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Elle
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
Megan Abbott Reveals the ‘Deranged' Book That Nevertheless ‘Changed My Life'
Welcome to Shelf Life, books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you're on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you're here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too. Megan Abbott's 13th and latest novel, El Dorado Drive , is a riveting thriller centering suburban women and their pyramid schemes—so perhaps it should come as no surprise that the book's already been optioned for an A24 television series. 'Like Tupperware or Mary Kay in the past, [modern pyramid schemes] promise so much, the American Dream within reach,' Abbott says. 'I began imagining how a trio of sisters could get drawn into it and how dangerous it could become. Do these women know when they've crossed a line into criminal activity, and what are they willing to do to keep going?' With El Dorado Drive , 'I wanted to write about women and money,' she says. 'So much of our life is ruled by money and, often, anxieties over money—it reveals so much about ourselves, our dreams and fears, pressures and fantasies.' The El Dorado Drive adaptation will be far from Abbott's first time translating books to the screen. Abbott co-developed the USA Network series Dare Me , based on her mystery set in the cutthroat world of cheerleading; is currently writing and executive producing (along with Taffy Brodesser-Akner) the Lionsgate psychological thriller series Here in the Dark , based on Alexis Soloski's book of the same name ; is co-writing, with author Laura Lippman, Lippman's P.I. Tess Monaghan series; and is also working on adapting Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest for A24/Netflix. The Detroit-born, New York-based bestselling and Edgar-award-winning author was named 'Most Likely to Succeed' in high school; went to the University of Michigan before earning her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University; turned her dissertation into her first book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir ); edited the female noir anthology A Hell of a Woman ; worked as a grant writer for the East Harlem nonprofit Union Settlement; is superstitious; is inspired by photographers, including Sally Mann, William Eggleston, and Gordon Parks, among many others; and lives in an apartment overlooking the Long Island Rail Road. 'It's a cliché, but I do believe books are an empathy machine, and I want to write (and read) about women who may, from the outside, appear troubled, unlikeable, and difficult,' she says. 'I want to be the defense attorney for all my characters, to try to show why they do what they do, what made them who they are.' Good at: writing about female friendship dynamics; owning tchotchkes and multitasking ; hula hooping. Bad at: ballet; all sports; understanding crystals; sleeping. Likes: movies, including Blue Velvet , Dressed to Kill , Some Like It Hot , and Double Indemnity ; mid-century modern design; Film Forum; pulp fiction; Forest Hills Station House and Natural Market in her neighborhood; Nick Cave's music and newsletter, 'The Red Hand Files'; 'Gen X queens' Kim Deal and Kim Gordon; Real Housewives of New York . Writing essentials: sunlight; Orbit peppermint gum; music. Collects: chalkware; first editions; vintage carnival prizes. Peruse her book recommendations below. The book that…: …made me weep uncontrollably: Denis Johnson's Angels , which starts as a wild road trip tale and turns into something heartbreaking, with some deep truths about the American Dream and those left behind: the desperate and dispossessed. ...shaped my worldview: Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem , which seemed to reveal dark, haunting truths about America that, as a 20-year-old, I'd only guessed at before. ...I swear I'll finish one day: George Eliot's Middlemarch . But will I? ...I read in one sitting; it was that good: James M. Cain's Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice , both first-personal confessional crime novels that seem to leap from the page. …made me laugh out loud: Charles Portis's The Dog of the South , or any Charles Portis novel. One of the most idiosyncratic and thrilling voices in American literature. …should be on every college syllabus: Nella Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing , a sly, seductive tale that tackles far larger issues. ...I've re-read the most: Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon . I can't help myself. ...has the best opening line: Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier : 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard.' …changed my life: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry's Helter Skelter , which sounds deranged, but I firmly believe that it and Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision —both extremely flawed books—inspired at least two generations of crime novelists to find their craft. …has a sex scene that will make you blush: Susanna Moore's In the Cut , which left first-degree burns on my fingertips (or so it felt). …sealed a friendship: Jack Pendarvis's Your Body is Changing , which led to a mutual correspondence and now 20 years of friendship and a longstanding two-person book club. …is a master class on dialogue: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, where every line sings. …broke my heart: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence , which gains power as we accumulate experience and heartbreaks. …everyone should read: Lucy Sante's exquisite memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition . …currently sits on my nightstand: Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Under Water . I've been re-reading all the Ripley novels in sequence and continue to marvel at her creation. Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be: John K. King Used & Rare Books in Detroit, Michigan—more than a million books in an abandoned glove factory—what more could you want? Now 32% Off Credit: Harper Perennial Now 41% Off Credit: Picador Modern Classics Now 41% Off Credit: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Now 24% Off Credit: Vintage Now 35% Off Credit: The Overlook Press Now 18% Off Credit: Dover Publications Credit: Straight Arrow Books Credit: Wordsworth Editions Ltd Now 36% Off Credit: W. W. Norton & Company Now 31% Off Credit: Berkley Now 23% Off Credit: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Now 53% Off Credit: Penguin Press Credit: W. W. Norton & Company
Irish Times
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Crime fiction: Megan Abbott, Elmore Leonard, Luke Beirne, Paul Vidich, Karin Slaughter and K Anis Ahmed
Megan Abbott's El Dorado Drive (Virago, £22) is a dark, satisfying delight. Abbott's writing has always been hypnotic, projecting a powerful sense of women's inner lives and desires through the prisms of noir and suspense. El Dorado Drive – her first novel explicitly set in her hometown, the archetypal old-money Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, where 'Eisenhower was still president' – anchors that strength in a newly intimate sense of place. Abbott also has some new razor-edged fun here with American suburbia's satire-ready pathologies as they break through the patina of country club life. The three Bishop sisters take centre stage: Pam's ex has stolen their kids' college funds; Debra's helping her husband through chemo; and Harper's coping with a break-up. Born into comfort, these three 'never thought about money until it was gone and then it was all any of them thought about'. Heavily indebted and newly evicted, Harper's crashing with Pam, who tells her about the Wheel. Ostensibly a women's support group, each meeting of the Wheel concludes with a woman receiving a pile of cash from the newest members. Although one character unconvincingly insists the Wheel's 'not a pyramid … It's a triangle,' Harper recognises it means 'selling the women you knew. Even the ones you loved,' by capitalising on their economic vulnerability. Struggling with her own secrets and debts, Harper sets aside her unease to join the group. READ MORE As the scheme plays out, a narcotic mix of regret, fear and love drives Abbott's characters forward, until someone winds up dead. The local cops, used to 'toilet paper vandalism and DUIs', are quickly out of their depth, leaving Harper to push for answers. As Harper tries to piece it all together, Abbott subtly moves her characters through slyly crafted surprises to a satisfying conclusion that betrays none of this book's intoxicating depth. Another great Detroit-area writer, Elmore Leonard – one of America's most distinctive crime novelists – gets some well-designed reissues from the Penguin Modern Classics: Crime and Espionage list. Like Abbott, Leonard has a gift for giving characters their own voices, his spare prose doing so as concisely as possible, even when – as in the lead reissue, Rum Punch (Penguin, £9.99) – describing extravagantly dramatic things like Nazi killing, gun running and money smuggling. Elmore Leonard in Detroit, Michigan, in 1992. Photograph: Michael Brennan/Getty Three of Rum Punch's main characters return from another welcome reissue, The Switch, where the kidnapping of a Detroit developer's wife very much fails to go as planned. Ordell, Louis and Melanie haven't grown noticeably luckier, smarter or kinder since then, but Rum Punch gets a different spark from airline steward Jackie, who's entangled in their schemes. Both more complex and easier to root for, Jackie is drawn as vividly as anything in Leonard's best work, and she makes Rum Punch sing. Irish-Canadian journalist Luke Beirne's third novel, the quietly moving Saints Rest (Baraka Books, CAD$24.95), is set around St John, Newfoundland, an atmospherically drawn landscape that's key to the story. Narrator Frank Cain is the junior member of a small PI agency, weighed down by a job that too often involves 'helping the rich stay rich and the poor stay hungry'. Warily, he takes on a new client, Malory Fleet, whose son Jason, a low-level dealer, was murdered exactly a year ago. Now, Jason's girlfriend Amanda has disappeared, and Malory, who sees her as a daughter, wants her back. Immersing himself in the case, Frank soon loses his moorings, uncertain even whether Amanda fled or was taken. As he tries to find Amanda without losing himself along the way, Saints Rest unfolds quickly to a short, sharp shock of a conclusion. Paul Vidich's The Poet's Game (No Exit, £18.99), an espionage thriller set in 2018 Washington and Moscow, is a worthy follow-up to his memorable Beirut Station. Vidich details political gamesmanship with an exactitude in the tradition of John le Carré, whose influence he ably honours. A former CIA operative, Alex Matthews now runs Trinity Capital, a financial firm in Moscow, a city he knows well from his days as the CIA station chief. When the CIA director asks Alex back to help extricate an asset he recruited – code name Byron, the last remaining agent of his old network – Alex agrees. His sense of duty lingers, though his commitment to the CIA had long been diminishing 'like a slow dusk' because of the agency's growing hypocrisy, leading to his marginalisation and early retirement. As Alex soon discovers, that institutional hypocrisy has endured: it looms large here, resting uneasily alongside his own love, guilt, and grief. A tragic personal backstory reverberates throughout the novel, adding depth to Alex's character without overwhelming the central plot. The action moves ahead at an elegant pace and concludes on a pitch-perfect note. Hugely popular bestseller Karin Slaughter starts a new series with We Are All Guilty Here (HarperCollins, £22). Although some of the seams show – this is a long book, full of plot twists and more than enough characters to populate several titles – Slaughter's clearly a real pro who's very, very skilled at what she does. The propulsive first third captures the pressure between being a teen in a small town and the often naive helplessness of the adults struggling to love them. Desperate to be adults, Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker find themselves dangerously out of their depth. When they disappear, the community rushes to find them. While trying to ensure that fear doesn't make neighbours 'tear each other apart', Deputy Emmy Clifton-Lang and her father Sheriff Gerald Clifton quickly find damning physical evidence, but their interrogations provide the leads that matter most. Twelve years later, another girl disappears in disturbingly similar circumstances. This case throws its shadows over Emmy's own family, leaving bruises that will surely linger through the series. Embedded in its small Georgia town, We Are All Guilty Here stands out for often being as invested in these families as in the crimes they encounter. Spinning a tale of hubris, Bangladesh memories, and exotic meats, K Anis Ahmed's Carnivore (HarperCollins, £16.99) is an energetic romp through a moneyed world that stops at nothing to feed its ego. Bangladeshi emigrant Kash Mirza opened an exclusive Manhattan restaurant in the summer of 2008, when 'alpha-nerds with PhDs in stochastic mathematics or God-knows-what had no clue … markets would tank …everyone would be a millionaire.' Kash rode this wave as blindly as the rest, never anticipating the imminent crash. By the fall, though, those financial sharks 'turned into broken relics' and Kash faces being broken too, by Boris, a gangster from whom he borrowed a bit too much a bit too often. Trying to figure out how he landed in such a precarious situation, Kash summons the ghosts of his childhood and of his fellow ex-pats. As Boris presses for repayment, cutting off Kash's pinky along the way, Carnivore follows Kash's increasingly inspired efforts to survive. He soon double-talks his way to a meeting with an international group of billionaire gastronomes, selling them an 'Evening of Danger' to appease their ennui. As the novel moves to its culinary climax and Kash's rationalisations accumulate, Ahmed surrounds him with a vivid secondary cast, making this a charmingly gruesome depiction of his race for survival.
Washington Post
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Megan Abbott and the lure of private worlds
NEW YORK — The first time the crime writer Megan Abbott set foot in a country club, she was about 13. A friend who had money had invited her to a cotillion. Abbott's left-wing parents — who didn't have money, not like that — bought her a white dress and kept their disapproval to themselves. She remembers looking up the word 'cotillion.' How smooth the other girls' hair looked. Going to the ladies' room and seeing perfumes laid out on a tray, and an attendant standing by, and not understanding any of it. 'And I thought, 'Well, I don't ever want to do this again,'' Abbott recently told me. 'It was a very useful moment for me. I realized not only did I not belong but that it wasn't for me — I had no desire to belong there.' Much of her fiction has circled around understanding that desire in others: What draws people to these insular subcultures, and what, exactly, will they do to stay? Abbott likes writing hothouse environments — 'to a fault sometimes,' she allowed. Her settings have a lush psychological and cultural specificity that's untethered from other markers of reality. The ballet studio, the research lab, elite youth sports: You can practically smell the sweat of these places, but you wouldn't be able to point to them on a map. Her new book swerves from that approach: 'El Dorado Drive,' out June 24, takes place in her hometown, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a suburb just northeast of Detroit. It tells the story of the three Bishop sisters, who are among the suburb's many families of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, brought low alongside the auto industry. Then an old frenemy invites them to join 'the Wheel' — a way to start bringing in cash, tax- (and husband-) free. Women helping women, goes the pitch, and I don't mean by sharing Valium. All they have to do is pay in with a one-time gift of five grand — and, of course, recruit more new members. The sisters climb the Wheel quickly. As pressure mounts, exploding into violence, they soon learn how precarious it is at the top. I met Abbott on a drizzly May afternoon in Times Square. She had staked out a table in the back of Jimmy's Corner, an old-school boxing bar where she's greeted by name. (It's a good place for a New Yorker to know, she said, because you always end up in Midtown one way or another — in her case, because she'd just come from a screening at MoMA hosted by the stylish independent production company A24, which is adapting 'El Dorado Drive' for TV.) She had the round and inquisitive eyes, the thin arched brows, of a silent-film star. Skull earrings dangled from her ears. Writing the new novel felt 'weirdly nostalgic,' she said, over a Corona. Like the Bishops, Abbott grew up in Grosse Pointe during Detroit's rapid decline. 'It was like the fall of Rome — slowly and all at once,' she said. 'Everybody's parents remembered this glory era.' Unusually for the time, her family often went into the city: Her parents worked in the political science department of Wayne State University and would take their kids to the movies or a museum. Detroit felt both exciting and forlorn — a place where streetlights, once they went out, never got fixed. Off the page, Abbott's never been a huge joiner: no sports, no secret societies, no sororal urges in general. But she was always driven and ambitious — a competitive person who hates competition, even avoiding board games. (She does take part in a jigsaw puzzle group: 'I'm gonna get a big chunk of that puzzle.') She chalks up her competitive streak to her older brother's long shadow — always the perfect student, and an athlete to boot. For a year in college, she lived with him and his buddies. 'I loved it,' she laughed. 'I didn't have to deal with any of the girl stuff.' Abbott graduated knowing only that she wanted to write and to move to New York, a city she'd fallen in love with through film. Attending grad school at New York University, she got both the city and the writing. While procrastinating on her dissertation about hard-boiled fiction, she wrote 'Die a Little,' a period noir narrated by an ordinary woman who, somewhat like Abbott, was a teacher with a much-admired older brother working in law enforcement. (Abbott's brother is a longtime attorney at the Macomb County prosecutor's office in Michigan.) Published in 2005, the novel won Abbott instant accolades from the mystery world. 'Everyone could tell she was going to be a star from the first book on,' said fellow crime novelist Laura Lippman. 'Some writers, especially when they have real literary cred, like a PhD, can be condescending to genre — even when they're in it. Sometimes especially when they're in it. But she was never that. You just felt that her love for the classic stories was utterly sincere, but she also was determined to make it fresh.' Two more novels and an Edgar Award later, 'it felt like I could do this forever, but it also felt in some ways — not to be super artsy about it — I didn't have skin in the game,' Abbott said. She shifted from writing about genre tropes to writing about adolescence, a time that seemed to Abbott — still seems — like the most dramatic and exciting phase of life. And who, after all, is more hard-boiled than a teenage girl? In 'Dare Me,' Abbott's breakout hit from 2012, one cheerleader, bent over the toilet, begs another 'to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of donut sticks, cheese powder, and haribo.' The narrator goes on: 'I kick, I do. She would do the same for me.' Thrillers are typically published in the summer; the true test of the page-turner is to be more alluring than the swimming pool. Abbott speaks, with winning candor, about how her stories always follow a simple three-act structure: temptation, followed by a reckoning (usually violent), followed by some form of payment or redemption. But atop this subfloor of plot, she builds worlds that feel murky, inviting, densely secretive. Her prose veers from sensuous to steely, delicious to revolting. You inhale it like freon-scented air. Abbott, who lives alone in the same Queens apartment she's had for decades, writes in four- to five-day sprints. She can be 'crazily ritualistic' in the thick of a manuscript: not talking to anyone, eating the same things for all her meals. She has totems — prayer candles, at one point a gold Furby — arranged on a shelf above her computer. A gymnast she talked to for her 2016 murder mystery, 'You Will Know Me,' told her: 'If something's working, don't do anything to change the routines. You don't know if some part of the routine is what's making it work.' Abbott understood the mindset: 'There can be no changes if I'm getting pages out.' She does take long walks, or will sneak out to a midday movie to jolt her senses. Horror is best, and a crowd that likes to scream. Often, in the infinite scroll and too-many-tabs of her research, an image will help jump-start her brain. For 'Dare Me,' it was the treadmark left on a squad mate's shoulder, nicknamed the 'cheer shoe hickey.' For 'El Dorado Drive,' it was YouTube videos of how to make 'money cakes,' dollar bills unfurling from inside the pastry. And though she's never written about Greek life, when she taught for a year at Ole Miss, she saw girls walking the campus in teeny shorts paired with giant sweatshirts. She couldn't figure out this look. Then a student finally let her in on it: The hoodies were trophies from boys they had hooked up with. 'And that was awesome to me,' Abbott said, her eyes gleaming. 'There's something so tribal about it — like conquering something.' Throughout Abbott's career, she's maintained an almost spooky feel for the zeitgeist. Novels like 'Dare Me' were the crest of a pop culture wave that treated the darker stirrings of adolescents with dead seriousness. More recently, there was 'Beware the Woman,' a Gothic pregnancy novel that seemed to channel the public's post-Dobbs anxieties. 'El Dorado Drive' explores the resentment and desperation left behind by the disappearance of American manufacturing. (Amazingly, on the heels of President Donald Trump's recent comments about toys, it even flashes back to a scene of spoiled children casually destroying their expensive dolls.) 'I know it sounds like a really small thing — she pays attention to the culture,' Lippman said. 'And her tastes run from low to high. She's not a snob.' On any given week, Lippman shared, Abbott might be texting their group chat about the latest 'Real Housewives' or writing an essay for the Criterion Collection. Abbott herself can't quite explain it, can't trace the roots of her obsessions. Perhaps, she suggests, group psychology is the code she always wants to crack but is never quite sure she does. 'I always want to go to a place I haven't gone. The old fascinations will find their way in, but if it feels too comfortable, what am I doing it for?' She smiles. 'The fear is what keeps you going.'
