Criminal - The Gatekeeper

Episode Date: September 22, 2017

"I keep saying 'where's the body? Kill someone,'" Marilyn Stasio told us. She reads at least 200 crime novels a year to determine which are worthy of her prestigious "Crime Column" in the New York Times Book Review. We talk with her about crime as entertainment - and why people are so addicted to the genre that she can't stay away from: "My fingers just itch when I see something that's says 'murder.'" You can find more of Marilyn Stasio's thoughts on crime fiction in her column. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. I will never read a normal novel. I just can't. I won't. I mean, I keep saying, you know, where's the body? Kill someone. Let's get out of here. Let's move this along. Marilyn Stasio has probably read more crime novels than anyone in the world. She's tiny and unpretentious, with a short white bob and not much patience for chit-chat. Since 1988, she's been the gatekeeper of crime fiction, with her twice-monthly column in the New York Times Book Review. How do you deal with unnecessary or superfluous violence? Does it make you like a book less,

want to give it less attention? I find it cheap. Mmm, I don't. I don't know, maybe I'm inured to it, maybe I'm insensitive. I don't know, maybe I'm inured to it, maybe I'm insensitive. I don't know, I think violence is fine. It's what we're afraid of. That's why we're reading it.

I think we like being frightened. It's exciting. It's in the same way I like horror movies. I like, you know, Alien. I like science fiction. I like horror movies. I like, you know, Alien. I like science fiction. I like monster movies. I can't stand Godzilla, but the rest of them are fine.

On the day we went to meet her in New York, we walked from the Natural History Museum towards her apartment building and found her waiting for us on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. She was wearing red keds. On the elevator ride up to her apartment, she warned us that she didn't have an air conditioner. We are in my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan looking out on a gorgeous day. It was a gorgeous day, but it was also kind of hot. She said there are only six humid days in New York each year, and that we just happened to come on one of them. How long have you lived in this

apartment? I've lived here forever, since 1971, actually. It was a rent-controlled apartment, which, as anyone who has ever visited New York ought to know, is worth its weight in gold. So I have not budged since. We set up in front of an open window. She's removed all of her screens because she likes to hang her feet out. There was construction right outside. Ordinarily, if that happened, we'd ask to move to a quieter spot. But the truth is, we were pretty hot and needed all the air we could get. So you might hear some loud noise in the background. When you live in the same place for so long, do you start to have routines and patterns and know the people that you see crossing the same time every day?

Oh, God, I try to break it up. I try not to be so predictable, but I can't help it. I always sit at the same spots in the morning after I've had coffee, and the same people come by and shoot the breeze. And I guess it's neighborliness. You know, I'm not going to fight it at this point. I say hello to the babies. I talk to the dogs. And then I go inside and work all day and look out the window like I'm looking out now. How many books do you read a year? I don't know, a couple hundred all the way through. But it's not so much how many books I actually wind up reading, start to finish, and then review.

There aren't that many of those books, but it's how many I read like 50 pages in. Here's her system. She picks up every single book that's sent to her. She reads a few pages and then decides whether to put it down or keep going. She has a policy for first-time authors. She'll give every single one at least 50 pages of her time and take notes on their style and then enter those notes into her master database of authors. Have you ever had an author get mad at you? Oh, I'm sure they're out there screaming at me right now, but not to my face.

Besides, most of the reviews I write are positive reviews because that's part of my reviewing. If I haven't reviewed your book, chances are I've turned it down. That's your review. And, I mean, what do you not understand about no? In her apartment, all you see are books, stacked on every surface and on the floor of the living room and dining room. In her study, she's got a beautiful collection of classic mystery novels, shelved all the way up to the ceiling, and also the galleys for the books she may or may not review. You can look in here

all you want. So I've got August, September, October, November, December and January are under there too. And then I have them lined up according to, well, the possible review and then definite review. And I line up the columns a couple in advance. And everything is very organized. I'm very organized. But you just can't tell, and there's no other place to put them because every other spot is taken up with books. Although the other day, I did write to my editor. I said, I have nothing to read. I was trying to figure out what to do for the next column, and I looked around and I said, I don't know, I don't like any of these things. I have nothing to read.

And I have thousands of books here. The British novelist G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the detective story is different from every other story in one important way. The reader is only happy if he feels like a fool. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Marilyn Stasio grew up in Revere, Massachusetts. And when she was a kid, she was always reading, because she learned pretty quick that if she was reading, her parents wouldn't make her do any

chores. I hated to do any kind of kitchen work. Hate, hate, hate. And my mother used to say, don't bother her, she's reading. And I learned, oh, that's the way out of this. When you were little reading, were you reading everything? Were you reading mystery books? What were you reading? My tastes were always kind of dark. The first thing I remember reading obsessively was the encyclopedia. I remember the picture of the two little princes in the tower, King Edward and his brother, in their

black velvet suits. It's actually a very famous painting. The painting depicts Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, when they were 12 and 9 years old. In 1483, the brothers were being held in the Tower of London, and they disappeared. Some say they were murdered by their uncle, so they could never challenge his right to the throne. He was Richard III. But no one really knows what happened to the boys. It's still one of the greatest mysteries in British history.

In the painting, the brothers look scared, looking at something out of the frame that we can't see. They're holding on to each other. But I thought that was the most romantic thing in the world, and I was always running to the encyclopedia, and that was always my favorite story to read. Did it scare you, that dark stuff, when you were little, or were you intrigued by it?

Oh, it was exciting. I like exciting things. I mean, I like a little thrill. When she began reading crime fiction, she started at the very beginning. And I remember thinking, I probably won't be able to read everything, but let me try. So I started with the classics,

and I went on from there. I must say, I loved Christie. There is nothing like Christie. Her favorite Christie is the first, The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, published in 1920. It's about a murdered heiress, and it introduced the world to a private detective with a very famous mustache, Hercule Poirot. The Times Literary Supplement wrote, the only fault the story has is that it's almost too ingenious. A major difference between classic crime fiction and what's being published today, Marilyn says, is that books today are so much longer. So, so long.

They're getting longer. They're so long. I don't know why they're so long. Yes, I do know why they're so long. Because at one point, it was all about solving the mystery. So the emphasis was on the crime. The emphasis was on the victim. The emphasis was on the procedures of how the detective, amateur or not, went about solving this crime. Nowadays, there is a lot more hanging on the character. It's the insertion of the author, an identification of the author with the lead character. And you can just

go on for years in that vein. I mean, you learn everything about this sleuth that you don't really give a shit about. You find out about their boyfriends, their husbands, their lovers, their kids, every last one of their kids. You watch them go to pick them up at school, drop them off, do the laundry. And I don't read past it. I mean, I read it, but it gives pleasure to the author. Not speaking for myself, not to this reader. I liked them better when they were nice and tight and concise and had a lot more impact on me because they were more about the puzzle and how to solve it. But my suspicion is that people don't know how to puzzle anymore. It's not the fad, it's not the fashion, we're not in the 1920s and 30s.

The 1920s and 30s was the so-called golden age of detective fiction, the heyday of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. These novels were about figuring out who the murderer was, and often set in remote mansions in the British countryside. You don't learn who did it until the very end. Think about the board game Clue. It was also the era of Black Mask magazine. They were publishing stories by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Think loner, tough guy, private investigators who drink too much, but still manage to outsmart everyone. In 1932, Dr. Rudolph Fisher published The Conjure Man Dies, a mystery tale of dark Harlem, one of the first African-American crime novels. So that was the 20s and 30s. And as far as action is concerned, that's the 50s is action. Writers like Ross McDonald and Mickey Spillane were popular. Patricia Highsmith published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955. I haven't read it, but I did see the movie with Matt Damon. The Godfather came out in 1969.

Stephen King published Misery in 1987. And in 2005, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo took over the world. So we're somewhere in the present. And the present doesn't care a whole lot about puzzle. The present cares a lot about puzzle. The present cares a lot about character. So we hear a lot about the person who is solving the mystery, and that's why they're so long. You've been doing this for a long time. You've read a lot of this type of work. What are the worst cliches? Okay. We're in a suburb, a cozy suburb, a sweet suburb, and the heroine is a heroine, and somebody near and dear is killed because she's an amateur. She doesn't have access

to specifics that you need to solve a crime. So this is where the good luck comes from, and this is where the cliche comes from, is she is always engaged to, flirting with, married to, or in bed with the chief of police or the lead detective on the case. I mean, that is so cliched, I want to throw myself off the roof. Oh, and somewhere along the line, she is going to become the lead suspect. So she has a personal motive for solving this case. Boring. Subtle results. Still you, but with fewer lines. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A,

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You have no choice. I mean, you don't leave the book at the end without answering the question, who done it? I mean, that's part of the formula. You cannot get away from that. Do you think that crime novels are easier to write? That's hard for me to answer because I don't read anything else. I stopped reading modern fiction, contemporary fiction, when I realized that it was all about the self. I don't know when it happened. It wasn't true in 19th century. It wasn't true in early 20th century. Somewhere along the line, writers started writing about nothing but themselves.

And I think it started with men. I mean, Philip Roth has got to be my least favorite writer in the universe. And I have absolutely no interest in that. But I have absolutely no interest in women's novels that are like that. When she was younger, she wrote and published a lot of her own work, a play, a novel, short stories. She says she hated it, but is glad to know that she isn't that stereotypical critic who reviews because they can't write. Her career as a crime critic started slowly. She was reading all these novels anyway for fun, so she started reviewing tough guy books for Penthouse magazine. And she realized no one else was taking contemporary crime fiction seriously.

So I decided, hmm, I could make a living if I pitched a column to these editors of big newspapers around the country because they don't know what to do with these books and they don't know how to treat them and they're not taking them seriously, so I'll give them a column. And I did, and I barely scraped by, but it was fun, and I got what I wanted, which was free books. She doesn't go to book parties or socialize with the writers she's reviewing. Not anymore. She says it hasn't gone so well in the past, like the time she laughed at the writing in a scene by Ed McBain.

It was a woman who was leaning against this patterned wallpaper, and it looked like a jungle. And he was comparing her to some kind of jungle animal cat. And I remember I met him, and I remember laughing. And he was really, really mad. He followed me down the aisle, wherever we were. And he said, you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't laugh. And I said, well, you should write better women.

And then he did. He really did write. And I must say, toward the end, he was writing really good female characters. What are they doing out there? Do you ever feel odd about using crime as entertainment? Oh, never think of it, really. Who cares? I mean, if, you know, that's your problem. It's not my problem. It's fantasy. I go to the movies. I like fantasy movies. I like the gorier the better. I mean, the alien movies

are heaven on wheels. I like ghost stories. I like haunted houses. I like zombies. I like monster movies. The thing is, it's all entertainment, and I like that stuff, you know, that crap. We asked her to recommend one novel, her favorite, for us to read before we visited. She chose The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, published in 1868. That's about 20 years before the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes. T.S. Eliot called The Moonstone the first, the longest, and the best detective story. But as with any who-was-first conversation, there's a lot of debate. Some people say Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first detective story in 1841. But for Marilyn, the moonstone about the theft of a cursed diamond is first and best.

She showed us one of her favorite parts, a letter instructing where to find a clue. To lay down on the rocks a stick or any straight thing to guide my hand, exactly in the line of the beacon and the flagstaff, to take care in doing this that one end of the stick shall be at the edge of the rocks, on the side of them which overlooks the quicksand, to feel along the stick among the seaweed for the chain, to run my hand along the chain when found, until I come to the part of it which stretches over the edge of the rocks, down into the quicksand, and then to pull the chain. I mean, that's really pretty good writing. I always like the writing first.

I don't care how great your story is. If you can't write it beautifully, then you ruin the story. You know, to pull the chain as it flows down into the quicksand. I can't imagine anybody reading that and not enjoying it. I remember thinking, why isn't it just obvious to the whole world that the Moonstone is just the best thing ever written? And it's the first detective story. And Sergeant Cuff is the first detective. And long may he wave.

Why do you think people are so drawn to this crime genre? Oh, wow. I don't know. I can't stay away from it. I mean, my fingers just itch when I see something that says murder or, you know, crime of the century or whatever. I mean, I just gravitate towards. So I suppose it's the cheap thrills, maybe. Part of it is the sense of voyeurism when, that's in the case of historical crimes, I think. I do true crime also, and I think that applies more with true crime rather than fiction. There's something really fascinating about reading about crimes committed by Louis XIV. You know, that's a kick. Didn't know that.

And all the murders of, oh God, the kings of England, help us. They all killed one another and their children and their nephews and their uncles and the poison. There's always been poisons, but it's just, it's voyeurism, I think. I'm not going to go out and do it myself. What year were you born? Oh, do I have to tell you that? I was born a long time ago. Nope, that's good enough. Okay. Although every now and then somebody writes a note saying, which I love. My favorite crime novel is Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross. When she dies, her husband's fingers are found in her mouth, as well as a bunch of peanuts. The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubenstein.

It's a story of an abysmal hockey goalie. It's by John Connolly and it's called Every Dead Thing. It stands out because I bought it when I was about 10 or 11 in a supermarket on a whim and didn't quite realize what young me was getting into.

It's a playground. Parker has to hide out in an amusement park that's closed for the season. I don't know. I'm probably not describing it very well, but anyway park that's closed for the season. I don't know. I'm probably not describing it very well, but anyway, that's probably my favorite. We want to know your favorite crime novels, old or new.

Write to us on Twitter, Facebook, or email us at hello at thisiscriminal.com, and we'll compile a big reading list. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Our intern is Mathilde Urfelino. Special thanks to David Murray and Sarah Weinman. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Shows like What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law, a little side project podcast Roman Mars makes with his neighbor, Elizabeth Jo. She teaches constitutional law, and most of the time, this is a pretty straightforward job. But now, five minutes before class, Professor Jo checks Twitter and uses the news to teach us about the Constitution. Reportedly, General Joseph Hooker once sent an envelope to Abraham Lincoln that contained the names of 55 convicted military deserters. Lincoln supposedly scrawled pardoned on the envelope and returned it to the general.

That counted. So could it be a tweet? So could Trump tweet tomorrow, I at real Donald Trump, pardon, at Roman Mars, for any and all federal offenses he has committed since January 20th, 2017. That's not going to fit in a tweet, but you get my idea. It's not an obviously laughable idea. Congress doesn't have the ability to place firm legislative restrictions on the pardon power. So it's not totally absurd as a valid pardon.

So I'm just leaving it out there as a possibility. And I'm just putting it out there that I'm cool with that, you know, if you wanted to do it. Not that I've done anything, but, you know, couldn't hurt. Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation. And special thanks to Adzerk for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia.

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