musical theatre in highschool and drove Paul fucking nuts.

[justforbooks]

Romantasy and BookTok driving a huge rise in science fiction and fantasy sales

The subgenre helped increase the market share by 41.3% last year aided by bestseller Fourth Wing from Rebecca Yarros while food and drink topped nonfiction sales

Sales of science fiction and fantasy books rocketed last year, with their value increasing by 41.3% between 2023 and 2024.

The booming popularity of romantasy – the subgenre blending elements of fantasy and romance that is a favourite of TikTok’s BookTok community – helped drive the rise.

UK readers picked up more fiction in 2024 than 2023, with a 6.2% increase in sales volume to 64,511,922 units, equating to a record £552.7m, according to trade magazine The Bookseller.

Meanwhile, sales of nonfiction books – excluding academic and professional specialist titles – decreased 6.3% in volume across the two years, selling 58,138,223 units. This amounted to £724.1m, the lowest figure seen for six years.

Overall, sales volume of fiction and nonfiction for adults showed a marginal decline of 0.1% between 2023 and 2024.

The leading author behind the romantasy boost is Rebecca Yarros, who was the bestseller in the science fiction and fantasy space in 2024. Her novel Fourth Wing was the seventh bestselling book in the UK across all genres last year, at 245,217 units.

Along with romantasy, other genres that have benefited from traction online include romance and erotic fiction, which saw sales value increases of 9.8% and 18.1% respectively last year.

However, the romance trend may be partly due to changing attitudes towards the genre: publishers are perhaps more likely to classify books as romance rather than general or literary fiction in recent times, because romance is now given more prominence in bookstores, notes The Bookseller’s Tom Tivnan.

The two bestselling categories in adult fiction – general and literary fiction, and crime, thriller and adventure – had their best performances since the early 2010s. War fiction saw a decrease of 18.3% in sales value.

The hit to nonfiction was partly driven by autobiography sales value shrinking by 21%. Celebrity books – including those by Cher, Michael Caine and Alison Steadman – underperformed, while royal autobiographies sank 97.2% after the success of Prince Harry’s Spare in 2023.

However, political autobiographies performed well, with Boris Johnson’s Unleashed selling £2.4m worth of copies, and Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir Patriot with £764,000.

The top-selling nonfiction category was food and drink, with the health, dieting and wholefood cookery category in fifth place, the latter having increased 23.1% in sales volume. Three air fryer and slow cooker books, including Pinch of Nom Air Fryer by Kay and Kate Allinson, made it into the top 10 bestselling books of the year.

Sales of popular psychology and self improvement books fell, with declines of 6.1% and 21.1% in sales value respectively. Meanwhile, poetry and puzzles saw record years. Scottish poet Donna Ashworth, who rose to prominence on social media combining poetry and self help, was the top-selling living poet with almost £827,000 of sales, while Homer sold £871,000, much of which came from Emily Wilson’s translations.

Like nonfiction, children’s book sales also took a hit last year, with a 3.3% decrease in volume to 66,687,401 units.

Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders was the top-selling book across all genres last year, shifting nearly half a million copies, with another Osman, The Last Devil to Die, coming in second place. Romance book It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover came in third.

Booker winner Samatha Harvey was 11th overall, selling 212,618 copies, while Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo was 14th, selling 161,726. You Are Here by David Nicholls also made it into the top 20, at 115,996 sales.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[heavenboy09]

Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To 1 Of The Incredible & Iconic American Actor, Avenger & Survivor of 2023 New Years Day👨🏼 🦅🏹🎯

He is an American actor. He began his career by appearing in independent films such as Dahmer (2002) and Neo Ned (2005), then supporting roles in bigger films, such as S.W.A.T. (2003) and 28 Weeks Later (2007). Renner gained Academy Award nominations for Best Actor for his performance as a soldier in The Hurt Locker (2009) and for Best Supporting Actor for playing a hot-headed robber in The Town (2010).

Renner has played Clint Barton / Hawkeye in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including in The Avengers (2012) and in the Disney+ miniseries Hawkeye (2021). He also appeared in the action films Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), The Bourne Legacy (2012), Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015); and the dramas American Hustle (2013), Arrival (2016), and Wind River (2017). Since 2021, he has starred in the Paramount+ crime thriller series Mayor of Kingstown.

HAWK 🦅 EYE 👁 🏹🎯

In Both The Avengers Movies & His Own TV Show On Disney Plus ➕

& Survived A Snow Plow Incident That Almost Rendered Him Dead.

But He Came Back Stronger Then Ever

Please Wish This Incredible & Iconic American Actor, Avenger & Survivor of 2023 New Years Day

The 1

& The Only

MR. JEREMY RENNER👨🏼 🦅🏹🎯 AKA CLINT BARTON AKA MARVEL'S HAWKEYE

#JeremyRenner #Hawkeye