All posts by Thomas Adcock

[NOTE: Following are remarks delivered by Thomas Adcock – in an condensed version – to an audience of writers, editors, translators, filmmakers and television producers gathered in Köln in late September for KrimisMachen 4. They have been adapted for publication here.] KÖLN – Germany With each new decade of my life, I have heard this expression: “The world’s gone mad!” Until recently, I considered this an overstatement by friends and family—people I love and admire for caring about the good things of life: peace among nations, human fulfillment, art andRead More

Eine verrückt gewordene Welt – und was Autoren dagegen tun müssen Eine Rede von Thomas Adcock, New York, für KrimisMachen 4 – ins Deutsche übersetzt von Alf Mayer „Die Welt ist verrückt geworden!“ In jedem Jahrzehnt meines Lebens habe ich diesen Ausruf immer wieder aufs Neue gehört. Bis vor kurzem hielt ich ihn für eine Übertreibung – von Familienmitgliedern und Freunden, die ich mag und bewundere, weil sie sich für die guten Dinge im Leben einsetzen: Frieden unter den Völkern, Glück, Kunst und Literatur, Erziehung, Menschlichkeit, Umweltschutz.  Wir alle kennenRead More

First glimpse into a brand new novel Thomas Adcock, author of the Neil Hockaday novels is back in all the old glory The hero of Thomas Adcock’s „Painted Devils“ is a world-weary New Yorker by the name of Matty O’Neill, who describes „the markers of my previous lives“ as „U.S. Army war criminal, a red-headed boxer called Rusty O’Neill, a boozer, a policeman, a crime reporter [and] all too briefly, a husband.“ We follow Matty’s painful remembrances of growing up in an immigrant household full of resentments—and unspoken mysteries—against theRead More

In the Beginning, a Terrace in Manhattan                                                                                                                                                                 Running out of room for Mother Nature  Ah, the Country Life … No End to Savage AmusementViolent geese, vile squirrels, toads in love, etc. Copyright © 2019 • Thomas Adcock NORTH CHATHAM, New York—U.S.A. Once upon a time, my wife and I were content as full-time denizens of hustle-bustle Manhattan—brash heart of a loud city populated by hundreds of skyscrapers and nearly nine million squabbling strivers; where anyone not beating you over the head with a club has friendship potential. We lived—and still do, Monday throughRead More

Whirlwinds of Cruelty Achtung, Flüchtlinge! Amerikanische Konzentrationslager by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2019 • Thomas Adcock NORTH CHATHAM, New York—U.S.A. Two years and seven months ago, a bankrupt casino magnate, bigot and vainglorious “reality television” braggart became president of the United States (with a little help, to be sure, from comrades in Moscow). To mark the occasion, yet another turn for the worse in the history of my country, I borrowed a famous phrase of yesteryear for an essay published in this space at that dark time. In the wakeRead More

RHINEBECK, New York—USA We are halfway through 2019 as members of the United States Congress are scurrying en masse back to home districts across the land, in accordance with one of their numerous recesses from important business we voters elected them to attend. Per the previous two years’ periodic recessionals, they abandoned Washington having done zilch about the most important business at hand: a one-man crime wave named Donald J. Trump. Upon his inauguration as president, in January 2017, the ridiculously coifed Mr. Trump set forth to consolidate power. InRead More

by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2019 • Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America In January 2016, in Montréal, the old man lay dying.  Perhaps he silently cursed having reached the age of ninety-nine rather than a full century well deserved. Surely he reflected on his long ago life in Berlin; in particular, Kristallnacht—the night of November 9 in 1938, when Hitler’s brown-shirts assaulted Jews in the streets, smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops, burned synagogues to the ground. Perhaps he gave silent thanks to his having the wisdom andRead More

by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2019 • Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America In last November’s federal legislative elections, Democrats swept to party leadership in half the two-chamber Congress of the United States—the House of Representatives, affectionately known as “the people’s House.” At last! Power to the people! Voters turned out in historically high numbers to demonstrate their profound disgust with the cupidity, immorality, and criminality of Donald J. Trump and his enablers of the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil Republican Party. Heeding the message of upstart Democratic contenders, featuring a bumperRead More

NORTH CHATHAM, New York—U.S.A. William Barr, attorney general of the United States, did exactly what Donald J. Trump hired him to do: On the afternoon of March 24, in Washington, he granted absolution to his lord and master—Donald J. Trump, suspected of treason and obstruction of justice. This act of legal mercy occurred on a Sunday, when evangelical Christian Trumpisti throughout the land undoubtedly spent their Sabbath morning beseeching Jesus and the Holy Father to spare the Golden-Haired One from impeachment or imprisonment. As the world knows by now, aRead More

Please…Call us ‘People of Means’ New York to world’s richest man: Fuhgeddaboudit by Thomas Adcock –Copyright © 2019 • Thomas Adcock  NEW YORK CITY, near America A prosperous dolt named Howard Schultz scored his most notable life achievement in 1995 by inventing the Mocha Frappuccino, a briskly profitable confection peddled throughout his empire of Starbucks coffee houses. A quarter century later, now comes Mr. Schultz asking voters to believe that his caffeinated brainstorm, and the billions of dollars accrued, qualifies him to be president of the United States.   Bad timing, Mr.Read More

NEW YORK CITY, near America Picture the current American presidency as gangster-laden film noir, a tawdry movie with two leading rôles: a thuggish lawyer called “The Fixer,” employed by “The Don,” malevolent godfather of a crime syndicate. The stars: Michael D. Cohen as consigliere, Donald J. Trump as capo di tutti capi. So it was, in life off the screen, for ten sorry years. Then came the morning February 27, a cold and sunny Wednesday in Washington. One of the stars broke character on live television. During five hours ofRead More

Get Out! Curtains Closing on a Carnival of Crime Down Among the Dead Men Let Him Lie’  by Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Happy New Year to all you fighting men and women of The Resistance! Ever since the surreality of a bellicose Know-Nothing’s criminal ascension to the presidency, back in November 2016, you have acted in the grand spirit of the American Revolution of some two centuries ago—a nervy peasant uprising, begun in 1776, that ousted a crazy-cruel British tyrant. You own the triumphal moment at hand: OurRead More

‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses …’ (Oh, never mind) Baby Jesus, go home by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America  Where to begin on the subject of the most loathsome mobster currently at large in the United States? Every thirty days as I sit down to compose my monthly offering to CrimeMag, I ask this question. Today, I ask again, Where to begin with Donald J. Trump? Mr. Trump’s endless racketeering, mendacity, and racism are daily cyclones ripping throughRead More

Messiah of the Maniacs America’s Red Hat Road to Hell Donald Trump’s bad hair day by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America The racist crime syndicate occupying the White House, headed by what psychologists identify as a malignant narcissist, has gone to panic mode. The signs are plentiful.  State and federal elections held on November 6 delivered a massive political rebuke of il capo di tutti capi, namely Donald J. Trump. The reaction has been a daily cascade of falsehoods from Mr. TrumpRead More

Moral Civil War Decency vs. Debasement  Seeking exit from the New Confederacy by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Reasonable citizens trapped in the bedlam of Trumpistan are angry—or depressed, or disgusted, or distressed, or despairing, or drained of energy needed to absorb the drumbeat of cupidity and criminality emanating daily from a debauched White House. Some days, all these emotions meld into an existential sorrow: Cry the beloved country. We limp through these last gasps of October in hopes that next month’sRead More

‘White People Have Lost Their Damn Minds’ Mad dogs, ideologues & 2-year-olds in Crazytown by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock NORTH CHATHAM, New York—U.S.A. Even now, twenty-one months into life under a White House crime syndicate facilitated and funded by Kremlin spies and oligarchs, I cannot wrap my head around a seemingly minor statistic here in the land of Trumpistan: On Election Day 2016, fifty-three percent of white female voters—fifty-three percent—decided that a man with a ludicrous yellow hairdo and a hamburger gut who appeared on televisionRead More

Justice is Nigh for Trump His Cult Keeps the Fascist Faith A promise of national catharsis in November by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America   I am happy to report that America’s most repulsive individual, Donald J. Trump, is not long for Washington. The current presidency—a circus of the tawdry, the pathetic, the crazy, the criminal, and the cruel—cannot sustain itself, no matter that its ringmaster is a virtuoso of ballyhoo and bullcrap. He is also a ringmaster in a death spiral.Read More

Lord Trump Almighty Gladdening the Heart of Lucifer  ‘Ego te absolvo’ by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock   NEW YORK CITY, near America Scheduled to open in October in more than a thousand “select” American cinemas is a motion picture entitled “The Trump Prophecy,” produced by Liberty University of Virginia, a bottom-tier institute of evangelical Christian instruction. The university is hustling advance ticket sales via online movie trailers meant for the mesmerizing pleasure of stalwarts in a religio-political cult whose lord and savior is said to haveRead More

Trump-Drunk ‘End Times’ for ‘Pipsqueak Putin’ Bigots, boobs & bible bullies—Aus! Weg mit Dir! by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Sadly for the United States and beyond, a degenerate fraudster, mendacious vulgarian, misogynistic swine, and all-round scrofulous lout occupies the White House—from whence he reigns as the racist godhead of a fascistic religio-political cult. The reasons for this plague of the moment are murky, debatable, and pathetic. Among them: Hillary Clinton’s stunningly inept presidential campaign of 2016; a cyber-attack of Russian disinformationRead More

Déjà Vu Thugs, Lies & Fevered Fantasies ‘The corpse of McCarthy-Hooverism still stirs’ by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock   NEW YORK CITY, near America Not so long ago, a paunchy prevaricator in Washington proposed to “make America great again,” as the slogan goes. It was the flag-waving, Jesus-jumping Cold War era of anti-communist hysteria in the United States: the perfect zeitgeist for J. Edgar Hoover to exert his racist, anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-immigrant, authoritarian proclivities. In his official capacity as director of the Federal Bureau ofRead More

Woke The Never Again Generation ‘We are not afraid … we will not be silenced … our voices are loud’  by Thomas Adcock Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock NEW YORK CITY, near America Young and golden is the moment when ordinary people achieve a coalescence of causes based in righteous anger, when we realize a combined power that might shape a better future, when we cease to abide belligerent  ignorance and curable injustice. When we act, e pluribus unum, to redeem a wounded national honor. When we feel weRead More

NEW YORK CITY, near America On the final Tuesday night of January, an annual date of political pageantry in the United States, Donald J. Trump served up a State of the Union address described by New York Times columnist Timothy Egan as containing “all the staying power of vapor from a sewage vent.” The philandering Berlusconi knockoff begged to differ. The stated theme of the big speech: one year into his presidency and everything in America is hunky-dory! Fantastic. Great. Terrific. Tremendous.  The official Trump newsletter extolled the performance: “EvenRead More

NEW YORK CITY, near America Like chronic boils on a fat man’s neck, Donald J. Trump shall not fade to obscurity. So long as there is a market for freak shows anywhere on Earth, he will remain in the public eye. Yet we need him gone from the White House, at least, and soon. Thus, we Americans are forging an alternative path to relief from this carbuncle of a man: Day by day, we bury Mr. Trump a little further in the ash heap of irrelevance. Resistance to the politicalRead More

Autumn in America, and comes now a bumper crop of bullet-ridden corpses and exposés of child rape and long-ignored lechery—accompanied by sanctimonious sympathy, a mountain of mendacity, and a horde of hypocrisy. Consider: Bang-bang and ho-hum. Machine gun massacres in October and the first part of November, in Nevada and Texas, yielded a body count of eighty-five. The carnage inspired the usual gang of cheap Washington politicians to offer “thoughts and prayers” to families mourning the loss of victims gone to Heaven (or Hell)—in lieu of common sense legislative actionRead More

  NEW YORK CITY, near America Her name is Darla. The soiled clothes on her back are all she owns. She sleeps on the sidewalk outside a Manhattan bank, keeping her distance from a church up the street where the feeling is mutual. Somewhere in Florida, her two small children live with their grandmother. This is all she tells anyone of her personal circumstances. When she feels safe enough to lie on her side, a risky angle for homeless women, Darla’s shirt rides up at the waist, revealing something fleshyRead More

As a member of the American journalistic fraternity, Donald J. Trump labels me a “damned dishonest” purveyor of “fake news,” in league with “crooked bad people” who clearly despise the United States. Be duly warned! As Dorothy and Scarecrow intoned whilst traipsing through a scary forest in the Land of Oz, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my…!” Last month in Arizona, during a rip-roaring rally of his fascistic flock, the president of the United States elaborated on his dim view of the likes of myself: “I really think theyRead More