Three Things We Loved This Week: 3/20/25

Thieving that runs in the family, Scott Phillips, and the kitchen sink

Whenever a call for submissions goes up, there’s always that little admonishment: “Be sure to read some back issues to get a sense of what we publish.” So what do you do when there are no back issues to read?

To help give a sense of our sensibilities (and just to share stuff we love), we’re publishing quick weekly roundups. If you like what we post, we’ll probably like what you write. So send us your stuff, okay?

The True Tale of Tommy Trotta

I shared this a couple weeks back on Notes, but I keep coming back to this story in The Atlantic about Tommy Trotta, a thief raised by a thief, who made a successful career out of targeting sports memorabilia. It’s a great piece of writing and an incredible story of crime.

Big Tom may not have been cut out to be a successful arsonist, stickup man, or drug trafficker, but he did better as a thief, supporting his family without once getting caught. To steal without violence was a sly art, and Little Tommy loved when his dad asked for help. Where other fathers took their sons fishing, Trotta’s dad took his to steal salmon from a hatchery. Where other dads took their kids to see historical sites, Big Tom took his son to loot them: Little Tommy, at age 11, would look out for rangers at the Gettysburg battlefield at night as his father dug up Civil War artifacts with a metal detector and spade.

William Boyle on “Kitchen-Sink Realism”

Genre is always an unruly, messy thing. William Boyle’s essay on the connections between noir and kitchen-sink realism, and how those connections influenced his own work, is well-worth a read:

Noir is, after all, tragedy. Kitchen-sink dramas also home in on tragedies both small and profound. Violence—emotional, spiritual, and physical—hums steadily under the surface in works of kitchen-sink realism, which is why it dovetails so nicely with noir and with social realism to provide an examination of dysfunction within families and society. What happens when people—often already living on the ropes for a variety of reasons—reach the edge of sanity, have taken all they’re willing to take?

Poisoned Pen Interviews Eli Cranor & Scott Phillips

Scott Phillips’ The Ice Harvest electrified me the first time I read it, and I’ve loved Phillips sensibility ever since. (I’m also a sucker for noir set at Christmastime. The holidays will drive anyone to do some dark deeds.) I really enjoyed this conversation with Phillips, author Eli Cranor and the Poisoned Pen’s Patrick Millikin.