“Tension buried itself in my chin as I pursed my lips.” Reading a new thriller with a lot of reaction beats like this one. Are thriller writers actually trained to write like this?

You know these writers. “Writers use the word ‘splay.’ The word ‘macadam.’ The term ‘shock of hair.’ Characters pad into rooms, tromp upstairs, narrow their eyes, tiptoe gingerly down the hall.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wri...

If that’s your best, your best won’t do.

Men who worship Trump, a man who wears liquid foundation, is *obsessed* with ballrooms, dances to gay anthems from the ‘70s, plays music from Broadway musicals, talks fondly about Arnold Palmer’s enormous penis, and gushes about how hot Jaxson Dart is, are questioning James Talarico’s sexuality?

“Nobody ever wants to wind up in Jersey, and yet so many of us do.”

Best thriller I’ve read in ages.

The Three Investigators and The Mystery of the FedEx Delivery.

The Three Investigators and the Mystery of the Secret Nothing I Can See.

“I personally think that experiencing darkness through fiction can be a lot of fun,” Harper said with a twinkle in his eye. “But maybe that’s just me.”

The moderately barbarous coast. (Mystery Bay State Park, Marrowstone Island, Washington)

Friday read. One of the better entries in the Three Investigators series.

First Bainbridge Island guy to play in the big leagues. Pretty exciting. Especially since it became clear sometime around 1974 that it wasn’t going to be me. www.ajc.com/sports/2026/...

What does your taste in mystery-fiction main characters say about you? Here’s what mine says about me.

Agree or disagree? “I don’t see a burning interest in literary male writing. It’s not a good era for male self-discovery.” —Thomas McGuane www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/b...

“Matcha is lawn clippings in steamed milk.” Agree or disagree?

"No one has ever gotten pregnant while listening to the music of Rush. Clinical studies show that when combined with watching a male sexual partner play air bass along to the extended solo in 'Freewill,' the contraceptive efficacy of Rush approaches 100 percent."

“The greatest football player of all time is Jim Thorpe. The second greatest is Jim Brown. And after that, the gap gets vast.”

Did you ever know someone who Is a) a loser; b) who you care about and try to lift up; and c) who undermines and punishes you for caring about them even as they want you to never stop trying? If you’ve known this particular pain, then the new Willy Vlautin novel is for you.

“I think I was roundly hated by most of the people involved.” — Roger Waters

Not an April Fool’s gag. Though it probably should be. From a private-eye novel set in 1980 Seattle: “I looked up at her, my mouth full of hot dog, my eyes full of nipples.”

I’m singing as I run errands: "I've been everywhere, man. I've been everywhere, man. I've been in the dentist's chair, man. I've sat for a cut of hair, man. Socks, I've bought my share, man. I've been everywhere ...." youtu.be/mNj6spCtUE0?...

No day can be a bad day when it’s a Tana French publication day.

Colson Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. It’s the greatest New York novel in years. @doubledaybooks.bsky.social

Should-be Onion headline: TIGER WOODS ARRESTED FOR BEING TIGER WOODS

Take me down, little Susie.

I am sixty years old. And still sometimes nothing hits the spot like a Three Investigators mystery. Wolfed down a hundred pages of this one over my morning coffee.

Seems like ICE agents have been ordered to go unmasked at airports. So, a good time to photograph as many of them as possible, so details like tattoos or how they arrange their pouches or patches can be matched to faces later after masked abuses.

“Literature and sex are the primary methods we use for demarcating intervals of our lives. You’re reading this person and fucking this person during any given period and they tend to change over with weirdly similar timing.”

“Could you hear the crunching sound when the wheels ran over his skull and his brains squirted out his ears? Don’t ask me, I don’t know, I can’t know, all I know how to do is beat these cymbals together, jang-jang-jang, and who’s Dead at the Scene, Hal? Your mother? Your brother? Or is it you?”

A new Substack post. open.substack.com/pub/jimthoms...

In what year would you guess this novel is set, based on this passage? “Stagflation sucks,” he said. “My mom’s trying EST for peace of mind.”

“God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?”

“Do you have any idea what it was like back then to meet someone who read books? He made me wet as a sea sponge.”

“He sat on a log, looked over the water of Puget Sound, and thought about how his life had collapsed, and how his lifelong project of forming a literary career had not come to fruition. He couldn’t write.”

“He’s an editor. Some New York publishing house. Got great big circles under his eyes. He walks up and down, talking to himself.”

When celebrated authors write terrible similes. “Martine has a way with a hedge trimmer, leaving ‘flowers mounded on the lawn like Ukrainian corpses in Bucha’ after she tackles the landscaping.”

“There is nothing more embarrassing the next morning than reading one of your own suicide notes.”

A Quinn Martin Production. Act I.

Still Life With Cellphone.

Stiletto Alley. (Port Angeles, Washington)

Gotta joke for you. Guy walks into a singles bar ….

In line at the coffee shop, the sound system starts in on the piano coda from “Layla,” and the guy ahead of me turns to the woman with him and says: “When they found Carbone in the meat truck, he was frozen so stiff it took them two days to thaw him out for the autopsy.”

Dr. Richard Kimble, Chief of Oncology. #noir

"In the world of Jim Thompson, Deputy Barney Fife is a raving psychotic who darkens Thelma Lou's bedroom doorway at 3 a.m. with a liquor bottle, a single bullet and a jittery smile." — Stephen King

One 2026 resolution: Spread the gospel about the books I love. The first one I jumped into this morning is Richard Russo’s EVERYBODY’S FOOL. It’s great for many reasons, but I particularly love that it turns into a stone crime thriller about two-thirds in.

Happy Halfway Through the Baseball Offseason to those who observe.

Resolution for 2026: Reclaiming this hair.

Resolution for 2026: Studying at length the distinctions between a “banger” and a “slapper.”

Resolution for 2026: Arguing that soup is a sandwich.

Resolution for 2026: Making no distinction whatsoever between what I like and what is great.