Welocme To Derry Theories From A Reader Who Might Know Where This Story's Going

 

Those of you who read my blog know that when TV adapts a novel or a series of books I go out of my way not to read them first so I won't be biased when I review them. This has served me well particularly over the last few years from everything to Will Trent to A Gentleman in Moscow. Similarly on those occasions when I have read the source material beforehand, such as the limited series adaptations of Lianne Moriarty and the occasional mystery novel, I make it clear that I'm going to judge both separately and only comment afterwards.

My readers also know that I basically have little use for such TV gimmicks as fan service, whether they be retcon or Easter eggs. I like them when they are done well and subtly (Better Call Saul and Original Sin were by far the best versions in recent years in TV) but they've never been vital to my enjoyment of those shows.

 That being said given that there has been a fair amount of speculation over Welcome to Derry the so-far superb prequel that the Muschietti siblings have done with their version of IT (particularly after last night's episode) I find myself in the rare advantage of knowing certain things that the average TV viewer might not.  And while I don't usually give in to wild speculation given how the story is being told I am I think I can do one better than most: informed speculation. Because so far almost everything I saw prior to the last night's episode has basically confirmed to be that the references that the writers to what is happening in the first season is neither fan service or retcon but canon. Not just for King's original novel but indeed much of the King universe which intersects with IT in many ways that the series so far is being faithful to.

There's also the fact that I've read the original novel somewhere between 10 and 15 times in my life. (To be clear, I'm well aware the hardcover edition is 1140 pages along. I may have underestimated the number of times I've read it.) And having read every other book that King has written at least once and many of the ones that I'm certain the writers are using for this series multiple times if you want to know what may happen the rest of the season you're looking at a source that is as reliable – possibly more so – then whatever you'll find online even in Wikipedia.  And since the original book is such a brick it would be understandable if viewers only experience with the material comes from the films I'm pretty sure I could be just as useful to telling you about what they're getting right and what they might do as some of you will tell me what they're getting wrong about Last of Us and House of the Dragon. (To be clear I don't care about your precious source material so I don't blame you if you don't care about mine.)

Spoiler Warning: I may very well be about to spoil much of the original book both when it comes to tone and potential speculation. I don't think I can spoil a forty-year old book but still, if you don't want to know what might be coming by the end of the season, get out now.

All right I will actually break this down by bullet points for once.

 

Pennywise's  finally appearing in last night's episode is keeping in with how King deals with this manifestation in the original book.

I have little doubt there was some bitching and moaning as to why its taken five episodes for Bill Skarsgard's iconic clown to make his first appearance. I know why they did and it wasn't just for shock value. (For the record, how he chose to manifest is keeping with canon as I'll explain.)

In King's book, Pennywise appears in a couple of scenes at the start of the novel and then essentially disappears for the next three hundred pages only manifesting himself over three hundred pages later when eleven year olds Bill and Richie and up going to the House on Neibolt Street. And only Bill sees Pennywise: Richie sees him as the Teenage Werewolf, the  main character from a horror film he saw earlier that week.

Pennywise only appears a relatively few times in (Its?) most famous form in the entire book and when he does its only to each of the Losers and only briefly.  There are signs of Pennywise's presence – those endless balloons being the most famous – but most of the time IT basically appears to each of the Losers the same way Its doing in Welcome to Derry: manifesting themselves into what they fear the most. And because the Loser's childhood is in 1958 most of the versions are of things that are items from horror movies or books.

Ben first sees him as the Mummy in their initial encounter. Mike sees him has a bird 'the size of a house trailer'. For Eddie, who is always ailing, he takes the form of a hobo that he believes has leprosy. And for Stan Uris, he takes the form of dead boys.

That's why while I was shocked that Pennywise made his transformation from Matthew Clements, I wasn't surprised. The moment I saw him I knew that this was just another manifestation that Pennywise was doing. It was more elaborate then some of the ones he'd done so far but its not that far removed from hearing voices in the drain. And indeed when the Losers become adults Pennywise will take the form of those who he has killed to throw a special shock into them.

This is a larger reference to how King works in the majority of his books overall. It is atmosphere and buildup and we rarely see 'the monster'. In Salem's Lot the head vampire Barlow only appears after 150 pages and then only shows up again twice more in scenes that demonstrates just how evil and powerless those hunting him are against him. In The Stand Randall Flagg shows up twice in Part I in person (as opposed to in dreams where he is always vague and shadowy) once at the end of a long segment in Part 2 and it is only when the action moves to Las Vegas where he is running the show that we see him in his ugly glory – and then realize how little control of events he actually has.  In Christine it's not until the second part of the novel that we see the title automobile attack and murder someone and only then start to realize how horrible 'she' is. King doesn't want to show the shark either but he never lets you forget it's there.

 

Welcome to Derry officially links IT to King's Dark Tower series.

To be clear whatever link it has was retconned by King himself decades after he finished the book something he's actually acknowledged in a metafictional turn in Song of Susannah. But the signs were there eventually and they are much clearer here.

In IT we are told repeatedly that there is a guardian force known as 'The Turtle' who has been watching over what happens in Derry. At one point in a climatic battle Bill finally sees him and he's less help then you think: "I made the universe but don't blame me. I had a bellyache" he 'tells' Bill. Throughout the book you keep hearing "the Turtle couldn't help us"  though none of the Losers truly understand what they're talking about, even Mike who remembers Derry best.

So far in the series we've seen more than our share of turtles and the writers have both been subtle and direct about mentioning it. (It's a visual medium, okay?) We first learn of the Turtle as one of the Guardians in Mid-World when Roland talks about the Beams in The Wasteland and that they are starting to decay.  The Beam that Roland and his band are following is that of The Turtle. (I won't spoil anything else.) And as we all know from that "There are other worlds then these."

But there are even subtler links to The Dark Tower here, most notably when we were told that there are thirteen totems that keep It in place. Now if you've read the series thirteen is a number of significance because there are thirteen 'baubles' that have immense magical power. Roland is told of them in Wizard and Glass by his father: "Twelve for each of the Guardians and one for the Dark Tower itself." And if you try to control them, they will absolutely destroy you.

The fact that the existence of these totems is now to the indigenous people who live around Derry might strike some as a little bit of racial stereotyping. And it is to an extent – unless you consider this as part of The Dark Tower.  Throughout the series Roland refers again and again to ''The Old Ones' or 'The Elders'. They are the keepers of the lore of Mid-World and they once knew all the secrets but they have been gone well past the lifetimes of those who know them. And who is the closest equivalent of the elders in America but the indigenous people?

Watching them discuss the cycle that was going on as part of tribal lore was also a canon of the original book. As Mike relates in his Interludes, the cycle is not only known to him but those who have written histories of Derry over the decades and centuries.  The knowledge has led to many of them taking their own lives so I have to hand it to these elders: they're definitely handling it a lot better than those Dead White Men did.

And for those of you who wonder why would the General be trying to cage an entity that we absolutely know can't be controlled? Well, that's canon to if you consider:

 

Are we seeing the Origins of the Shop?

I speculated in my original review that the General (James Remar) might be working in conjunction with 'The Shop' the secret military government agency that makes appearance in quite a few King novels over the years, most notably in Firestarter.

The General acknowledged that a few years ago he was involved in some top secret medical testing which stinks of the kind of thing The Shop would do in the 1960s when it starts giving drugs to a group of college students and ends up giving them telekinetic powers. Two of them get married and they have a child: Charlie McGee and naturally the Shop wants to use her as a weapon. (King did come of age in the 1960s so his distrust of the government is well-earned).

Eventually Charlie burns it down and exposes it but as we all know in King's world nothing lasts forever. Throughout King's fiction there are multiple references to it, most notably in The Tommyknockers. There's a good chance if there's any military organization that has to do with utilizing the supernatural the Shop is behind it in some way and they will justify what they do with no conscience at all. Listening to Mrs. Sigby's monologue justifying what The Institute has done in the TV series earlier this year it's pretty close to the kind of thing that someone who worked for the Shop would say.

So yes it makes perfect sense that even knowing how horrible this thing is the Shop would want to use it to 'end the Cold War'. What the Shop wants to do of course is actually live up to the military industrial complex the lefties think really exists to an extent beyond their wildest dreams. The fact that it has already led to a spectacular loss of life will do nothing to stop them from searching for it in later episodes, I have no doubt. This is one of those reasons they should really have listened to Private Halloran which brings me too…

 

 

Dick Hallorann was always in Derry at one point and he always knew the Hanlon family.

Dick Hallorann's presence in Welcome to Derry is canon from the original novel, though the dates have been changed. He was in the military in Derry as young man and he did know the Hanlon family. However, since in the original book it was in 1930 no one was treated him or Will like real Americans.

Mike  Hanlon's father (in Welcome To Derry his grandfather) desire to serve his country leads him to experience the kind of bigotry that Welcome to Derry doesn't come close to touching on here. (Though they very well might in the second season which is scheduled to take place in 1935.) The base that Hanlon and Halloran are given is not a reward for service but a kind of punishment, a middle finger to the white brass to tell the segregated units that they are acting uppity.

Now its pretty clear that the series is building to the event that closes the cycle and it is what does so in 1931: the fire at the Black Spot. Now the circumstances will clearly be different here then in the original novel but I suspect the result will be the same: the white townspeople will learn that 'the Negros' have a base where they are entertaining it, set fire to it and anywhere from forty to forty five enlisted men will be killed. Dick Hallorann, however, will survive and not just because he has a date with the Overlook in about forty years. In the original book he uses 'The shining' to help save quite a few people including Will Hanlon.

I should mention in the original book Hanlon is of course a private and is essentially bullied from the moment he gets here. Nor does he show anywhere near the lack of fear he supposed has: he's terrified when the place burns down. And that actually brings me to a piece of speculation I have myself…

 

Does Penny wise have enough foresight to know the children who are the biggest threat to him and seek them out?

It's essentially canon in every source that Pennywise knows the Losers are a threat to him mainly because they escape from IT multiple times, something none of the other victims can. The fact that they are stronger together stuns It in both of their confrontations.

But as we see in Welcome to Derry Pennywise has a presence in Derry that infects the entire town and has the ability to control whatever happens to feed off both its victims and the town itself. IT also has the ability to manipulate people to follow them to its own ends. In every adaptation IT finds a willing acolyte in Henry Bowers and tries to use it to negate the Losers as a threat.

So the question is: does Pennywise have an instinct of which children are dangerous to Its existence and has always done so. Is that the real reason that IT has been engaged in such manipulation to kill Will in particular, who as we all know, will be the father of the son who brings him down not once but twice?

And remember one of the victims in the Pilot was Teddy Uris who is clearly the uncle of Stan, one of the Losers who nearly defeats IT in 1989. That's not fan service either.  And IT clearly knows that Dick Hallorann is a threat, perhaps not the same one as the Losers but definitely a problem. We saw it manifest to do the same to try and take out General Shaw as a child and with Rose and in the present both are clearly threats of some sort.

Perhaps in future seasons the further back we go we will get confirmation of this. And that leads me to one last question that we were all talking about last night:

 

 

Mrs. Kersh was quite the looker when she was young!

I'm sorry but Madeline Stowe still looks damn good for her age. Now to be serious.

I'll be honest, while Mrs. Kersh has appeared in every version that has been filmed and is part of one of the most shocking scenes in the original book, I've never truly thought she was anything but a manifestation of IT.  In the book we see photos of her that appear to be erotica in 1958 Neibolt Street (and yes, they move) that turn out to be Mrs. Kersh. But I always assumed that she was just another glamour something that IT used to scare people when it chose. I never thought she was a human being and I certainly didn't expect her to be played by Madeline Stowe in Welcome to Derry.

The moment we learned who Ingrid was, the speculation began. I have two theories, both of which are plausible.

The first is that she is just another one of the acolytes that Pennywise has used over IT's time in Derry to do its evil. Henry Bowers was the most famous one but in the novel it used Tom Rogan, Bev's husband to do the same thing in the climax of the book.  Many times these acolytes don't know they're being used and in some case they are mentally unstable to begin with so that they allow themselves to be manipulated. If Ingrid is a battered spouse (implied but not yet confirmed) she would fit in with those solid citizens – and its worth noting both Henry and Tom were regulated beaten by their parents.

The second, equally realistic possible, is that she's no different from any other Derry resident and is just being manipulated by Pennywise without knowing it. We've already seen more examples in the series then we ever did in the film of this happening and while its usually directly related to violence, we have to remember Pennywise plays the very long game.  Sometimes that means citizens turning a blind eye to the horrible things that happen under their noses and as readers of the book know, sometimes it means picking and choosing what outrage to react against. And since its pretty much implied that Hank Grogan's escape is going to be the  domino that leads to the fire at the Black Spot, sometimes IT doesn't have to try that hard.

We may not get confirmation of these links until the season is over and some we might not ever get official confirmation on unless the writers choose to tell us. What I know already is that all of this just confirms what I said at the start: this is the Stephen King adaptation that both I and all of the millions of Constant Readers he's had over the last half-century have been waiting for their whole lives.

The fact that I know exactly how this season and how every other season must end has done nothing to negate the pleasure I'm getting from Welcome to Derry by the way. That's the thing with every great prequel. We all know the end but more than anything else, it's all about the journey. And King's book have a lot of great journeys.

 

 

 

Suggestions for a Post-Trump America: A Tale of Two New York Congresswomen

 

 

In the last article in this series I talked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, how she is the biggest success story of what is essentially a failed movement and how despite that many Democrats consider her the future of the Party. I've had some more thoughts about that since then and to best express them I think it would be fitting to compare with another member of the New York Congressional delegation Laura Gillen.

Ocasio-Cortez and Gillen are both women who are part of the New York Congressional delegation and they are both Democrats. But the similarities end there.  AOC is known by people who don't live in New York and may not know any other elected representatives. Gillen is not known outside of New York and probably not even that well within the boundaries of her district.  It is unlikely that Ryan will ever be considered for a Senate seat or the Presidency the way AOC already is.

Yet there is a much better argument that in a post-Trump America the Democratic Party if not the party system in general would do better to follow the path that Ryan has chosen more than the one of Ocasio-Cortez. And to understand why we have to review that while they both live in New York state they might as well live in two different universes.

After much reflection I'm inclined to think the Justice Democrat movement is an attempt of the left to try and cut the Gordian Knot that keeps their normal success of activism from succeeding in politics. To that end they are trying to run for elected office while nevertheless keeping the same moral purity the activist does, particularly when it comes to their campaign pledges when it comes to campaign contributions.

Even though I feel these two worlds are incompatible I won't deny there's something admirable about the left at least trying to bridge the worlds for some kind of success. The problem is not only has it failed spectacularly but it demonstrates that this generation of progressives essentially demonstrates by far the worst aspect of both activism and politics and none of the benefits of either.

I've discussed the issue of moral purity before when it comes to campaign finance in previous article and I'll just summarize it here:

"I need to make it clear so I’m not misconstrued: I agree firmly that there is too much money in our political system since Citizen United and that the current group of elected officials, mostly Republicans but some Democrats, have no motivation to repeal it in the near future. If progressives were serious about getting it done, they would be running for elected office in every state of the union and making it part and parcel of their platform…

…But in the paradoxical thinking of the left, when they run for office they seem determined to ignore the rules and win by the sheer force of their argument."

There is only so far to the left you can go and be tolerated unless you have money and since the Justice Democrats clearly are unwilling to take much of that, they have little but the purity of their cause to carry them through the day. That has limits on it that I doubt campaign finance reform could help."

So we see that the moral purity of the activists works against the reality of the politician. And just as clearly we see how the one aspect of politics the Justice Democrats works against their activism.

If the left has an electoral philosophy, it is based in the feeling that the millions of people who don't vote every year would if a candidate with a platform such as the Justice Democrats were to run for the Presidency. Much of the 'war' in the Democratic Party is based between those who want to try and reach the voters in the center against the progressives who believe the answer, as always, is to the left. When they are shown the results of elections (including the 2024 presidential election) which show where the weaknesses of the Democrats are the left is essentially saying that the Democrats should more or less write them off as 'deplorable'  This is code for the fact of something the left knows but will never publicly acknowledge: the Green New Deal won't work in Kentucky or West Virginia, gun control is not something people in Idaho or North Dakota agree with,  and stopping climate change is not something that is the priority for out of work people in Mississippi and Louisiana. And the reason I know they know this is because even during their biggest attempt to win office in 2018 with the sole exception of Paula Jean Swearengin's attempt to win the Senate in West Virginia, the Justice Democrats stayed the hell away from those states.

In this this demonstrates that, for all of the speeches that the Squad will make, they're not the second coming of Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony or Rosa Parks. What they are, frankly, are very much what they claim Trump is: they are not bravely striding to represent the causes they fight for in unfriendly territory but rather only safe environments in battles they are relatively certain they can win. They're not risking their political careers in places they know are unfriendly to them but only safe spaces against enemies that they think that beat in a fight. And as I need to keep repeating, even there they lost most of those fights. For the purposes of this article I'll focus on New York which in theory should have been completely supportive of everything they stand and where they have the closest thing the Justice Democrats have to a base of support. Even that term is laughable.

When AOC managed to win her primary and then her House Seat she was one of only six Democrats running for a primary at all in New York that managed to win. The other four representatives lost, not even able to get more than 20 percent in a House Primary  and Cynthia Nixon was humiliated in her attempt to be Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary.

In 2020 Jamaal Bowman was one of only three newcomers to the Justice Democrats to manage to win office. We'll get back to him.

In 2022 Rana Abdelhamid was going to run in the New York 12^th Congressional district. She had announced in April of 2021 and was planning to run against incumbent Carolyn Maloney. Abdelhamid criticize Maloney for wearing a burqa to illustrate the oppression of women in Afghanistan. According to Abdelhamind, oppression of Afghan woman was an 'Islamophobic narrative meant to justify American wars and that these women didn't require support or saving.

After new boundaries maps were released that were unfriendly to her Abdelhamid withdrew arguing that he community had been left out and that it was 'reminiscent of an ongoing legacy of non-inclusive gerrymandering." Considering that this gerrymandering led to the heavily Democratic districts where so many of her colleagues were able to find success in the first place this was the definition of throwing stones at the very glass house she wanted to enter.

In 2024 Jamaal Bowman lost his Democratic primary to challenger George Latimer. While much of the circumstances of Bowman's defeat was due to the positions he took against the War in Gaza, it is worth remember his district had a substantial Jewish population and he made no real effort to win back the very people who might well now have doubts for voting for him that November.  As I wrote before AOC's attempts to stump for him did nothing to stop him from losing his primary in double digits. The fact that the Justice Democrats just two seats while the Democrats gained two seats in the House – despite all the other losses they suffered – should have been the biggest sign that the position AOC and the Squad were taking had its limits. Obviously this lesson has been ignored.

Which brings me to Laura Gillen. Laura Gillen is 56 years old and she is a freshman representative. Her district includes central and Southern Nassau county on Long Island. Now Long Island like much of New York is a swing district.  According to 270towin four of the Congressional districts that are considered swing districts are in New York. Three of them were carried by Democrats Josh Riley, Gillen and Tom Suozzi.

It's worth noting for those who think of New York only as the giant blue state that goes Democrat every election night that it's far more conservative then it looks and that's definitely true on Long Island. Control of the House of Representatives both in 2022, last year and certain this year is almost certainly going to focus on these New York districts.  Gillen ran for office the first time against incumbent Anthony D'Esposito and only won with 51. 8 percent of the vote. Gillen won last year with a margin of 2.3 percent of the vote over D'Esposito. She only outran Trump in that district by one percent.

AOC can afford to do the kinds of activism that she does on a regular basis – wearing a gown that says "Eat the Rich" at the Met Gala is just the most famous example – because her district is so heavily gerrymandered that the only danger she faces is if someone runs to the left of her. (How much further to the left you can get is an open question but I'm learning never to admits their further to go on either side at this point.) Gillen can't afford to take these kinds of steps: if she were to even wear a button that said something like that the RNC would make her a target and she'd very likely lose. To be clear they're already plan to do that anyway.

It's why when AOC was one of the few representatives to endorse Zohran Mamdani for Mayor Gillen was the first to come out against his campaign. There were already ads being used to tie vulnerable Democrats to do this being used in the New Jersey's governor's race (it didn't work) and Gillen knew how unpopular Mamdani was in her part of Long Island. Whether this will remain the case is hard to know but I suspect she's going to keep him at arms reach for the next year.

It's also why when the House voted to reopen the government two weeks ago Gillen was one of eight Democrats to join Republicans to do so. Two of them Jarden Golden and Marie Perez are members of the Blue Dog Democrats and five of the others only won by a narrow margin including Suozzi, Adam Gray of California and Don Davis of North Carolina.

The outrage at the House Democrats was not as loud as those Senators who broke party lines mainly because next year the Democrats have a better chance of taking back the House then the Senate and they'll need every Democrat they can get. (Golden won't be one of them; he announced he was stepping down after becoming exhausted by these kinds of battles.) But Ryan knew that if she was tied to the shutdown it would come back to haunt her in a way it just won't for AOC's activism.

It's why I really do think so much of Ocasio-Cortez actions are not only performative but as hypocritical as those of the Freedom Caucus she and her colleagues regularly lambast. Gerrymandering cuts both ways and no matter what the public in general thinks about her or even other New Yorkers, she will never pay the consequences. I find myself comparing her to of all people Ted Cruz, a man who even his fellow Republicans hated when he began his career. Like Cruz AOC can do the most horrible things in the chamber of the House that do nothing but build her brand and because of the 'rigged system' she will never feel the wrath of the voters.  She represents the worst part of activism and politics in my opinion and I feel free to treat her with the same disdain and contempt I do so many of her Republican contemporaries such as Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert.

By contrast in less than a year in Congress Gillen has done more to make me proud to be a Democrat than AOC has in her entire Congressional tenure. Part of it is what she hasn't done – there has been no posturing, no performative gestures, just acting like a grownup. In the era where viral moments count for more than quiet behavior and have increasingly substituted for governing that counts for much in my eyes.

But just as important is that Gillen has decided to do not the easy things but the difficult ones, the right things not the popular ones, the kind of things that are, for all the posturing of progressives, difficult to do and especially tough for elected officials. It would have easy to endorse or even  choose to stay quiet during the New York City Mayoral race; instead she chose to come out against the eventual winner.  It would have made her popular with the progressives to keep the government shutdown despite the real-life consequences but she crossed party lines to reopen it and no doubt will face a certain backlash from the left who thought they were going to 'win'. Gillen must have spent a fair about of time agonizing and weighing the consequences of her choices and still did the difficult thing. That's rare in an era of increasingly polarized government that favors playing to ones base rather than actually being a grownup.

As I said the road ahead of Gillen isn't going to be an easy one: the Republicans know this is a district they can win and they will go after her. But she is the kind of representative Congress will need – not just in a post-Trump America but really the kind we used to have and celebrate on a regular basis.  To call what Gillen does a Profile in Courage just for doing her job might seem a bit extreme but considering the America we live in and especially compared to the more high-profile performative gestures of Ocasio-Cortez I'd vote for her any day of the week and especially  on Election Day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homicide Rewatch: Map of the Heart

 

Written by Michael Whaley & James Yoshimura

Directed by Clark Johnson

 

Note: For reasons that are unclear NBC chose to completely scramble the order of the final six episodes of Season 4 of Homicide and in the middle of them air the episode Blue Moon which I discussed earlier.  Fortunately aside from the issues of the board there are no real continuity errors that even the most devout nitpickers could pick up on.

With one exception I'm going to be reviewing the final six episodes in the order they were filmed.

 

When Map of the Heart aired there was some debate among fans as to its quality. David Kalat refers to it as 'a hard-edged episode with plenty of comic relief' while Tod Hoffman calls it 'a rather confused, convoluted episode'. Interestingly Kalat seems to enjoy the episode for the reason Hoffman dislikes it; he believes for that reason it deserves multiple viewings.

In actuality the story is relatively simple despite the trappings and it adds a realpolitik air to the sense of the usual lack of closure. My opinion of it after the most recent viewing is that is the rare episode of Homicide that has actually improved with age, rather than simply age well like most of them do.

This episode was filmed in 1996 and while the aura seems more in place with that of The X-Files now that we are in the midst of the War on Terror (which the detectives in Baltimore would know upfront would go as well as the War in Drugs did) it is all the more pertinent. Considering that so much of 21^st century politics would be about crimes being excused in furtherance of a so called greater good and the actions of the people the government is sworn to protect being of less significant in the geopolitical picture the story of the investigation into Edward Clifford's death could not be more relevant.

When David Simon created The Wire he made it clear practically in the Pilot that as soon as 9/11 happened the federal governments interest in ending the war on drugs was cast aside.  As the series progressed it was increasingly made clear that the slingers and detectives were irrelevant to a city just across the river from them and that many of the dealers themselves were able to isolate themselves by offering token threats to the higher up in the FBI. In turn Simon would later argue that the larger political issues that Washington was involved in and that so much of the media and political sphere were laser-focused were essentially irrelevant to people like McNulty who didn't even bother to vote in elections.  The slingers themselves would turn it around by making just phrases as 'WMD's' and 'the Surge' just slogans to describe their new product.

Simon had no real role in this episode, of course, but we can see the groundwork for both points of view being laid in this episode.  After 71 year old Edward Clifford is found dead in his swimming pool Bayliss and Pembleton are called in even though it's not yet clear this is a murder.  However once they come back from the morgue they find a weaselly figure at their desk claiming to be Richard Laumer. (He almost certainly is but given the nature of the episode, you never know.)

He tells Bayliss that not only he said he would kill Clifford and asks for a DNA test to prove paternity. He claims he did and hands over a video will of his 'real father' that was made a year ago almost to the day. Morris Laumer says he has left a trust in an offshore account in which a year after his death will go to Edward Clifford. However if Clifford dies prior to that one year-anniversary it will go to his son Richard.  Richard was the trustee of the will.

Almost immediately after this Giardello goes to his office and finds Captain Gaffney (in what is chronologically his first episode in the unit after being promoted) with a woman who claims to be Felicity Fenwick and almost certainly works with the NSA. She basically tells Giardello, who tight-lipped passes the information onto Bayliss and Pembleton that they are to locate Richard Lawler, hand him over to them and in return they will receive all the information needed to solve their investigation.

By this point the detectives know that there is a very good chance Clifford was a murdered in a very cute way. He had prostate cancer that might have led to a heart attack. However the toxicology report revealed the use of steroids which would inflame his cancer so badly it would lead to a heart attack. Furthermore, given his age there are places he could not have reached to inject himself. Someone had to have helped him.

Fenwick makes it clear in no uncertain terms that the detectives are to leave this alone. But Bayliss is having none of this and storms out of the box. "Since when do we make deals, Gee?" he says. When Gaffney says this is insubordination Giardello with a special kind of quiet anger: "God bless!" He has no more use for this then the detectives do.

The scene between Pembleton and Fenwick is superb as neither shows any side of backing down. Pembleton is perfectly calm throughout but completely agrees with his partner. He also realizes that Laumer has gone completely off-books. Lawler is a cartographer who draws maps that predict the future. To that extent he is valuable to people like the NSA. But it's clear he went off the grid and he's managed to elude them. (The fact that the detectives later track him down while the NSA can't, may be a subtle in-joke as to just how bad the feds are at tracking their own.) Fenwick tries to threaten Pembleton without doing so but as someone who could teach a class on how to elicit a confession without torture Frank is having none of it.

Eventually Pembleton and Bayliss track down Laumer not far from the Baltimore Aquarium, one of the great tourist attractions of the city. Lawler denies any knowledge of Fenwick but admits he works for the NSA and that they don't like it when their employees are unhappy.  He tells him that Edward Clifford came to him three years ago, said he had a relationship with Laumer's mother and that he wanted to reach out. Clifford, it should be noted, was a divorce attorney who loved to humiliate those he had raked off by dropping his pants and one could argue he was taking an opportunity to do so now. Laumer says that he never told his father about this and its clear he genuinely wants to believe this, despite the very real fact that the will would pretty much imply Morris knew and was basically trying to test his son to do so. Richard maintains his arrogance façade. (See Hey Isn't That…to see why this is foreshadowing of the actor's career.)

By this point Gee asked Russert to look into things with intelligence and not one hour later Clifford's trainer comes into the squad to confess that he did it. He says that he injected him with steroids and offers a 'free and full confession', even though he didn't say anything when he talked with the detectives yesterday. He will do 3-5 for negligent homicide.

The final scene in the Waterfront is a masterpiece, particularly for Secor. Lawler has spoken in poetic terms that he could be found anywhere they serve a good burger and a waitress 'with nice gams'.  Bayliss tells him about the Waterfront. He and Frank then go out of their way to not serve Lawler a drink while they tell him in no uncertain terms that even though they can't touch him, they know exactly what he did.  During this scene we see Laumer's arrogance façade begin to crumble though he tries to be stoic about it. He will not confess to what he's done, he refuses to even acknowledge any responsibility for it.  What finally gets to him as when Bayliss and Pembleton argue that for all his cleverness and his desire to be seen as a puppet-master, he's just a little man who was completely manipulated in a war between the two men who claimed parentage of him. "So what was this?" Bayliss asks casually. "Murder for profit or patricide?" Once this is clear Lawler drops the envelope with the DNA results he's worked so hard to get. Pembleton twists the knife: "Don't you want to know if you killed your real father?"  Laumer says: "I have a trust fund coming. I'm a rich man." Like every other time the detectives have asked them a question he deflects: the fact he chooses to leave immediately afterward shows he knows that they've seen him.

This is a dark storyline so it's good that there's comedy going on, much of it involving the Three Stooges: Munch, Kellerman and Brodie. Munch brings into the unit a VCR he bought from Kellerman that has bells and whistles but some miles on it. Brodie needs to repair and finds out that there's no serial number on it. Eventually its confiscated because Kellerman basically pilfered from arson and sold it to Munch.

This terrifies Munch into thinking he will be snatched up by IAD for corruption. (In a hysterical scene when everything going on with the detectives is unfolding he's certain its about him.) At that point Kellerman and Munch run into Brodie and they engage in a hysterical conversation that sounds very much like the intelligence talk that we expect in the NSA about what's going on. "There is no VCR. We never had this conversation. And if we did we're not here." Brodie is completely baffled by this but tries to play it cool. "Reality is just a guess for me, I think."  When he tries to play off it at the end of the episode he sounds completely ridiculous.

What's fascinating is that when she sees the VCR Howard's first assumption is that Kellerman comes from money something we the viewer knows isn't the case and that when Howard tries to tell him this he righteously gets mad. "Tell my father that because he's still working double shifts bottling at the distillery!" he tells Howard with something close to anger. Kay, oddly enough seems puzzled as to the idea so Mike drives it home: "You think I'd be working here if I did?" Howard is left speechless at this.

But the more interesting comic subplot is when it is revealed Kellerman has been 'victimized by the Lunch Bandit', the longest open case in Homicide history. For the past two years someone has been stealing food that is left in the refrigerator and somehow the detectives are baffled by it. "You've done surveillance?" Kellerman asks Russert. "Interrogated suspects? And nothing." Kellerman then makes an effort to set a trap for the bandit by leaving ribs in the fridge and preparing a dye pack from robbery. He tells Munch this but not Brodie – and you can guess what happens. (Max Perlich's casting almost pays off in this episode.)

'Map of the Heart' ends very much like an episode of 24 or Homeland in one sense: while a horrible crime has taken place and the perpetrator has gotten away with murder, his connection to the federal government leaves him untouched. But it also very much a Homicide ending too. Left with the DNA results Pembleton asks Bayliss if they should open it and he says know. "The guy got away with murder and I'm supposed to care?" he says simply.  The events of future geopolitical turmoil don't amount to a hill of beans to a homicide detective. They see things in black and white – or red and black in this case – as opposed to the shades of gray that people like Lawler and Fenwick live in. Once you understand its understandable how we've clearly screwed up on the War on Terror and why people who lead it won't acknowledge to change things any more than they did on the War on Drugs.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

This episode is the first one to be directed by a cast member of Homicide and represents the directorial debut of Clark Johnson. He would go on direct four other episodes of Homicide and after he left the series would have a more successful career as a TV director. Most notably he directed the first and last episodes of not only The Wire but The Shield and would be nominated for his only Emmy for directing the latter.

Now's as good a time as any to talk about Clark Johnson's career as a director. He directed episodes of The West Wing, Third Watch, Sleeper Cell, The Walking Dead, Person of Interest, Copper, several episodes of Homeland, Orange is the New Black and Your Honor. While most of his directorial credits are for TV he did direct the film adaptation of S.W.A.T and The Sentinel,

Hey, Isn't That.. Terry Kinney was best known for his work as Steve on the first two seasons of thirtysomething. He'd played Lamar Quinn in The Firm and had starred in Last of The Mohicans and Devil in a Blue Dress. However this role brought him to the attention of Tom Fontana and not long after this he would be cast in his breakout role as Tim McManus, the unit manager of Em City on OZ.

He's been a prominent figure in many fascinating short-lived TV series ever since. Julianna Margulies Canterbury's Law, Sgt Brown on the still very much missed The Unusuals, Sam Bosco on the first season of The Mentalist, Owen Morely on the medical drama Black Box. He also played the recurring role of Christian on the TNT series Good Behavior with Michelle Dockery as a con as well as Barry on Inventing Anna. His longest recurring role and the one that has the greatest parallel her is on Billions where he played the shadowy government figure Hall who served as an influencer and protector for all those at Axe Capital for the entire run of the series.

'Detective Munch': A great episode for Munch. My personal favorite comes when Brodie tries to talk to him in the bathroom about the VCR while he's on the commode and he starts throwing rolls of toilet paper to force him to go. Of course after that he asks Brodie to give it back and by that time Brodie has gone.

Get The DVD?  If you see this on streaming you will not hear the music. In particular I found the use of Dire Straits 'Your Last Trick' in the final scene of the episode a very good contrast. But it wasn't as vital to my enjoyment of the episode as the other music this season. (This will change starting with Season Five. Trust me.)

 

FDR Coined The Phrase 'Not For The Needy But For The Greedy' - And It Backfired On Him In The Most Spectacular Way Possible

 

 

If you spend any time among the left – and I've spent far too much – you are aware that so much of their 'political ideology' can be summed up in catchphrases. One of them which has been said so often by politicians such as Bernie and AOC about how the government works is some variation on "it works not for the needy but for the greedy.' It doesn't come up as often as 'the rich paying their share' or 'taxing the top one percent', but it takes the form of a meme just as often.

I won't deny the phrase is catchy. The thing is it Bernie or the Squad or Elizabeth Warren didn't create it. There's a good chance Sanders or Warren know its true origin and co-opted it for themselves because it fits in with their philosophy and more importantly it comes from the only President they likely have any respect for in history: FDR.

This is like every other slogan that comes from recent political history (Trump stole Make America Great Again from Reagan and Clinton; to use the most obvious recent example) and just as often it has been taken completely out of context. The biggest problem with that particular phrase is that within weeks of his using it came back to bite FDR in a way few things he did in his career ever did and it very well could have undone his entire Presidency had it not been for other circumstances. So let's talk about the origin of the famous leftist slogan and why it was never popular the moment it was used.

Context as always matters. This happened in February of 1944. It's now a matter of public record that at this point FDR had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and had more or less begun the decline that would lead to him passing away a little more than a year later. As part of this there was an effort to lighten the President's workload even though most agreed it was impossible. In the midst of the period leading up to the Normandy landings, the President was meeting with military strategists less than once a week.  He conferred with his Secretary of War Henry Stimson personally (as opposed to Cabinet meetings) just three times in February and March. By contrast Churchill was in constant contact with his military chiefs.

If anything he was less involved with his domestic policy, openly not telling his closest members his plans for legislation. At the start of February Jim Byrnes  'the assistant President' had threatened to resigned because he hadn't been told about his plans for 'an economic bill of rights' which ended up being the GI Bill. FDR made it clear that he thought Byrnes was a prima donna and laughed at the fact that one of his top cabinet officials had hurt feelings about a huge policy shift.

This was keeping very much with the kind of person FDR was. He'd long considered himself an indispensable man and while he was great at playing practical politics he thought he was the only one qualified to be President. He'd considered running for a third term as early as 1937 and while circumstances very well did dictate his needed to run again in 1940 that he spent no time in the years in-between training a political successor spoke to his own belief that he was the only person who was qualified to be President. Not just among the Democrats but period.

FDR had always felt that because of his massive electoral wins the American people had put him above having to answer the demands of most people, including those in Congress. And after twelve years of being in power many of the men in both houses were beginning to get tired of 'That Man' who made it very clear that he was going to do what he wanted and that Congress had to lump it. Few people felt this more clearly then Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley.

Barkley ranks as one of the great political figures of the 20^th century. He had represented Kentucky in Congress since 1913 when he had come into power in the landslide that made Woodrow Wilson, FDR's first political employer President. Initially conservative working with Wilson helped make him more liberal from the creation of the Federal Reserve and the FTC to the doomed attempt to get America to enter the League of Nations. He ran for the Senate for the first time in 1926 and won reelection in FDR's landslide.

He had a reputation for party unity and for being an incredible speaker both on the stump and at conventions. As early as 1928 there had been a boom to make him the Democratic nominee for Vice President and he was kept in consideration every four years afterwards. He was given the Keynote address at the Democratic convention of 1932 and would get one at every convention until 1948.

When the Democrats took control of the Senate in landslide numbers majority leader Joseph Robinson appointed Barkley as his assistant and the two worked to get most of FDR's New Deal programs through Congress. Barkley had said in his keynote speech of 1936 that the Supreme Court was taking advantage of the country. This led him to be FDR's choice when Robinson died of a heart attack.

When FDR chose to ignore separation of powers by making it clear he favored Barkley for majority leader many senators resented his influence and though Barkley won – albeit by a single vote – from the start of his tenure he was considered a Roosevelt lapdog. When the administration began to struggle he was dubbed by the press as 'bumbling Barkley' even though among his accomplishment was the creation of the Hatch Act.

Barkley thought Wilson was the greatest President he served under while he thought Roosevelt 'had the instinct of a virtuoso for playing practical politics and a deep and penetrating insight into how government worked." But by 1943 tensions were developing between the two. And in February of 1944 they came to a head.

In February FDR had requested that Congress approve tax increases to generate $10 billion in revenue for the war. All Barkley and the Senate finance committee could get was $2.3 billion. Roosevelt told Barkley that he planned to veto it because the Treasury and Office of Economic Stabilization recommended  it.

If FDR had just done that he might have avoided problems. However in his veto message he included the phrase: "It is not a tax bill but a tax relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy." That was too much for Barkley to bear. On February 23^rd Barkley entered the Senate chamber and made it clear that he planned to take the unprecedented step of resigning as Majority Leader. He said that Roosevelt phrasing: "was a calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every member of the Congress of the United States." He urged his colleagues to override the veto.

Today's readers might greet this with neutrality comparing it to the vote to unseat Kevin McCarthy two years earlier as well as the decision of so many elected officials to not seek re-election. This was something different: Barkley was going to stay in the Senate – he in fact was running for reelection that year – but was declaring his independence from the President on this issue. And everyone in the Senate knew it.

When FDR heard this from Vice President Wallace he immediately sent a letter to Barkley apologizing and urging him not to resign. But the next morning he not only did just that but he was unanimously reelected as majority leader.  And more importantly Congress chose to do exactly that in a huge way: the House would override the veto by 204 votes and the Senate by a margin of 3 to 1 and while the Republicans had made sizable gains in the 1942 elections in both houses (privately the country was no longer accepting the Roosevelt mandate) Democrats still had the majority in both chambers.  The veto of the tax bill had shown just how little goodwill FDR had left in Congress and it wasn't just coming from the Republicans any more.

It's rare for a sitting President to receive this substantial a repudiation from Congress in American history and there were few examples of this at the time: the censure of Andrew Jackson, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the failure of the League of Nations. But even for some Democrats this was astonishing. As Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia would explain it to a British ally had that happened across the pond, the government would have been swept away.  FDR's reaction was simple: while he chose to publicly patch things up with Barkley, he removed him from his list as potential vice presidential running mates for the upcoming election. (Harry Truman, it should be noted, sided with Barkley on the override.)

Had this unfolded still further any chance FDR had for reelection the coming November – perhaps even his renomination as President – might have been completely undone. Much of the reason it didn't had more to do with Barkley's goodwill then his commander-in-chief.

Barkley was very much a party man and he knew that FDR was commander-in-chief in the middle of a war. Despite Barkley's feelings many Democrats still thought that the sitting President was the only one who had a chance of reelection in the fall. More to the point Barkley was hoping to improve his political prospects (he himself thought he had a chance of being nominated for Vice President at the convention anyway) and it wouldn't be until Truman was chosen that he realized that this boost to his prestige did more to keep him from becoming President.  But he was very much still a loyal Democrat and he was facing a reelection campaign himself that year. Roosevelt did nothing to challenge him in his Democratic primary that year and he won reelection for his fourth term in the Senate.

Eventually Truman would named Barkley his running mate in 1948 and he would become Vice President that year. But by that point Barkley was 70 years old and had effectively aged out of becoming a serious Presidential contender. While he made a valid case at the 1952 Democratic convention the delegates chose Adlai Stevenson instead. He would run for the Senate again and win election in 1954 but die little more than a year after taking office, at the age of 78.

It's worth noting while all of this was going on FDR basically was on vacation at Hyde Park. He seemed not to have truly cared about Barkley's actions while they were happening. FDR knew this could have effected the election and cause him to choose not to run and he would send a memo asking if there was any practical alternative for a fourth term. By this point FDR was becoming impatient with the slow process of how government worked and wanted to act but simultaneously wanting to make decisions at his own pace. One sees a commander-in-chief who is frustrated with how the government works but doesn't want to relinquish power unless he's forced too. And regardless of his health FDR was still sure he was the only man who could lead America at any time.

Context truly matters and its clear that FDR's decision to make Congress's decision something that would today be considered 'playing to his base' had consequences that under other circumstances could have cost him the election.  That the phrase he coined lives on in left-wing politics to this day not only shows the left's choosing slogans rather than policy but their ignorance of history. Had FDR lived he might have well written in his memoirs that he wished he had been more circumspect with this phrase. Then again, given the way so many of his followers are willing to gloss over the imperfections and mistakes in so much of his policy, both foreign and domestic, they'd just push it aside. "Barkley was just another Senator from Kentucky," they'd say. "What could any of them possibly know  what was best for America especially compared to that Man?"

Constant Reader November 2025: And When She Was Good By Laura Lippman

 

 

"There was a little girl who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead

And when she was good, she was very, very good

But when she was bad she was horrid.

Mother Goose

 

According to her author's sleeve of When She Was Good, written in 2012, Laura Lippman has been awarded every major prize in crime fiction.  Each of her hardcovers has hit the Times bestsellers list and that has to have only increased in the decade to come. There are blurbs on the back of her books from the New York Times and the Chicago Post as well as Harlan Coben and Tess Gerritsen and until fairly recently she was married to David Simon, one of the greatest showrunners in TV history.

So once again it begs the question: why do so many of her contemporaries (including Gerritsen and Coben) have at least one TV series or several film adaptations of their work and Lippman has so relatively few? Considering that Michael Connelly has had three adaptations of his novels turned into streaming series at this point, that Karin Slaughter and Tony Hillerman have in the past decade gotten their flagship characters received broadcast and cable series, each now in their fourth season and James Patterson' Alex Cross has now gotten a streaming series why is there as of yet no Tess Monoghan series planned for any major platform?  And considering that so many of the limited series as well as TV series have been adapted from female novelists far less prolific than Lippman why is it only this past year that Apple finally made Lady of the Lake her first limited series of any kind?

I have no doubt if I were to pose this question to most progressives, particularly women, they would make an argument of the toxic masculinity and the patriarchy that has been victimizing women more than men, blah blah blah. Until recently I might have bought that argument. But it wasn't until I finished And When She Was Good that I realized that it might be political but not in the traditional way.  Having now read enough of her books I'm pretty sure that the problem with Lippman's writing is that its either not political enough or goes against so much of the orthodoxy that has become part of Hollywood particularly in the past decade.

First there's the fact that I've now read a dozen of her books (six in the Tess Monoghan series; half a dozen standalones) to realize something striking. While Lippman's books are contemporary they basically choose to talk about the events of the day as little more than background noise either not relevant to the characters or when they are pointed out, make it clear the character things that the concerns that the masses hold are basically irrelevant to the average denizen of a Lippman novel.

In large part this is due to setting: like her ex-husband Lippman is a resident of Baltimore, one of the bluest cities in the bluest state of America. But like her husband and indeed many of his co-writers on The Wire such as Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane Lippman by and large takes the position that the issues that are part of the 24 hour news cycle and social media, that are shouted about by both parties, basically don't affect the average working class person no matter what part of America they live in. And as a result the only opinions they have on it are how they might affect them personally or if they find it ridiculous that so many people seem to care about them. This flies in the face of a Hollywood, who even before the 2016 election, was taking the position that what happened in the White House and Congress was absolutely vital to every person in America and that if a person chose to not to take a side, they were taking one.  Lippman's books would make great stories on a streaming series or big screen but in a Hollywood that increasingly considers pure entertainment not important enough to do, they'd rather not waste their time. (On a side note this may be why many of the above writers have been increasingly frowned upon by critics in both book and TV form: there's an increasingly becoming an argument that even fiction must reflect reality or it’s a waste of time.)

This would be enough of a problem on its own. The bigger problem is that while Lippman's novels are by and large fundamentally centered on female protagonists, none of them meet the metrics that have become the standard of a certain type of female character in so much of TV and film particularly by female showrunners and actresses.  A female protagonist must be career oriented and not think of being a wife and mother first. If she does bad things, they must in reaction to the oppressive patriarchal structure around her and she must feel remorse for it when it happens. And when she is in a career setting she must be openly superior to a male in the exact same way and any problems she has are because of the structure held by the white cis male.

With almost no exceptions every single female character in a Lippman novel proudly fails these metrics.  Indeed they often think the women who choose to put their careers first will eventually fail at the personal life. Tess Monaghan was particular clear on this point in her first books, making it clear that she might like a career but she wants someone to come home to the end of the day and she mocks the idea that a woman can have it all.  And so there's no confusion she wants to be happy personally more than career wise. Heloise Lewis, the protagonist of Good, doesn't completely share Tess's ideals but its clear at the end of the day her choices, flawed though they are, are far more to protect her son then her career.

(By the way though she doesn't appear in this novel it's clear Heloise knows Tess. Her lawyer is Tyner, who is Tess's mentor and chief employer, and it's clear Heloise has been using Tess to do background checks on clients. Tess might very well know what Heloise is doing but by this point she's smart enough to keep her nose out of other people's business unless they ask.)

Considering that so many of Lippman's novels are modern noir that center on 21^st century versions of the femme fatale most of the female characters aren't happy about doing bad things and they may have reasons to do them but they're not striking a blow for feminism and its only occasionally they feel bad about it. Heloise is not a femme fatale in the way that the leads of future classics like Sunburn and Prom Mom are but she is just as ruthless and cold-blooded as they are and is just as focused on her own survival. Unlike them she has a false sense of moral superiority as well as a false idea of what she truly is.

To be clear Heloise is a suburban madam who runs high class girls and has been doing so for nearly a decade. This actually brings me to the final point in which Good openly argues, indirectly, that the arguments today about DEI and feminism are a bad joke. Heloise was a prostitute who spent many of her years under the abuse of a pimp named Val. When she became pregnant a vice cop busted her and she offered to give him evidence of a murder Val committed in exchange for it to be clear that there could be no connection back to her.  The detective Tom set this up and Val went to a Supermax for the rest of his life.

Heloise's real name is Helen Lewis. She is the daughter of Beth and Hector. Hector had a first wife named Barbara who he had three kids with but never divorced. He lived with Beth, regularly beat her, then started to first berate and then physically beat his daughter. Helen is an intelligent woman who wants to have a career and plans to go to college but Hector's abuse is so horrendous that eventually she is forced to get a job to support herself.

At sixteen she ends up working at a diner with Billy, a man who is 25 and who everybody warns her is a bad person. Because she has been the victim of so much abuse from her father and her mother has done nothing to defend her, she finds it impossible to believe anyone would love her. So Billy's attention seem to be a way out. It isn't until it is too late that she realizes Billy is both a criminal and an addict. By the time she's eighteen she's married to him, dancing and is essentially halfway to being a whore. Three years later she's essentially sold to Val and becomes his property.

Helen keeps trying to find a way to keep moving forward. She goes to a library and ends up tricking the boss there so that she can just read some great novels and increasingly non-fiction. She gives up on the idea of her high school diploma but she does get a GED. She doesn't think of getting higher up because it risks angering Billy. When Val is busted for killing Martin (by that time she's twenty five) she needs to find a way to provide for her son and she wants to be her own boss and make her own hours.

So she goes to see Val who basically tells her to go into an online prostitution source in which he will be a silent parter. She trains with someone who is doing the work and when she is busted  steals all her clients. Eventually Helen having spent years working with a Maryland assemblyman decides to set up a false front in which her official business is a lobby called: the Women's Full Employment Network.

Lippman, I should mention, has a lot of fun satirizing what people think of a feminine issue. WFEN is the name of a radio station she listened to is a youth. She makes it clear her business is about the rise of women in employment. And she chooses it because she knows that if she raises in her new suburban home none of the rich white suburban people who no doubt call themselves liberal (in 2005 progressive was not part of the vernacular) will stop asking questions about what she does for a living. "All she had to say was 'income parity' and everyone was ready to change the conversation."

(In fact later in the novel she mentions that she is part of the 1 percent and that in fact it takes less money then you might think to be part of that fabled group. I wonder what Bernie would think if he knew that.)

At the start of the novel Heloise (she changed her name as a joke to the famous advice columnist her mother read) has a successful business far beyond any thing Val could have ever run. She has a good house in the suburbs, an accountant who knows little about the business, employees with a health plan, two legitimate business to launder her money and only two people who know what she does for a living. (They're also, not coincidentally, the only two people she considers friends.) One is Tom and one is Audrey.

Audrey was also married at eighteen, and was abused by her husband for several years, before she burned him alive. The prosecutor and police have no mercy for her and she goes to prison for manslaughter. She's pardoned by the government and goes to work for Heloise because she takes the title of the job at its word. But Audrey is both unattractive and (hysterically) disapproves of adultery. She's hired as an au pair but eventually she figures out what Heloise is doing (equally hysterically by seeing a Lifetime movie) Heloise denies it until Audrey manages to save Scott's life in a potential carjacking. When Audrey decides not to be interviewed or photographed (to protect Scott and his mother) Audrey asks for Heloise to trust her.

 And Heloise does but tellingly judges her for her taste in reality television and Lifetime Movies. Heloise believes because she runs her own business and because she reads books like Sister Carrie and Freakonomics she is above most people she knows. She's above the suburban mothers because no one knows her secret. She's above her girls because they are only employees. She's above her clients because she believes sex is power over them. And even though she has since become an abused women herself, she fundamentally believes herself to be above her mother who she's fundamentally cut out of both her life and Scott's.  You suspect the only reason she has any sympathy for Audrey is because she chose to kill her abuser and was punished by the law yet managed to walk away free.

The irony is that Heloise Lewis has demonstrated that she has managed to do exactly the kind of thing in a profession that is dominated by men as well as a woman does. But not only is she no better morally than Val, she's not nearly as smart as him, trusts the wrong people over and over and even before the action in the novel begins has made it clear that her concern for the women under her ends when they are no longer financially viable. There's a part of me that really wants to compare Heloise Lewis to Elizabeth Theranos.

No that's unfair. Theranos did a lot of bad things but I'm pretty sure she was never guilty of conspiracy to commit murder which she more or less is guilty even before the action starts.

The action of the book starts in the presence with the headline of a suburban madam who commits suicide. Heloise has been following the story of this woman with a sort of vague interest – she was arrested eight months ago and they are in the same profession – biut tellingly she looks down on her as a publicity hound and thinks she's beneath her. We get a sense of her character when a nearby women comments on the death and shows the exact things Heloise is thinking about her but seems compelled to argue the other side of it.  I'm almost reminded of Walter White in Heloise's actions: no matter the danger to her personally she often seems compelled to take a point of view that could lead to danger, just to show how smart she is. The difference is Walter White shared in a Nobel Prize for chemistry before he started cooking crystal meth and all Heloise has is a GED and a sense of superiority because she believes she can manipulate men with the power of her body.

I must say the clearest parallel Heloise has to any figure in Peak TV is not Walter White or any of the characters in any of her former husband's shows but rather the women in Deadwood. The clearest parallels are of Trixie and Joanie Stubbs, two prostitutes who have both undergone the kinds of horrible treatment at men that Heloise did and like her seem beholden to their abusive pimps. There's also a clear link to Alma Garrett, the widow who must throw off her addiction and embrace an unlikely burden after a child is left in her care.  That said I can't help but think all three of these women would look down their noses at Shelley the same way the overwhelming number of characters she meets as her past comes back to haunt her as well as some of the men in her present life do.

Indeed late in the novel one of her old fellow girls from Val encounters her (I won't reveal the circumstances) and lays bare exactly who she was and still is:

"Look, you were always just a snooty bitch, thought you were better than everyone. Because of your looks, because Val liked you best, because you were sneaking around with those books. But what were you? You were just another whore."

And that's the truth that Heloise keeps facing time and again: she's not as smart as  she thinks is. She keeps falling for the maneuvers others make, listens to the wrong people, is outsmarted by Val time and again even when he's in the Supermax.  She thinks because of her long-term relationships with a Maryland assemblyman and Tom they think of her as a partner when in fact both of them just see her as a prostitute. None of them think she could have a career outside of being a prostitute or madam and indeed when she ends up trying to look for other options, it's clear she's not qualified to do much of anything.

The biggest difference between the women in Deadwood and Heloise is that all of them understand in order to survive you need a community, alliances, friends. Heloise has so isolated herself from the rest of the world in the name of keeping her work and suburban world separate that she doesn't really have anyone to turn to for help when the walls increasingly close in and the body count starts piling up. Even then the only reason she finally decides to get out is a selfish one: she doesn't want Scott to ever find out what she does for a living.  Both Joanie and Trixie would agree with the assessment above.

And Alma would have little use for how Heloise takes care of her son: while she does everything to provide for him financially it's not clear how much time she actually she spends with him during the course of today and so many of the interactions she has are used as cover to discuss her own problems in public.  And she's essentially spent her entire life lying to him about his background and its only when he finds out the truth that she's forced to think about his future. In the present Scott is eleven and part of the reason its been so easy to keep things covered is because children care less about adult things at that age. Even had the horrors that take place in the novel not unfolded, there was always going to be a clock as to how long Scott was going to take his mother's deflection – and eventually the internet and technology would no doubt lead to him seeking out answers without needed his mother's permission.

The third reason why I doubt Lippman's books have been adapted for television is that there's no real arc for the characters the way we almost always get in limited series. At the end of other series that take place in these female led literary adaptations with a darker past – Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, Sharp Objects and so on – you get a sense of closure emotionally in the sense that our female protagonists have learned something. Lippman's novels rarely give us that sense and this is just as true at the end of And When She Was Good. 

To be sure the mystery is solved, Heloise manages to survive and even find a path forward (though I won't reveal how). But after all of the horrible revelations have become clear there's no real sign that she's truly accepted responsibility for her actions, nor how much her existence has paralleled her own mother's even now. All she cares about is that the walls between her lives are sturdy and she and her son survived. That there has been a string of bodies due to what she's done is tragic and she feels unhappy about it but only in the same detached way at the start. And she's just as ruthless and cold as before, willing to manipulate people with a cold calculation the same way she did at the start of the novel. Even the fact she's out of the business and safe from prosecution is somewhat of an irritation as she now has to deal with a more unpredictable clientele. (I won't reveal how she got there save to say it's another satirical anti-feminist joke.) When she acknowledges at the end of the novel she's no different from the suburban housewives she looked down on at the start, she almost seems sorry to have left the old life behind.

This brings me back to the title of the novel. Like with so many of Lippman's books she never has a direct reference to it in the text. I have little doubt she has enough confidence in her readers to draw their own conclusions at the end of the book.  In this case I think the implication is that indeed Heloise has always been horrid And When She Was Good – or tried to be – she ended up making things worse for those around her but escaped unscathed. The next question is: "Can she live with that?" and the reader knows the answer. That's not the way Hollywood likes its female characters, even if it is realistic and entertaining.