Aug 18, 2026 · 7 min listen · Last updated August 18, 2026
From storyflo. This is your daily audio brief. Here are today's top 5 true crime stories. Let's get into it. First, from CrimeReads (Literary Hub). Max Doty on Concepting, Erasure, and Building a House in His New Novel. If you want to see a room of writers roll their eyes, it’s easy.
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Daily True Crime Brief · August 18th
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Max Doty on Concepting, Erasure, and Building a House in His New Novel
If you want to see a room of writers roll their eyes, it’s easy. Just ask them, “Where do you get your ideas?” Personally, I don’t find the question asinine at all. I just think that the real question behind what’s being asked is, “How did you go from that first initial seed of an idea to the actual concept you executed in your book?” Now that’s a question. I want to talk a little about concepting a book today, especially the way a premise can develop into something radically different than the initial seed that inspired it.
Jennifer Givhan on Monstrous Mothers, Headless Women, and Writing Symbolic Horror
I think this is a key attribute of our cultural fascination with the headless woman. She’s everywoman and no woman at once. She invokes terror, or she’s invisible. When I was eight or nine at a sleepover at my friends’ house across the street, we read a book of scary stories that housed one tale that would stick with me and come to underscore a major facet of my writing life: “The Girl with the Green Ribbon.” My mom had her thyroid removed when she was a girl, and back in the day they sliced her throat and sewed her back together.
Tapeworm is a vampire novel. It says so right on the cover. But what mental image does that conjure? Often, we think of a gaunt figure silhouetted by a flash of lightning, bending over a victim’s neck, only to recoil from the crucifix and garlic around their neck. Or perhaps it’s a young man twinkling in the Pacific Northwestern sunlight, calling a much younger woman “spider monkey.” Maybe it’s the tortured vampire-with-a-soul haunting the alleys of Los Angeles as a supernatural private eye. It probably isn’t a writhing mass of parasitic worms in the shape of a Latina biker.
Charles-Henri Lavielle on Toulouse, Settings, and Seeing Cities Anew Through Noir
Charles‑Henri Lavielle talks about why noir fiction feels like a map of a city, especially his hometown of Toulouse. He’s read the whole crime canon—from Hammett to Simenon—and noticed that the best stories make the place almost a character, letting readers smell the streets and hear the night‑time hum. When he first read Pascal Dessaint’s La Bouche d’ombre, the novel was set in the very neighborhoods he walked through, and the descriptions made him feel the city anew, even prompting him to imagine cinematic moments as he passed the same corners.
Lavielle has lived in Toulouse for more than three decades, played rugby, founded the publishing house Anacharsis, and built a network of friends and rivals. That deep familiarity gave him the confidence to edit a collection of short stories that aim to capture the city’s atmosphere through noir lenses. He argues that fiction can sometimes convey reality more sharply than academic disciplines, because writers can “put their finger on” the lived texture of a place without the methodological constraints that scholars face.
The essay also touches on a broader question raised by anthropologists François Pouillon and Alban Bensa: why great writers often seem more convincing about people and places than social scientists. Lavielle suggests that noir, like rock music, is both standardized and capable of producing unique, location‑specific moods. In the genre, the city is portrayed as sick or moribund, and the crime narrative becomes a probe that uncovers hidden layers of urban life.
He warns against letting the genre fall into generic generalities, reminding us that the best descriptions come from direct observation. Whether you’re a native or a visitor, the collection he assembled brings together diverse voices—different ages, genders, and backgrounds—all tied to Toulouse. The goal is to let listeners feel the city’s texture, even if they never set foot there, and to remind us that the concerns of today often echo those of centuries past.
Brianna Labuskes on Reckoning and Using Memory as a Tool in Crime Fiction
Memory isn’t a perfect video you can replay; it’s a mutable tool our brains use to keep us moving forward. We edit our recollections without even noticing, letting present feelings tint the past. That’s why a huge chunk of people misremember where they were on 9/11, even though they swear they’ll never forget. The brain builds narratives that feel true, even when they’re built on a shaky foundation.
That messiness makes memory a wild playground for crime fiction. Some writers ask whose memory should count in the moral tug‑of‑war of the past, especially when race and privilege color the stories we tell. Others lean into the blank‑spot trope—think of a blackout drunk or a trauma‑scarred mind—to crank up tension. Books like The Girl on the Train, Tana French’s In the Woods, and Wendy Walker’s All is Not Forgotten all explore how unreliable recollection can drive a mystery.
A newer angle shows memory as a force that actually shapes the investigation. In God of the Woods, for instance, the protagonist’s recollections become a tangled part of the case itself. In Brianna Labuskes’ own novel Clean Slate, the main character Olive Hunt is a crime‑scene cleaner whose childhood with an OCD‑driven mother left her with a flood of painful memories. Every time she wipes a bloodstain she’s also scrubbing away the fear of becoming her mother, yet the same habits let her spot clues the police miss.
The core of the story is Olive having to face a serial‑killer investigation that forces her to stop hiding behind the cleaning. The very skills her mother taught her become the tools that might save her, but they also bring the knives of her past right back into play. In the end, the novel reminds us that memory, flawed as it is, can be the sharpest instrument a detective has—if you’re willing to confront it head‑on.