Books

CLOCKWORK BALDERDASH (profanity alert):

As Odd as a Clockwork Orange: The Unreliable Narrator and Primary Sources (The Memory Hole, Jun 28, 2026)

In the years after they reunited, there were signs that Burgess’ wife could not fully overcome the attack she suffered: “Lynne could not bear to be left alone at night,” Burgess wrote, “even with a dog that flew into an ecstasy of noise at the scuffle of a mouse. She feared the dark, and the fear had its origin in blacked-out wartime London when she had been viciously attacked by four GI deserters.” The attack inspired an early passage in one of the most disturbing scenes of A Clockwork Orange, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. The final chapter of the book, where the main character outgrows his sociopathy, was cut by the U.S. publisher to maintain a darker ending for the novel: “Eric Swenson, Norton’s vice-president, insisted that the book lose its final chapter,” Burgess explained. “I had to accede to this lopping because I needed the advance, but I was not happy about it.”

Following Lynne’s death in 1968, Burgess was asked to return to the hospital to collect her rings. To obtain the wedding ring, her finger had to be broken, the same one the American GIs had attempted to break many years before.

This is the account you will read—or a slight variation thereof—if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on the topic of Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true.

ALL FOR HIMSELF:

How One Man’s Quest for a Musketeer’s Bones Got Him Locked Up: A secret archaeological dig inside a Dutch church has led to drama worthy of Alexandre Dumas. Did Wim Dijkman really find the bones of the fourth musketeer? We may never know. (Jeanna Smialek, Sept. 13, 2026, NY Times)

Yet the investigation into whether the bones belong to Charles de Batz de Castelmore d’Artagnan, who died during the Siege of Maastricht in 1673, was about to take twists and turns that might have impressed Dumas himself.

Within days of our conversation, Mr. Dijkman would find himself in a cell at the local police station. Within weeks, he’d be arguing in the local media that he was being framed for grave mistakes in unearthing and processing the skeleton.

Within months, it would become clear that Mr. Dijkman and his band of mostly amateur archaeologists might well have uncovered D’Artagnan’s remains — but the town of Maastricht would allege that they may also have impaired the chances that the world will ever know whether the bones truly belong to the musketeer.

The quest for D’Artagnan’s skeleton would prove to be a story full of power struggles, hubris and hot heads. It continues to consume the little corner of the Netherlands, nestled between Belgium and Germany, where it has unfurled.

OF MICE AND MEN:

Why Asimov’s Foundation series still resonates in the AI era (Chow Chung-yan, 26 Aug 2026, SCMP)

Elon Musk called it a fundamental catalyst for SpaceX. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman credited it with shaping his career. Newt Gingrich made it required reading for his congressional staff, and even Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara was reportedly inspired by it. […]

When Asimov began writing Foundation 85 years ago, he was capturing the cutting-edge intellectual currents of his era: mathematical determinism, the quantification of social sciences and the rise of central planning in governance.

Economists such as John Maynard Keynes argued that macro-level human behaviour could be managed through top-down intervention, while Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch were building the first econometric models. Seldon’s psychohistory was essentially macroeconomics and public administration pushed to their absolute logical extreme – individual chaos smoothed out by the predictable behaviour of billions.

Both sides of this coin are incredibly destructive: there are the intellectuals who believe that their social engineering would, uniquely, work and those who think their failed lives must have been engineered from without.

COUNTING:

Did the Zodiac Kill the Black Dahlia? This Crime Writer Thinks So. (Alexander Nazaryan, Aug. 26, 2026, NY Times)

[W]hen two of Connelly’s most trusted collaborators, the retired Los Angeles Police Department detectives Rick Jackson (partly the basis for Bosch) and Mitzi Roberts (the inspiration for Ballard), came to him early last year with the claim that an amateur sleuth in West Virginia had solved the most notorious murder in L.A. history, there was only one thing Connelly could do: work the case as if he were still a young reporter ravenous for the big scoop.

That investigation resulted in “Killer in the Code,” a podcast whose second season returns on Wednesday with the first two episodes of six. The 10-episode first season, which debuted last December, roiled the true crime community by arguing that a World War II veteran named Marvin Margolis was responsible for two of the most famous unsolved crimes in California history: the 1947 Los Angeles murder of Elizabeth Short, immortalized as the Black Dahlia, and the five killings committed by the Zodiac throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s.

“I have no doubts,” Connelly said in the run-up to the second season, which focuses on advancing the case against Margolis as if he were still alive. The evidence pointing to Margolis as the killer, Connelly added, was “completely convincing.”

Margolis has been floated before as a suspect in the Short killing, but never with such confidence. And he has never been previously connected with the Zodiac killings. The podcast has infuriated many in the true crime community. Connelly is viewed by some as a carpetbagger and completely out of his depth, duped by bad cryptography and shoddy evidence, the kind of thing Bosch or Ballard would see right through.

“Mike was a fine reporter, but those reporting days are in the rearview mirror,” said Larry Harnisch, a leading Black Dahlia expert who has led the opposition to “Killer in the Code.” Back when Connelly was a reporter for The Times, Harnisch was a copy editor at the paper. He hasn’t taken kindly to what he sees as the novelist’s intrusion on his domain. “I’m not going to sit silently and let them do it, because it’s a scam,” Harnisch said.

Despite the criticism, Connelly retains a conviction that he has the right guy, dismissing Harnisch and other detractors as a “small incestuous group” peddling “disproved” theories.

“I knew that, going into this, I would put my reputation on the line,” Connelly said.

“They’re invested in a different theory,” he added, “so to accept our theory, they have to accept that they’re wrong, or they’ve wasted a lot of time.”

The gray goatee, the bulky frame, the raspy voice. Michael Connelly, now 70, may be one of America’s most successful writers, but the vibe he gives off is of a cop on the cusp of retirement yet with something still left to prove.

Connelly admits that when he first got involved in the podcast, he did not think it would become something of a second job. (His latest novel, “Ironwood,” was published in May; a new Bosch novel, “The Hollow,” is coming in October.) He would narrate the story of Margolis, and the Black Dahlia-Zodiac link, then go back to writing books. Instead, the story has swallowed him whole.

It all began when he learned that a self-taught investigator in West Virginia claimed to have finally solved one of the Zodiac’s cryptograms. “As homicide investigators like to say, it goes where it goes,” Connelly said.

He can’t just drop it, like a bad first draft. This Friday, he and the rest of the podcast team will present their findings at the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center, which houses the forensics divisions of the L.A.P.D. and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

What keeps him going is an enduring fascination with Short, the patron saint of every lost soul to wander down Sunset Boulevard. “She was missing something,” Connelly said. “That’s the secret of L.A. Everybody here came from somewhere else because they’ve been missing something. Myself included.”

Educated about serial killers by novels, as we all are, both the gap between murders and the wildly differing manners of killing seem awfully odd.

NOT THE ONION:

The Elvis Impersonator, the Karate Instructor, a Fridge Full of Severed Heads, and the Plot 2 Kill the President: Remember that crazy story about the dude in Mississippi who mailed ricin to Obama and then tried to frame some other dude in Mississippi for the crime? Well, as Wells Tower discovered when he traveled to Tupelo and started poking around, the story is a thousand times crazier than you thought (Wells Tower, September 29, 2013, GQ)

Spend a week or two in Tupelo, Mississippi, and you begin to wonder if the air down here perhaps contains an element that causes dreams to ignite and burn hotter and stranger than elsewhere in the world. What are the dreams that catch fire in this town? They are dreams of rock ‘n’ roll; of valor, metamorphosis, and ruination; sex and betrayal; of the government and shadowy forces; of the grand dream, American. The ether here is surely spiked with something. How else do we explain the dream of the poor hillbilly born in a shotgun shack in east Tupelo, who invented rock ‘n’ roll and changed the world and died on the toilet at the age of 42? How else to understand a man like Kevin Curtis, one of northeastern Mississippi’s preeminent Elvis impersonators, whose life was nearly ruined by the sight of a severed head on a refrigerator shelf? How else to make sense of the story you are about to hear, the tale of Mr. Curtis and Everett Dutschke, two men who might have shared a lovely friendship but instead had a weird feud that ended in the attempted poisoning of the president of the United States?

Theirs is a story of human dismemberment and righteous causes, of martial arts and murder intrigues, sexual perversity, political conviction, and resentments dearly held. What lies behind Mr. Curtis and Mr. Dutschke’s spectacular collision? A lot of odd and complicated things. But in the simplest sense, perhaps it’s that these gentlemen simply had too many dreams in common, and in their particular America, there are only so many dreams to go around.

“MORAL RUIN”:

Fractured Odysseus: The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s books on Homer are the key to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (Colin Dickey, August 20, 2026, American Scholar)

Of all the Homeric translators and commentators over the millennia, Nolan seems most explicitly in dialogue with Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who discovered the therapeutic value of reading The Iliad with Vietnam veterans. Through his clinical practice, Shay came to believe that Homer’s Achilles is suffering from all the symptoms of complex PTSD as we now recognize it. But unlike the American military, Greek culture had numerous cultural means of treating this trauma that have since been either lost or actively suppressed.

From that experience came Shay’s 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Shay pinpoints the beginning of Achilles’s suffering—what he would come to call his “moral injury”—to when Agamemnon betrays him (paralleling how many Vietnam vets felt betrayed by their government). “When a leader destroys the legitimacy of the army’s moral order by betraying ‘what is right,’” Shay writes, “he inflicts manifold injuries on his men. The Iliad is a story of these immediate and devastating consequences.” Numbed by wrath, Achilles turns his back on the fellow Greeks for whom he formerly cared deeply. In this compromised state, the death of Pátroklos destroys him, engendering a berserker rage in which he desecrates the corpses of his fallen enemies, unable to control himself or observe the traditional laws of war.

For Shay, “The Iliad is the tragedy of Achilles’ noble character brought to ruin—moral ruin in his own terms … Achilles’ moral unluckiness, his tragedy, was that events—simply what happened—created the desire to do things that he himself regarded as bad.” It is something he found again and again in the American veterans he was treating.