0:02
Rebecca Wright Stevens on Amos Lane and Repping Alaska’s Indigenous Citizens in Court
Arraignment of Amos Lane in District Court
Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska
When I pushed open the heavy gray doors of the courtroom, heads turned toward me as though it were a wedding, but nobody smiled. I wished I weren’t dragging a suitcase, but I’d come straight from the airport because my office said arraignment had already begun. I stashed the suitcase in a back corner and headed up the aisle.
The courtroom usually sat empty on a Friday morning, and usually was as quiet as a church, which it resembled with its pinstriped gray carpeting and blond wood spectator pews. Instead of an altar, we had a judge’s bench and jury box. Today the place was standing room only, and it buzzed with the murmurs of impatient spectators.
“Amos Lane is his name,” Liz, our office manager, had said when she phoned me in South Carolina in the middle of my first vacation in three years. “They’re holding him on misdemeanors now, but they think he killed the Ipalook sisters.”
“The Ipalook sisters!”
Fred Ipalook Elementary School in Utqiagvik was named for the family patriarch, the first Inupiaq (formerly called Eskimo) school principal.
“Both of them strangled, one raped,” Liz said.
I was standing in my parents’ kitchen, looking through the magnolia trees blooming on their lawn, trying to register what Liz was saying.
“Listen…I know you haven’t been out in a while,” she went on. “Do you want me to have Anchorage send somebody up temporary?”
It took me a while to answer.
“No, I’ll come. It’s my territory.”
My parents’ friends had asked me why I went so far away to defend people who might be dangerous. I had two explanations. The first involved money, the second was hard to explain, so I usually tried to change the subject.
The first was that my daughter was in law school and my son had just started college. Financial aid departments were generous to a widow like me, with meager resources, but the schools were still expensive. I learned that oil-rich Alaska provided good salaries for public defenders, especially if you were willing to go to a bush office, so I sold the old farmhouse near Olympia, Washington, that had been our family home for eleven years; managed to get through the Alaska bar exam; and moved to Arctic Alaska.
The second answer was that the midnight sun and the polar night and the white owls and white bears and white foxes of the Arctic fascinated me. Especially the white owls.
Public Safety officers filled the back pews. Their presence tended to put pressure on the magistrate to set a high bail. I knew it would be part of my job today to remind the court and the prosecutor that we were only here on misdemeanors. My new client might be a suspect in these shocking murders but had not been charged with them. No one had.
I spotted Ed Ellingsworth, local lead detective, his cadaverous frame drooping over a corner of a pew. A young female reporter sat beside him, plump and giggly. I rather liked the way she never spelled the district attorney’s name right. The name was Slusser, but she always wrote Slusher. She also garbled some Inupiat words, and used k, q, and g interchangeably, but so did a lot of people. The language is not yet entirely standardized, but then, neither is English. At least she had learned that Inupiat was a noun and Inupiaq an adjective.
Words that still confused me were the names of the area. When I first arrived, I was told that historic areas in the middle of town were referred to as “Ukpeagvik,” with a “p,” and that the name meant “place where the snowy owls gather.” How lovely, I thought—both the name and the glorious creatures themselves. At the time, the town was called Barrow, a proper British name, but then the townspeople voted to return to the ancient name of Utqiagvik, or “place where roots are dug.” No doubt both names are accurate, and the difference between them perhaps neither the reporter nor I will ever fully understand, but I preferred the owls.
Two entire middle pews were occupied by members of the Ipalook family, looking stricken and exhausted. There were also many spectators who came to court out of boredom. Utqiagvik didn’t have a movie theater. In the front row, there was a group of young women in summer parkas, some with babies folded inside their front zippers.
A faint, comforting scent of seal cooking oil pervaded the room.
My new client, Amos Lane—it would have to be him—sat alone in handcuffs at the defense table, bearing the angry stares at his back. All I could see was that he was a Native man with long black hair and muscular shoulders wearing an orange jumpsuit, and that he needed some company. I passed through the pony gate in the bar and took my place beside him.
His eyes flicked sideways over me, and I saw in his glance that he lumped public defenders together with bailiffs, clerks, police, DAs, judges, and everyone else who put him and kept him in jail.
“You’re Amos Lane? My name’s Rebecca Wright. I’m the public defender for the North Slope Borough.
1:58
Araminta Hall’s 8 Favorite Novels Featuring Unreliable Narrators
Calling my latest novel Unreliable Narrator is very meta because an unreliable narrator is probably the most loved trope used by thriller writers. In fact, it’s probably the most loved trope of every writer. And the reason for this is because it is also one of the most human conditions. We all see the same things differently and, to some extent, we all lie to ourselves about who we are. Unreliable narrators are perennially fascinating because they lay bare the tension between who we think we are and who we actually are.
My novel explores this idea through Hope, who discovers that the worst thing she ever did has been turned into a best-selling book by the celebrated novelist Ambrose Glencourt. Ten years before, Hope worked as Ambrose’s assistant, living at his glamourous ancestral home, Shadowlands in the middle of the British countryside. Wanting to be a novelist herself she documented all the events of that hot, heady summer in a journal.
It is clearly the work of a young woman seduced by this world of bohemian privilege, ambitious for herself and her life. Except now Ambrose has turned her life into a work of fiction and his account is very different to hers. As Hope tries to work out what actually happened, she has to confront the fallibility of her memory, the strength of her desires and her relationship with the truth.
My favorite books all have an unreliable narrator at their heart and, whilst I could probably give you a list that was about five-hundred books long, I have reluctantly cut it down to my top eight.
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Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Probably the first book everyone thinks of when you say the words unreliable narrator, but that’s because this is a master-class in self-deluded characters. Both the main protagonists, married couple Amy and Nick, are chronically unreliably, not just to the outside world, but also to themselves.
Nick especially is a simply genius invention, a guy who believes so totally in his own suffering and righteousness that he fails to recognize the part he has played in his wife’s disappearance.
Patricia Highsmith, This Sweet Sickness
A brilliantly claustrophobic novel told in the first person by David Kelsey, who just knows that married Annabelle will fall in love with him if he can only get her to understand how they have to be together. All he has to do is get her to the secluded cabin he keeps especially for her. Full of secret obsessions and nail-biting tension, this is ultimately a story about belief versus reality.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Humbert Humbert is one of the most disturbing narrators of any novel ever written. Convinced that fourteen year old Lolita is flirting with him, he sets about seducing her, justifying everything he does, which includes the rape of a child, behind the strength of his feelings for her, which he calls love. It could be argued that Nabokov’s writing is too brilliant, because the word Lolita has come to mean a female temptress, which is the exact opposite of what he intended.
One of the most exacting and compelling reading experiences you’ll ever have.
Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal
Barbara tells the reader she just wants everyone to know that her good friend Sheba isn’t the person the press are portraying her to be, after her affair with a fifteen year old pupil at the school where they both worked. But Barbara’s defense of her friend ends up revealing much more about Barbara and her motivations than she intended.
This novel is so brilliantly observed and Barbara is such a masterclass in self-delusion, the ending feels truly shocking.
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte made a very interesting choice when choosing the narrators of this novel and it has always felt like one of the most important aspects of the story to me. Cathy’s servant Nelly Dean tells the story, but it is written down by Mr Lockwood who is renting the house where Cathy once lived. Both arrive with their own biases, Nelly because she was once from the same class as Cathy and then became her servant, and Lockwood, who feels outside the long established families who rule this part of the Yorkshire moors.
The layers of unreliability run throughout, Nelly often not hearing or knowing everything that happened between Cathy and Heathcliffe and Lockwood often interpreting. And the brilliance of this lies in the fact that Wuthering Heights is a novel about being an outsider, so who better to tell it than two outsiders with their own scores to settle, just like Heathcliff.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Another outsider, proving what fertile ground they provide when creating unreliable narrators because they are not just navigating their own selves, but trying to understand an unfamiliar world which can lead to misunderstanding.
In this masterpiece, Stevens is about to retire after three decades working as a butler for Lord Darlington. He has always believed that by serving this ‘great gentleman’ he has done his duty and had a good life.
3:53
Jo Piazza on Writing Convincing Art Heists and Museum Mysteries
A heist is a very particular sort of crime with a very particular emotional hold over readers. Every time that I mention to someone that I’ve written a heist book, they tell me exactly how they would pull off a heist. And some of them are pretty good. Most of them are bananas.
I’ve written so many different kinds of crimes over the past ten years that if the FBI were to pull up my Google searches, I would most definitely be on several different watch lists. I hold my breath every time I go through a customs checkpoint.
And even though I’ve written everything from murder to political fraud to identity theft, the heist is the hardest crime I’ve ever tried to pull off on the page. I think that’s because the heist has been so thoroughly mythologized in American culture.
People tend to think of art thieves as brilliant masterminds operating three steps ahead of everyone else, and art theft itself as a glamorous crime with an impossibly elaborate plan orchestrated by painfully good-looking people with excellent hair. I call this the Clooney-Brosnan conundrum.
Unlike murder, a heist also occupies a strange place in our collective imagination. Many people view museums, galleries, and wealthy collectors as institutions that exist for the rich rather than for ordinary people. Whether that’s fair or not, it creates a kind of Robin Hood narrative around art thieves. We don’t necessarily approve of what they’re doing, but we often find ourselves rooting for them anyway.
That creates a problem for a novelist.
A murder only has to feel plausible. A heist has to feel plausible and ingenious and sexy at the same time. Readers want to be surprised by the plan, but they also want to believe it could actually work. They want the elegance of The Thomas Crown Affair and the ingenuity of Ocean’s Eleven.
When I started writing The Parisian Heist, I quickly realized that movies weren’t going to help me. I needed experts.
That reporting led me to Anthony Amore, head of security at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI Art Crime Team. Between them, they’ve spent decades studying stolen art, recovering stolen art, investigating art thieves, and thinking about the vulnerabilities that criminals exploit. What I got from them was a completely different way of thinking about how a heist actually works.
Here’s what I learned about writing a believable (and still delicious) heist.
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Know your Timeframe and Your Tech.
The writer needs to know exactly what year their heist takes place and what kind of technology would be available.
My novel is set in 1996, largely because I wanted to avoid smartphones. Smartphones solve too many problems and create a bunch of others. The second you hand every character a device capable of instant communication, GPS navigation, facial recognition, reverse image searches, and access to the sum of all human knowledge, the mechanics of a thriller change dramatically. In my opinion, they get way more boring.
The technology inside museums was also radically different in 1996. Security cameras still recorded onto videotapes. Overnight footage was often grainy and black-and-white.
Museums weren’t storing information in the cloud because there was no cloud. Security offices were filled with bulky CRT monitors rather than sleek digital displays. Information-sharing between institutions was slower, records were less accessible, and many of the technological tools we take for granted today simply didn’t exist.
Understanding those limitations helped me build a more believable crime.
Museum security doesn’t work the way novelists think it does.
Writers tend to imagine security as a binary. Either the thieves get through it, or they don’t.
Actual museum security is far more nuanced. As Anthony Amore explained to me, the purpose of many security systems isn’t to create an impenetrable fortress. The purpose of security is to buy time. Motion sensors, cameras, alarms, glass-break detectors, security hardware, access controls, and overnight guards all exist to slow a thief down long enough for somebody to notice.
Once I understood that, I stopped thinking about how my characters would defeat the system and started thinking about how much time they could actually have.
Getting In Might Be Easy. Getting the Painting Off the Wall Will Be Trickier Than You Think.
Eventually, somebody has to physically remove the painting from the wall.
That sounds obvious, but it turned out to be one of the most useful questions I asked during my research.
Most readers imagine art theft in abstract terms. The painting slides off the wall, and the thief escapes. End scene.
Museum professionals think about hardware like brackets, mounting systems, security screws, and the tools used to remove them. They think a lot about how long it takes to free an object from its display.
Anthony Amore explained that many institutions rely on specialized security screws that require uncommon tools to remove.
5:49
How Pinellas County, Florida Shaped the Strange Life of Conman Paul Skalnik
The early Spanish explorers who made their way to the western coast of Florida, to what is now Pinellas County, came searching for treasure. But they found only primeval forest, which stretched to the Gulf of Mexico, and a slender chain of barrier islands edged with aquamarine water and bone-white sand.
Fortune seekers continued to flock there for centuries afterward, lured by myths of a Shangri-La, but it wasn’t until 1887, when a railway line connected the peninsula to the mainland, that the area finally made good on its long-imagined riches. Tourism and citrus farming gave rise to two major cities, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and by the middle of the twentieth century an influx of retirees and veterans of World War II fueled a population boom.
Subdivisions and strip malls swallowed up the ancient pine forests and orange groves, and Pinellas County became a showy, if despoiled, new world: a patchwork of swimming pools and retention ponds, manicured retirement communities and RV parks, sleek new condos and Easter-egg-hued motels. Rapid change was taking place all across Florida, where the postwar years brought more new residents, development, and commerce than the previous four centuries combined. The pull of the Sunshine State never let up, drawing successive generations of newcomers.
People came to Pinellas County because it promised to be better than whatever they left behind. They were northerners fleeing bleak winters and the higher cost of living; southerners who had run out of money, or ideas, or goodwill back home; retirees from the upper Midwest who yearned for an easier, more care-free way of life.
Scientologists were among the many people who made their way to Pinellas County, and in 1975 the Church of Scientology began buying up swaths of property in Clearwater. Its disciples would remake the city’s downtown into a mecca of their own. Turning a once-grand, run-down hotel into their opulent base of operations, they created a marble-and-gold-leaf fantasia that would have left Florida’s early European explorers speechless.
It was a wedding—Skalnik’s fourth—that brought him to Pinellas County in the spring of 1980. He had met his new wife, a faithful, clean-living young evangelical named Suzanne Bourdeau, while she was vacationing in Orlando, and they married in her Clearwater church on a cloudless April afternoon.
“The bridegroom,” read their wedding announcement, “served in the U.S. Marine Corps and is general manager of Pro Chem Inc.” In the accompanying photo, Skalnik stood beside his jubilant bride, gazing soberly at the camera. He wore a businessman’s suit and tie, his dark mustache barely obscuring a smile, apparently untroubled that he was still married to Penny.
Suzanne did not know that three Mrs. Paul Skalniks had preceded her. (Her husband’s first two unions, to a nurse in Austin and a young woman from a small town outside Waco, lasted eleven months and eighteen months, respectively.) Cheerful and unguarded, Suzanne was the sort of person who assumed the best of others, not out of ignorance, but from a generous spirit.
She felt lucky to have found a husband who not only doted on her but shared her strong faith. Skalnik, who claimed to be a new believer, accompanied her to worship services every Sunday, and her church community eagerly welcomed him into the fold.
They settled in St. Petersburg, in a duplex enclosed by a white picket fence. Half an hour’s drive away was Stetson University College of Law, which had, for generations, produced many of the area’s judges and prosecutors, and that spring Skalnik told Suzanne that the law school had accepted him into its incoming class.
Suzanne was thrilled that he was going to be an attorney, but being married to a law student, she soon learned, was lonely. Her husband was rarely around, and no sooner was he home than he was off again—telling her that he had to prep for moot court, or study into the early morning hours at the law library. His fierce work ethic only underscored, for her, the scope of his ambition, but she dreaded eating dinner alone, looking out from the dining room table at the law textbooks he left scattered around.
This was not how she had envisioned their first year of marriage. While she supported the two of them, doing back-office work for a local defense contractor, and kept busy volunteering at their church, she reminded herself that the sacrifice was temporary. Everything he was doing was to build them a better future.
On May 22, 1981, thirteen months and a day after their wedding, Suzanne received a phone call from the city jail in St. Peters-burg. Skalnik was on the other end of the line. He provided no details, saying only that he would explain everything later—but first she needed to bail him out.
7:39
Surfing, Bananas, and Runners: Agatha Christie’s Grand Year of International Travel
Agatha Christie, World Traveler
During her year on the “Empire Tour,” Agatha wrote what she called a “diary” of letters to her mother. Clara kept all these letters, and when she died, Agatha reclaimed them. Later collected in a book edited by Agatha’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, these letters provide a close look at Agatha as a traveler, from what she enjoyed to what frustrated her.
Agatha wrote often, for example, of the women she encountered on the tour. One letter recounts her meeting with the “Champion lady runner” of Australia (Mrs. Baddock).
Agatha took a photo of Baddock smiling in her running outfit of bloomers and a cap just as she was about to take off in a race. Agatha also recalls the female members of the Bell family, who owned a massive farm in Queensland. “Mrs. Bell is delightful, full of character….All her children adore her….They [the girls] are all mad on horses and go about all day in shirts and breeches.”
Agatha’s letters home also detail her observations of nature along the journey, including Lake Louise, Table Mountain, Victoria Falls, and Waddamana in Tasmania. Of Waddamana, she wrote: “All Australian scenery that I have seen has a faintly austere quality, the distance is all a soft blue green—sometimes almost grey….And here and there great clumps of trees have been ringbarked and have died, and then they are ghost trees, all white, with white waving branches.”
Fans can learn about her adventures and discoveries throughout these letters: “I never knew what a banana could be,” she wrote after visiting a plantation in Honolulu. On a trip to a chocolate factory in Melbourne, she described the variety of cocoa beans from Trinidad, Ceylon, West Africa, and New Guinea. And in South Africa, New Zealand, and Honolulu, she enjoyed surfing: “Oh, the moment of complete triumph, on the day that I kept my balance and came right into shore standing upright on my board!”
Ultimately, Agatha would spend much of her life abroad, and travel would be a big part of many of her novels, from Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Three Act Tragedy (1934) to Appointment with Death (1938) and A Caribbean Mystery (1964).
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The More You Know
Agatha was one of the first British women to ride a surfboard standing up. After her first attempt at surfing in South Africa, she kept at the sport, developing her skills in New Zealand and later in Honolulu, where she rode a surfboard named Fred.
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