The Edgar Award for best crime novel: the best-written book on the shortlist
Read the opening of our pick below ^ Something of an Anti-Climax ^ A Hermit Wanders Down from the Hills
In today’s issue
— ‘It was the Jackson 5 after all who put Ray Carney back in the game following four years on the straight and narrow’: our pick of the best-written shortlisted book for the Edgar award for best crime novel, the winner of which will be announced on the 1st of May.
— ‘Only those severely damaged in the head by the series would claim it’s worse than ICBMs or that its reverberations may exceed those of Triumph of the Will’: Something of an Anti-Climax and A Hermit Wanders Down from the Hills, parts 4 and 5 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have already shown this series.
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The shortlist for the 2024 Edgar Award for best crime novel
Flags on the Bayou James Lee Burke (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press)
All the Sinners Bleed S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books)
The Madwomen of Paris Jennifer Cody Epstein (Penguin Random House – Ballantine Books)
Bright Young Women Jessica Knoll (Simon & Schuster – Simon Element – Marysue Rucci Books)
An Honest Man Michael Koryta (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books)
The River We Remember William Kent Krueger (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books)
Crook Manifesto Colson Whitehead (Penguin Random House – Doubleday)
The best-written of these is
ONE
From then on whenever he heard the song he thought of the death of Munson. It was the Jackson 5 after all who put Ray Carney back in the game following four years on the straight and narrow. The straight and narrow—it described a philosophy and a territory, a neighborhood with borders and local customs. Sometimes when he crossed Seventh Avenue on the way to work he mumbled the words to himself like a rummy trying not to weave across the sidewalk on the way home from the bars.
Four years of honest and rewarding work in home furnishings. Carney outfitted newlyweds for their expedition and upgraded living rooms to suit improved circumstances, coached retirees through the array of modern recliner options. It was a grave responsibility. Just last week one of his customers told him that her father had passed away in his sleep “with a smile on his face” while cradled in a Sterling Dreamer purchased at Carney’s Furniture. The man had been a plumber with the city for thirty-five years, she said. His final earthly feeling had been the luxurious caress of that polyurethane core. Carney was glad the man went out satisfied—how tragic for your last thought to be “I should have gone with the Naugahyde.” He dealt in accessories. Accent pieces for lifeless spaces. It sounded boring. It was. It was also fortifying, the way that under-seasoned food and watered-down drinks still provide nourishment, if not pleasure.
There was no retirement party when he stepped down. No one gave him a gold watch for his years of service, but he’d never lacked for gold watches since becoming a fence. The day Carney retired he had a box of them in his office safe, engraved with the names of strangers, as it had been a while since he made the trip to his watch guy out in Mott Haven. His farewell to the stolen-goods biz mostly consisted of rebuffing former clients and telling them to spread the word in their criminal circle: Carney is out.
“What do you mean, out?”
“I quit. Done.”
The door onto Morningside, carved out of the building to facilitate the night trade, became the innocent route for afternoon deliveries. Two weeks after the Fortuna robbery, Tommy Shush knocked on the Morningside door with a black leather briefcase tucked under his arm. Carney took a look at the diamonds to test his resolve—and bid the thief good luck. The next day Cubby the Worm, one of his white regulars, showed up after hours with “some real hot stuff.” Cubby specialized in unlikely hijackings that took years to off-load—the man was up to his eyeballs in Chinese pogo sticks and pantyhose encased in plastic eggs. Carney turned him away before he could describe this week’s misbegotten haul, nothing personal.
They stopped coming by, the thieves, bit by bit, only momentarily glum, for there was always another hand, another conduit, another deal to be made in an enterprise as vast, complicated, and crooked as New York City.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire.
Something of an Anti-Climax
REMEMBER ELLA AND ME going out as Laura Palmer and Mr Lynch and returning home for Lynchian wrestling, the anticipated-fun to actual-fun ratio that was waiting for us? Now imagine that feeling of anti-climax stretched out over five months. Season 3 turned out to be the most wretched work of art, the worst flop, ever made by man or woman or demon.
This isn’t some casual exaggeration. I am serious when I say it is the worst artistic project there has ever been.
We didn’t always believe this, true, as during our first few watches it only seemed like the worst TV show in history or the worst artwork of our lifetimes. But as Ella, Trinna, Les and me came to comprehend the series’ singular nature, it became clear how inadequate such descriptions were. It is the worst work of our lifetimes, of course it is, but it’s the worst of all time too, of any time since humans started making art. No joke, no messing, this is how bad it is.
Think of the billions of attempts at art humans have made, from The Virgin on the Rocks to infants’ stick drawings. Out of those tens of thousands of years’ worth of efforts, Twin Peaks: The Return is the worst of the lot, meaning we have here an event as unusual and historically significant as the invention of language. You feel like you’ve discovered some impossible new continent or planet. This is how extraordinary the series is.
I know you’ll doubt such statements (who wouldn’t?) but you won’t doubt them by the time we’re finished, I promise you, especially if you make the leap and try to watch clips of the show yourself. Get through these pages and those clips and if you still believe an artist managed to produce a worse artwork, I promise to hear you out with an open mind. I will read your book, listen to your podcasts, watch YouTube presentations of your case, whatever you wish. If you’ve discovered a work even more extraordinary than The Return, that makes its artist look a bigger diddy—not more vicious but a bigger diddy—than this series makes David Lynch out to be, then I want to know about it, both because it must be unmissable and because, to say the least, I don’t like the idea that my higher power made the worst artwork of all time.
The Return’s awfulness game is deep and broad, ambitious and exploratory, and seeks out and infects areas of life that should be unreachable by any telly drama. I’m trying to think of synonyms for awful as it’s nowhere near strong enough in this context, but none of its synonyms do the job either. Ghastly… dreadful… The Return isn’t dreadful. Or it is dreadful but is so much more than that, so far beyond dreadful you feel embarrassed for your mind for even suggesting the word. Rank, gruesome, mince, bogging, bowfing, minging, honking, hoaching aren’t quite strong enough either.
But disaster might be getting closer. Also catastrophe, trainwreck, fiasco, travesty, monstrosity, carnage, abomination, atrocity, crime against humanity, holocaust…
No, with holocaust we might finally have found a word too strong for a TV drama. Likewise bloodbath. But a disaster is roughly what we’re dealing with.
Ask supercomputers to theorise a worse show and I doubt they’d manage it. That isn’t hyperbole. I haven’t lost my mind here. I was able to pull back from holocaust, wasn’t I? It’s important to be precise regarding what we’re dealing with here, neither too generous nor too harsh. I’m comfortable calling the abomination our world’s worst-ever endeavour judged in artistic terms, but not the worst thing of any kind we’ve ever produced or will ever produce, or the work with the most serious political ramifications. Only those severely damaged in the head by the series would claim it’s worse than ICBMs or that its reverberations may exceed those of Triumph of the Will. Nobody can see humanity’s entire future, can they, so assertions like this are just silly.
As she recovered in hospital after another booze and wrestling relapse brought on by the series, Trinna announced that if a Milky Way-wide contest for the worst art fiascos in the galaxy came to Earth looking for contenders, then they’d obviously pick Season 3, which would go on to blow away the galactic competition. But that’s daft talk from a woman with serious hormonal issues and who when she made the comment was also high on morphine. The Milky Way is bloody gigantic, Trinna.
Season 3 is so bad, however, that it was played in common rooms in Spain’s most punitive prisons. It is the only TV series in history so bad it was investigated by the FBI. It is so bad it made people run naked in the streets, made them banshee-wail and actually tear out their hair as they demanded to know of the heavens and passing strangers: Why? It is so bad that watching it becomes a weird form of religious experience. Its honkingness actually makes your body hum. You’re not going to end up concluding it’s bad but not historically bad, and that I’ve overpromised on its vileness. This will be a different kind of ride altogether.
It can’t be emphasised enough, though, that at least in the usual sense Mr Lynch is a separate being from the ten-dimensional demon that possessed his mind and body, and he therefore wasn’t responsible for the carnage of The Return. It was this entity, which came to be known, a little inaccurately, as the Demonic Twin of David Lynch, that passed itself off as the great man and used his industry reputation and contacts to write, film and air the worst-ever work of art.
As a result the great man couldn’t proclaim his innocence over the carnage, because he was no longer in charge of his own mouth, or of any part of his body, so he couldn’t even proclaim his innocence using mime or sign language. He was completely impotent.
But as with Mr Trump, Mr Putin, Santiago Abascal’s Vox, etc., it isn’t only The Return or the Twin that’s the issue but also their brainwashed followers. Without his champions in the media and elsewhere Mr Trump would have continued to assault women, claim certain women are too unappealing to assault, and all the rest, but he could not have potentially destroyed life on this planet forever. And without the cult devoted to David Lynch, the Twin would have continued to supervise everything across nine or ten dimensions but the catastrophe would never have got made or found an audience.
The Twin and the nine non-demonic entities involved knew there would be no other cult anywhere so vulnerable to pretentious mince, so cowed by cult dogma, that they wouldn’t still watch and spread the word about even a historically bogging show. Plus exactly like followers of Mr Trump and of at least one other boomer whose hair has a compelling history, this cult had long since abandoned reason in its defences and celebrations of the great man’s works. You can’t explain them, fella, because they’re not meant to make sense as such. They’re kind of joking but kind of not. They’re 5D chess. I just know they’re amazing and that’s that. Some can just see it and others can’t. This sort of woolliness is ideal if you want a cult following to feel comfortable promoting and defending the indefensible.
Providing yet more cover for the disaster was the fact that Lynch hadn’t worked in TV drama for many years. People simply wouldn’t have accepted that Hiro Murai or Steve McQueen or Andrea Arnold was responsible for a series as godawful as The Return. But a seventy-something hermit notorious for waggling fingers beside his head for no good reason, and for his ambition, transgression, tonal games and other risks that require peak form to pull off without shaming yourself—this was ideal cover for what the entities had planned.
When transgressive art works the rewards can be considerable, but when it honks you can end up with some of the very worst trash like Frédéric Beigbeder’s 6.99, or anything by Lucifer Valentine. Honking transgressive art is worse than virtually anything in our culture, worse than superhero films, reality TV, worse even than much of porn, which meant Mr Lynch’s reputation for risky transgression and audience-goading was perfect for the entities’ project.
It helped too that his music was increasingly unimpressive, and that the final six minutes of his last film before his possession, Inland Empire, featured actresses from his previous works appearing out of nowhere for a mortifying song and dance glorification of his career. In the build-up to The Return’s premiere many fans worried that it might prove a solipsistic mess, even if nobody, exactly nobody, anticipated the worst mess since the birth of our species.
But none of the above would have ensured US cable channel Showtime would fund and broadcast the mess. For that its bosses would need to have known beforehand that critical gatekeepers would either praise the series or if they disliked it keep this to themselves. In 1992 Fire Walk with Me got a real critical hammering, but then as the years went on the critics saw how wrong they’d been and every new Lynch film got obsequious reviews. The Twin therefore knew it could hit them with the worst thing they’d ever seen and like the rest of the cult they’d still sing out the praise.
A Hermit Wanders Down from the Hills
ONCE YOU KNOW THE FULL STORY of what happened here, including the depths the series reached, you’d have to be deep into the insanity of denial to believe it was made by Mr Lynch. It’s hardly surprising to stand by my higher power on this issue, but it’s also just objectively the case that bigheaded as he is, the man is still on a completely different artistic and spiritual plane to The Return, which in time became one of the biggest clues that someone, or something, other than Mr Lynch was behind the production.
As for the Demonic Twin, when you consider how low it had to sink to make this disaster, low even by the standards of hyperdimensional demons playing the heel, you almost feel sorry for the creature. But you don’t actually feel sorry for it, because the creature so overplayed the role of heel, sank so far below what the entities’ script called for, that it rendered itself beneath our pity.
Mr Lynch himself I have so much pity for. Picture it: there you are, minding your own business, maybe a quick watch of a Chrysta Bell promo and then with a burst of the old Transcendental Meditation quelling your impatience with the sycophancy of your actually or metaphorically manbunned colleagues. That’s better now, they aren’t that bad really, just folks experimenting with carefully considered hair-structures while trying to get on in the industry like you yourself once did on both fronts, and now look at you, a magnificent career and hairstyle-history behind you, respect from anyone who knows their cinema and TV drama and hair, a veritable Master of filmed drama and the noteworthy quiff—when out of Dark Matter a demon arrives to possess your three-dimensional presence and film the most bowfing pile of junk in history.
To think of Mr Lynch impotently trapped inside his human form, freaked-out inside that pitch-blackness, desperate for help that never comes, enduring the production in his name of the worst atrocity ever given the name of art… I’m not ashamed to say I have knelt beside my bed at night to pray long and hard on his behalf, and on behalf of the artform his Twin desecrated using his name. What it did to both was awful sad.
Before we look at The Return, I should explain why I’ll seldom be mentioning the series’ ostensible co-showrunner Mark Frost. The reason is there’s no indication I know of that he was possessed by a hyperdimensional demon planning to produce art’s ultimate shambles. None at all.
The Twin made it clear in the lead-up to its premiere that Frost was little more on the show than co-scriptwriter, an ugly moment and the first red eye-gleam of the demonic machinations soon confirmed by The Return. And because those machinations are so closely tied to the show’s demonic hoachingness, it would be irresponsible of me, low and dirty, the sort of thing that lands you in court, to claim that Frost was in on the machinations when he was merely the Twin’s oblivious script elf.
When I began to write this story down, Trinna asked me why I was bothering. Emmanuel Carrère, Maggie Nelson, Teofil Pančić, Louis Theroux, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek had published their books on Season 3’s controversies and mysteries to great success, Trinna pointed out, so was it not time to let these events go, live and let live as the GA/AA slogan had it, make my peace with it all, not risk another crackup over the series and simply move on?
Firstly, those books are nothing like comprehensive in their coverage of these events and are frequently just plain wrong, especially when it comes to the roles played by the entities and by me. So somebody who was there at the eye of the storm needs to put the record straight.
And anyway, I did let the events go, at one point. Due to psychic developments we’ll get to later, on the urging, the strong urging, of Les, Trinna, other GA/AA sponsees and friends, Jorge, doctors, nurses and patients at Santa Rita’s, Dougal and others, I used the Qustodio app to block access on my devices to any site or app with the words return, Lynch, kayfabe, cheesiness, so bad it’s good, if you can’t beat them join them, Franck Boulègue, Ella, Morrissey, Michael Gove, or skinny jeans on them, and asked Les to choose the Qustodio password and never reveal it to me. And it worked. Months and then years passed without me cornering Les before GA/AA meetings, sometimes with threats to wrestle him, to demand that password.
But then along came Covid-19 and the lockdowns and so much time drumming my fingers beside my mouse or phone. And that pressure-cooker feeling building in Madrid and my flat and skull, the lockdowns going on and on, all recovery meetings shut down, my somebody-please-infect-him him neighbour roaring out ‘I Will Survive’ through a thin wall as I tried to sleep. On my most bewildered, broken days I even imagined the national 8pm applause for medical staff was actually for The Return, because it was originally shown here at that time. It was in fact 9pm.
But even more important was the way the virus forced everyone to consider their mortality and what genuinely mattered to them, big-picture stuff, and what genuinely mattered, I realised, was The Return’s monumental boggingness. For many of us those lockdowns were a chance to live at a slower pace and reflect on what sort of life we’d led and on the world we’d all created, what twelve thousand years of civilisation had led to: TV channels worldwide airing this vicious honkathon to whoops from the corporate culture’s gatekeepers.
Then in May 2024 the show hospitalised Ella, César Grez, Les, and others. Actually sent them off to San Rafael and de la Princesa hospitals in ambulances.
One time after she sobered and lightened up Trinna stood outside her latest rehab and asked the deepest part of herself what it was that she truly wanted to do in life now that she was free, she believed, of drink and grappling. And what she truly wanted to do in life, it turned out, was to become a more devout Nazi and Satanist.
Wearing goat horns on her nightguard cap she soon drunkenly charged and grappled Jorge with such force and heft it toppled his Ecologistas Insurreccionales HQ security hut, yet another relapse due to her lacking any kind of higher power, having tried and found insufficiently helpful Satan and various malign Thrones, Principalities and Archdemons with Latin names, the Serbian warlord Arkan, Tex-Mex ring legend One Tough Young Hombre, then her hatred of Season 3.
When after all this wasted time and effort I saw the obvious solution and proposed Adolf Hitler as a compassionate higher power to lend assistance in steering clear of drink and wrestling, Trinna glanced warily around the Parque del Oeste as though the Gestapo had disguised themselves as the park’s trans hookers and confessed that just between the two of us, when it came to the personality of Adolf Hitler she had certain reservations. At which point I had an out-of-body experience and looked down on my once again shortcircuiting brain and wondered how my life had led to this new WTF tableau, this former Revolutionary Communist nightguard and Grapplers Anonymous/Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor from Buckie suggesting that his giantess Satanist colleague from Serbia covered in master-race whiteheads adopt the Führer as her nurturing higher power and being turned down because the Führer was too weird.
Eventually Trinna got over her reservations, though, and gave the man a spin as her higher power. When tempted to drink or physically or mentally grapple, she admitted that due to years of relapses, she herself could no longer be trusted with this latest relapse decision, so she gave it over to this imaginary Hitler. As he wouldn’t wish Trinna to relapse and be an unproductive Nazi, he gave the relapse the thumbs-down. Therefore Trinna didn’t relapse.
This is a simplified and obviously absurdly Nazified summary of one way higher powers can function in recovery, and if you’re scoffing then great, that means you’ve never been so low and desperate you’d consider handing a pivotal life-decision over to an imaginary genocidal carpet-chewer. But the absurdity illustrates an important point, which is that you can choose whatever higher power you want so long as it’s not what goes on in your own head, i.e. your God’s not the very addict’s thoughts that have wrecked your life with relapses. Many transformative moments have this idea at their core, don’t they: Not me, not mine.
If there really is nothing in the entire universe superior to what goes on in your head, congratulations because you’re God/Allah/Yahweh/the Ultraverse/the Diamond and you can obviously handle not just booze and wrestling but a supercluster-sized cocktail of meth, fentanyl and datura.
I’d like to submit a complaint, however, regarding me and Dougal’s childhood, and also the opaque way you go about your business—for instance why would the Ultraverse choose you in particular as its earthly manifestation? Also regarding children’s access to porn, the existence of Mr Gove, plus this whole Lynch headwreck and one consequence in particular, and plenty of other stuff, actually.
Trinna’s now been sober and nongrappling for five months, really happy with her lovely girlfriend Claudia. ‘And even when she is not so lovely,’ Trinna told me, ‘you soon forget about this when you lose yourself Heiling with your camaradas in the dark woods,’ a line if not a specific sentiment I find curiously appealing.
She also told me there’s such a group as el Club de costura nacionalsocialista, the National Socialist Sewing Club, in those woods as well, where these bams gather to play Nazi death metal and sew swastikas and demons onto one another’s leathers. On Trinna’s recommendation a few of these growlers asked me for help with similar drink problems and consequent Nazism and Satanism problems, but when I handed the decision over to my own higher power, this imaginary Mr Lynch’s verdict was ‘No freakin way.’
But big Trinna there outside her rehab: the following year that was me. Shit had now got real with those hospitalisations and revealed my life’s mission, which was to get my Qustodio password from Les, research the subject in detail and depth once again, and solve the mystery of why, as we all believed at the time, Mr Lynch had made something as awful as Season 3.
A notable aspect of its first run from May to September 2017 was the way the media ignored this glaring metaphor for certain political developments, in the US and elsewhere too, not least the showy obscurantist eejitry within liberal culture that’s been so successfully exploited by the hard-right.
Notable as well is the way a series that topped so many Best-of lists has been paid little attention generally. Women and young people showed hardly any interest in the thing, and the women who did watch it make up a substantial portion of its haters. Trinna ridiculed it just as much as I did, with Ella not far behind us, while her coven battled the spread of its malice with (frankly useless) hexes on its corporate-media champions. The book Laura’s Ghost on the subject of Twin Peaks’ female characters and fans, meanwhile, is highly complimentary about most of Twin Peaks, especially the humane treatment of victims of abuse, but much less so about The Return, no surprise considering its attitude to rape, which at times is worse than you’d see in hardcore porn (see the following section), and its portrayal of older women compared to older men.
And with many other Twin Peaks fans what happened was they quickly realised they were watching one of the most audience-unfriendly works ever made, and then switched it off and did something else with their precious free time and never returned to the mess.
If a hermit wanders down from the hills then streaks along the road yelling out contemptuous glossolalia at strangers, it’s natural to ignore him rather than engage with the finer details of his argument. But what if the corporate media’s ageing cultists are right behind him warbling with joy at every glossolalic syllable and proclaiming him the Master and Genius Auteur, and the hermit and his warblers bear strong resemblances to other boomer reactionaries with famous hair and their own berserk cults? And what if trapped inside the hermit’s body is the true Master and Genius Auteur?
The expression ‘It’s in our house now’ is used in the series to refer to the evil unleashed by the first atomic-bomb test, but it can be applied to the series itself. The gatekeepers didn’t do their job and it got into our house. All this deserves attention. There’s a story here. The Return really was Event Television.