Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 14

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Elidee leads Harry and Billy in more or less a straight line, rather than looking for the shortest route, at one point taking them over the top of a building. It's about a 30 minute walk, in the beginnings of a Chicago summer, so they're cranky and sweaty by the time she takes them to a door that will allow them into the pedway, which is apparently closed this time of day, and will be until six the next morning. I am once again having difficulty figuring the time here. Harry arrived at Murphy's apartment sometime between sunset and midnight. It's June 18th, so that's maybe 9 or 10pm. Too late to visit unannounced unless you're very close to someone, earlier than most adults go to bed of their own volition. Suppose he's there for a couple hours, gets home around midnight. Chapters 8 and 9 are mostly dialogue and should therefore play out mostly in real time - in the audiobook these come out together to 27 minutes 17 seconds, round up and call it half an hour, maybe 40 minutes to allow for Elaine's circuit of the room at the beginning of chapter 8 and then time Harry spends straightening the mantle and having feelings at the end of chapter 9, although the almost-fight with Morgan probably took longer to describe than it did to experience. So Harry falls asleep on the couch sometime between 12:30 and 1:00am. In chapter 1, Harry says he "hasn't slept", indicating that he may have been up for over 24 hours at that point, so it's possible he sleeps for as much as 12 hours here, although given the nightmares I honestly kind of doubt it. So let's say he gets up around noon. The conversation with Bob cannot be more than 23.5 minutes, since that's the full length of chapter 10, but showering, cleaning himself up, etc probably takes a while so let's call that an hour all-in, meaning he leaves the house at 1pm. Someone worked up a plausible looking approximate location for Harry's apartment, on the basis of which it should take 15, 20 minutes to get to the "southern edge of the Loop" where Reuel's apartment is. Call it 30 minutes to allow for traffic and parking (I may be underestimating Chicago traffic here, but it's not rush hour or anything). So he gets to Reuel's place around 1:30 pm. He wasn't actually in the apartment for that long, but he takes the stairs slowly and he's injured on the way out, so let's be really generous and call the whole thing an hour. He leaves for the funeral/viewing at 2:30. Now, unlike "midtown", River North is a real Chicago neighborhood, and at one time had the largest concentration of art galleries in the US outside of Manhattan, which may be why the changeling kids chose a funeral home there, I guess. Anyway. River North is pretty close to the Loop. Even coming from it's southernmost edge, this should be something on the order of a ten minute drive. Call it 15. So he gets Quiet Acres at about 2:45. Call it another 15 that he spends lurking around trying to spot the murderer among those in attendance before wandering into a back corridor. He overhears maybe a whole minute of discussion there before following the kids outside, has a quick scuffle, then gets thrown in the trash, and after "a minute", Billy shows up. By this time it is maybe 3:15. The pre-summoning conversation with Billy can't possibly have gone on for more than 10 minutes, it takes another 10 for Toot and his guys to arrive (this is specified), and then they have to negotiate, eat the pizza and get underway, let's say that all manages to take 45 minutes somehow, it's 4pm when they start following Elidee. It's "better than half an hour" to get to the tunnel entrance, making their arrival sometime between 4:30 and 5pm. The unfinished building is presumably the Heritage at Millennium Park, which finished construction in 2005. Now, pedway hours are a bit variable, and depend some on the businesses to which any given entrance connects. (I have looked at multiple maps in the last hour that said to assume Pedway hours were x to y "unless otherwise noted" but did not provide any notes. These maps did not agree with each other about the actual times either. I think the signs indicating pedway entrances are supposed to give hours, but like, they don't.) However, the earliest official closing time I've seen anyway is 5pm, that only appears to be after the start of Covid, and I cannot figure Harry getting there that late. He could have slept longer than I estimated, but given that he's sitting on the couch and got woken up by a nightmare, I think my guess is, if anything, overgenerous, and my estimates on the time he spent in Reuel's building and negotiating with Toot were deliberately so. On the other hand the impression I've gotten of the Chicago pedway from Reddit indicates it's possible their entrance just closed at 4pm that day for no particular reason. 

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In any event, they take the pedway to a section that's gated off with a sign reading "DANGER KEEP OUT". For the life of me I cannot figure out where this is supposed to be. The only reference to any abandoned section of the pedway that I could find anywhere, and I looked, is to a tunnel connection what is currently Chase Tower with 70 W Madison, but that isn't connected to the "main tunnels of the pedway" in the first place. Based on the description, this should actually mark a connection between the pedway and the old freight tunnels. If you're aware of where the heck this closed off section is supposed to be, or could be, you are welcome and encouraged to let me know in the comments. A short way in, the tunnel walls become rough and uneven. I don't know if I'm supposed to be picturing natural stone or crumbling brick here, although if they're in the freight tunnels it should be the latter. Harry pulls out his pentacle for light, and we're given an explanation of what it represents (to him), the five elements held within a circle of human will and intent. Elidee leads them to an apparently blank wall panel which Harry starts fiddling with to find their way into Undertown. When Billy says he doesn't know what Undertown is, Harry explains that Chicago was built on a swamp and that initially, buildings and even streets would gradually sink into the mud, and they started building streets and building entrances a story up, so they would be at ground level after sinking, creating an entire level of the city that was underground and mostly buried in mud. This is... not entirely accurate. Chicago was, an in fact still is, slowly sinking into the swamp upon which it was built, but I can find no evidence that buildings were constructed to sink a full story into the muck, and the buried streets, while real, have a more complex origin and are not still down there somewhere waiting to be walked. Due to constant, lethal outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera, Chicago implemented the first comprehensive sewage system in the US. This process involved moving a lot of central Chicago about four feet up, which required the existing streets to be covered with several feet of soil and relaid higher up to correspond with the new entrance level of the surrounding buildings. Those old streets presumably still exist under the new ones, but they don't connect to anything and the space between them and the surface is about four feet high and full of dirt. Seattle actually did end up with an undercity in parts of downtown as part of a similar "we're too close to the water level" regrading process, but as they did it after their big 19th century fire, rather than before, renovation was able to be a little more comprehensive. You don't have to elevate buildings that are currently smoking piles of rubble. I'm skipping over some of the absolutely bonkers feats of engineering involved in both the lifting and the management of its aftermath because they have no bearing on the story we're trying to talk about here, but you can find most of this on Wikipedia - start with the Raising of Chicago and maybe take a look at the one for the water cribs as well. According to Harry, the undercity created by this sinking process was, for a time, home to both vermin and criminals. Again, there was a lot of crime in Seattle's undercity for a while there, and if I remember rightly there were some speakeasies and things in Chicago's freight tunnels, but Chicago never had a secret undeground level of the city proper the way this book describes, although a lot of its rat population is contained in its various tunnels. He asserts, accurately, that there are a lot of tunnels under Chicago, and that the Manhattan project was housed there at one time, which is...complicated. Chicago Pile-1, the first artificial nuclear reactor, was in Chicago, was part of the the Manhattan project, and was underground, but it was housed in a squash court at the University of Chicago, by whose Metallurgical Laboratory it was developed, not in the city's tunnel system(s). It's also hard to say that the Manhattan project was "housed" any particular where - it was a multi-site operation, and work at the Metallurgical Laboratory continued at least through 1944, well after Los Alamos was established, although Pile-1 was eventually dismantled and reassembled in Argonne forest preserve, where the Argonne National Laboratory continues energy research operations to this day.  At some point, vampires and other... Things moved in and ate a lot of the humans and rats down there. A lot of what lives in Undertown are strictly subterranean creatures that don't have a lot of contact with humans, even wizards, in the usual course of things, and about which Harry therefore doesn't know a whole lot. Apparently there might be "wyrms" down there, although I don't think it's ever established what that means in this setting. Billy is less than enthusiastic about this proposition, but Harry reminds him that he wanted to come along. He also runs Billy through the basics of dealing with the sidhe - no gifts, no bargains, be careful of sensual temptation. Billy is a little impatient, leaving Harry uncertain whether he's gotten his point across, but he recognizes that it's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. 

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After a little more walking in the dark, the tunnel opens out into a low-roofed cavern, and Harry almost
immediately picks up bad vibes. Grimalkin has arrived to guide them to Maeve's court. This is the first time in the series that we encounter a malk, and I don't think we actually see Grimalkin here, just hear his voice and watch his glowing footprints on the floor. He's initially reluctant to introduce himself, although it's not clear if that's the result of nefarious intent, the natural fae reluctance to answer direct questions, or a personal desire to be a butt. Harry explains, for Billy's benefit and the reader's, that the fae are bound by anything they say three times, so if Grimalkin was lying when he initially expressed his intent to get them to Maeve unharmed, he's stuck with it now, but that they don't like being bound that way, so if you do it to a faerie who was actually trying to be helpful, they might reasonably get upset. I'm not actually sure why this was necessary. Elidee hides in Harry's hair when Grimalkin shows up, but she's still there, and the bargain with Toot was for her to guide Harry to Maeve, not just to someone who could. If Grimalkin tries to lead him off a cliff or into an ambush, presumably she would know they were going the wrong way and communicate as much. Granted, this has failure modes, but so does seriously infringing on the autonomy of a virtual stranger who hasn't yet done anything worse to you than sound creepy in the dark. Grimalkin, still apparently invisible, leads them by means of glowing footprints deeper into Undertown, where the stone begins to look like it's been...swirled? "Smoothed into place like soft serve ice cream". I'm only like, 70% sure that I understand what I'm supposed to be picturing here, but it's sufficient to illustrate the level of control that a Faerie Queen has over a place she's claimed as her own. 

They reach a set of tall wooden doors, which initially seem to depict a garden scene, but on closer examination... I mean, it is a garden, but it's a garden with a lot of human corpses and skeletons, and people having sex, and the fae watching from between the branches. This vaguely evokes Mab's ice garden from Proven Guilty, although there were fewer obvious corpses there, and more human ice sculptures. Slightly more tasteful than a big sign that says "Beyond these doors lie beauty, sex, and death, not necessarily in that order", but it conveys the same information. There's a little bit of an audiobook glitch here, where the description of the doors opening is repeated, apparently because James Marsters stumbled a little over a word and redid it, and then the earlier version wasn't removed. Inside, they find big band music, a 1920s ballroom tilted slightly on its side, with a creepy pond at the lower end and a throne on the higher, and about 40 of the sidhe, dancing in period accurate World War 2 era dresses and military uniforms. The description here is very good, but it's also, and I suspect this is deliberate, distracting. We spend as much time on one young woman's hair being sapphire blue, somewhat inappropriate to the setting, than on the period outfits. We're told that the sidhe are in "dress uniforms of both the army and the navy that looked authentic to the month and year". No one speaks of "the army" or "the navy" when they're not referring to to the army or navy of their own country, and uh, not to put to fine a point on it, if any of the Winter Sidhe were in Nazi uniforms, Harry would have said. This pretty much tells us that no one in Winter killed Reuel or stole his mantle, that they didn't initiate hostilities and that to the extent that there are good guys and bad guys here, they are not among the latter. Also, I suppose, that despite their not having picked this fight, a victory here could give Winter a substantial and lasting boost to their power and prestige within the supernatural world. Which, in the event, is pretty much what happens. 

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The human musicians are exhausted, underfed, and shackled, but they seem unbothered by this and entirely focused on their music. They're also very good. As Our Heroes watch, the trumpeter goes into a very impressive solo, while the other musicians just kind of collapse, until he suffers, I'm not sure, a heart attack or something, and dies, right there on the stage. The Sidhe dancers, who stopped to watch as well, part to allow Maeve through. She looks like a younger Mab - maybe 17 if I'm reading this right, with dreadlocs in the white, lavender, pale blue, and green that comprise Winter's signature colors. Now, the idea that white people shouldn't mat their hair into an approximation of dreadlocs was not anything like as well known, at least to white people, in 2002 as it is today, and certainly I don't think Maeve is above committing a little cultural appropriation, but this is once again making me wonder how the Mantles of the Queens interact with the bearers' racial features. We know the Mantles change the color of the Queens' hair and eyes (the Mantle of the Summer Knight turns Fix's hair white eventually as well, but he was already a changeling, and taking up the Knight's Mantle presumably constituted Choosing - which raises all kind of questions about the nature of the damn thing since Knights are supposed to be mortal, but we'll get to that in later books when it actually matters - I don't think Harry will undergo the same physical changes). We also know it changes skin color at least a little, since the Queens are all somewhere on the spectrum from very pale to inhumanly pale. So like, Maeve could be black, or at least mixed? We've seen her twin sister, and Sarissa's skin tone is described as as a "medium olive tone", which could mean almost anything. "Olive" is what writer's say when they don't want to commit to anything. Sarissa also seems to have fairly straight hair, but that can happen. Obviously, given that Maeve is, y'know, violent, predatory, and hypersexual, I really hope she's not supposed to be black, since that would be super, super racist, like, well out of parameters for what we usually see in this series, which is already pretty racist. But I've been thinking about how the Mantles would work with people of color since the second time I read Cold Days. Anyway, speaking of being predatory and hypersexual, Maeve straddles the trumpeter's corpse, kisses it on the lips, and makes a remark about how he said he'd die to play like that, which probably does more to clarify for Billy the hazards of making deals with the Fae than anything Harry could say on the subject. The other Sidhe applaud, for the death or Maeve's remark or both, which is kinda unsettling, but like, unsettling applause seems to be part of Winter's Thing. 

Maeve announces that they have a visitor, then resumes her throne so that Harry can approach. They go through the absolute minimum formalities, and then Harry just up and asks her whether she arranged the murder of Ronald Reuel. She says she can't just tell him something like that, he'll have to pay for it. He correctly reasons that she wants something in particular or she wouldn't have sent Grimalkin to escort him. She tells him to sit down so they can make a deal. 

Okay, so what happened was, I made a mistake on my spreadsheet and spent a lot of the past week trying to get caught up to where I thought I already was on fiction writing. Needless to say it's unlikely that you'll see another Dresden Files post before the end of the month, which also marks the end of the year in which I track my progress. In the next little bit here I'll be getting all the trackers and things up to date so everything will be tidy and ready to go for the Goals post sometime in the first few days of October. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 13

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Billy holds the pizza while Harry sets up a circle trap. When we talked about Storm Front Chapter 6, I mentioned that referring to "magic circle theory" makes it sound like it's a whole field of study, and how that reading is at least somewhat supported by the variety of circles, and the variety of uses to which they're put, throughout the series. We learn in Dead Beat that literally anyone can put up a basic protective circle - you don't have to be even a minor practitioner, and it's sort of implied in Fool Moon that Kim's difficulty in setting up and maintaining the Greater Circle she uses to help MacFinn is more because she doesn't understand it properly than anything to do with raw strength. So now I'm wondering whether anyone with the right training can create the kind of circle trap Harry uses here, and snare something in it if they have that thing's Name. Regular humans trapping faeries or similar and coercing them or making deals with them is a pretty old and widespread idea, and it sometimes even goes the humans' way, so I think it's within the realm of possibility, given that the Dresden Files is functionally an All Myths Are True setting. 

Harry asks Billy to keep an eye out in case anyone tries to sneak up on them, and Billy complains that he wanted to do more to help than just bringing the pizza. He points out that he could get the scents of Reuel's changelings, to which Harry agrees, acknowledging, although not out loud, that he's forgotten Billy could do that. There's some tasty nuance happening here. Harry did underestimate Billy, again, and didn't consider either his abilities or that he would have more idea about what to do with them than Harry would. Billy, for his part, is being a bit impetuous. He wants to do something more interesting, more exciting, than the legitimately helpful thing he's been asked to do. Hard to say what he would have done if Harry hadn't signed off on his getting the kids' scents; I honestly don't think he'd have wandered off, but I'm less sure than I'd like to be. 

We're briefly reintroduced to the idea of Names, and to how this kind of summoning is a bit of a gray area under the Laws of Magic, which Harry tries to be diligent about obeying since the Council has it out for him. The description of Toot-toot when he arrives is so similar to the one from Storm Front that I had to check whether the wording was identical in a couple places - it's not, quite. In Storm Front he's described as having a "form that echoed the splendor of the fae lords" and in Summer Knight we get "his beauty a distant echo of the lords of Faerie, the Sidhe". Toot is wearing a helmet made from a plastic bottle cap, and carrying both a spear (consisting of a straight pin secured to a pencil) and a plastic cocktail sword. He does his very best to perform a perimeter check of the pizza, then gives a whole cloud of similarly equipped small fae the okay to land. They set upon the pizza, but of course as soon as anyone takes a bite, the circle closes, trapping them inside. Toot initially thinks Harry is there to make them join Winter's side in the impending faerie war, and says he can't make them since they haven't been Called yet. Having extracted extensive assurances that Harry is not there to do any such thing, he and his people return their attention to the slice of pizza, devouring it in seconds. 

Once the all-important business of eating pizza is taken care of, he explains that the "drawing of the wildfae" has begun, and that usually fae who do nice things are called to Summer, while those who do mean thing are called to Winter, but he's not sure which side he'll be called to. Harry offers them the rest of the pizza in exchange for information about the whereabouts of the Summer and Winter ladies. Maeve is in undertown, and has been since last fall when all the local turbulence in the spirit world naturally attracted her attention. Best I can tell, every major city has at least a few spooky underground tunnels. I haven't done a comprehensive survey, but New York City, Paris, and London are all known for theirs, and Seattle has a respectable network. Baltimore is the least tunnel-y city I've ever personally looked into, with only a small set of tunnels under a single neighborhood. So Chicago isn't special in having an undercity, but it is perhaps notable in the depth and diversity of tunnels down there. You got the pedway tunnels, underground streets, sewers, some amount of abandoned subway tunnels, and of course the freight tunnels. Public facing information indicates that the lattermost are wholly inaccessible to the public, after flooding in the early 1990s, but I would be the opposite of surprised to discover that humans had found their way in, because I've met humans. Since Maeve is in Chicago, so of course is Aurora, and since Maeve is underground, Aurora is of course up on top of a "big building", although Toot is not usefully able to describe which building, and eventually agrees to send a guide with Harry - he doesn't want to go himself and miss out on the pizza. I do wonder what Harry would have done if Maeve and Aurora weren't both in Chicago - the urgency of the situation doesn't really allow for travel at the speed Harry can manage it, unless he wanted to use the Ways, which would be like, spectacularly unsafe under the circumstances. 

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Toot introduces Harry to Elidee, a red-glowing faerie so small she resembles a spark from a campfire. I don't know if she's a dewdrop faerie like Toot or if she's some other kind of small, glowing, winged fae. She can understand Harry, but is too small to speak in a way he can hear, instead communicating largely by flashing twice for yes and once for no. Harry offers to let her grab some pizza before they leave, in which context I'm not sure why they couldn't have just waited for Toot to grab himself some pizza, and had a guide who they'd met before and who can actually speak to Harry and Billy with like, words. Maybe it would have taken him longer to eat, since he's like six inches tall, I don't know. While Elidee is eating, Billy returns from scent-getting, reporting, to absolutely no one's surprise, that the kids don't smell entirely normal. Harry warns him not too spend long watching the faeries eat pizza, as looking at faerie lights can be disorienting, which helps establish their relative knowledge levels about the fae, and begins to set the tone as to just how many hidden dangers you can trip over when dealing with faeries. Elidee returns from her pizza and starts drifting in the direction of their first objective, the Winter Lady, and Harry tells Billy to stay alert and watch his back, something Billy is considerably more willing to do now that it involves going somewhere and doing something. He asks, almost hopefully, whether Harry is expecting trouble. 

Got my computer back in working order, but I'm having what feels like more than the usual amount of difficulty getting my shit together to put in the burst of extra work I usually do in September. Still have more done than I did this time last year, although we'll talk more about that at the beginning of October. Realistically I'm hoping to get maybe two more post done between now and October 1st. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things.  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 12

Harry manages to get out of the building and drive away without getting stopped by the police. The run-in with Grum pretty well confirms that someone in faerie wanted to hide something that was at Reuel's place, but this doesn't get Harry any closer to figuring out what it might have been. Grum himself also stands out a bit, among ogres as a group, for being restrained and decisive, for his smooth shape shifting, and for being able to almost completely ground out Harry's magic, although all ogres can do that to one degree or another. Given that "Grum" is not actually an ogre, I'm sort of curious how he pulled off the thing with Harry's magic, actually. As far as I know, this isn't part of the usual Sidhe package. In any case, that such an exceptional Ogre was sent suggests that someone powerful wanted something removed from Reuel's apartment. I note that Harry's conclusion here was accurate, despite being based on flawed premises. I suppose a disguised fae lord indicates roughly the same things as an unusually powerful and intelligent Ogre. 

A great deal of descriptive space is dedicated to how the funeral home, until recently Flannery's Funeral Home, now Quiet Acres, has declined under corporate (rather than family) ownership, and how they didn't do a very good job with Reuel's body. I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to convey. I do think it's a little odd that neither Titania nor Aurora made higher quality arrangements. Aurora is insane, and was the one who had him killed, but she doesn't want anyone to know that. Mab wouldn't let this happen to Harry, although she might have for Slate if he'd gotten a funeral in the mortal world. Lily wouldn't let this happen to Fix. We'll let the Mothers off the hook since they don't generally seem to take much of an interest in the Knights unless the Knights approach them first. If I had to guess, we're meant to understand that the changeling squad were left to handle funeral stuff, but Reuel had money, and presumably life insurance. Maybe he had it set up so the kids were the beneficiaries, and either they went with an inexpensive option because they needed the rest of the money, or he asked them to, if something happened to him, just handle his funeral cheaply and use most of the insurance money to take care of themselves. And of course, if Reuel was secretly J. R. R. Tolkien, the fancy funeral and burial stuff all happened back when he faked his own death before becoming the Summer Knight, and he wouldn't be too fussed about doing it all a second time. This does also underscore the disposability of the Knights, but it might have benefitted from a little more explication. 

Harry goes in without his staff or rod, because in most mundane circles, walking around with a big stick is looked at somewhat askance, and in magical circles, coming in with that kind of firepower makes it look like you're trying to start a fight. This comes up in a few other books, but I think this is the first time it's been discussed. We're told that the funeral is already underway when he arrives, but from the description (open casket on display, people awkwardly hanging out), it sounds like this is the viewing, which in my admittedly limited experience is a different thing, usually held on a different day (occasionally a couple days) before the actual funeral. There aren't any obvious bad guys in the viewing room, nor does anyone show the odd or anarchronistic fashion choices of a fairy trying to pass for human. The possibility of someone hiding under a veil is raised, but not followed up on, but short of opening up his Sight I'm not really sure what Harry could do about that. We didn't do any potions during the Infodumo With Bob this book, and Harry knew he was coming here, so if the story had called for it, he could have mixed up a potion that would help with veils somehow, but since there isn't anyone hiding under a veil, this would have been a waste of time and page space. Presumably in the interests of thoroughness, Harry slips into a back hallway, just in time to overhear several people talking about how Lily is missing, although they don't use her name, and that Harry's here, which they seem to think is a problem. Fix says Harry is rumored to be a decent sort, and Ace says that people who get in Harry's way have a tendency to end up dead, but they both defer to Meryl, whose name I may be spelling wrong because it's not in this chapter, when she says they should leave. There's a detailed description of the hallway, which I'm sure would be very helpful if this were a TTRPG campaign and it wasn't yet certain where the confrontation would take place, as Harry follows them outside. 

Fix sees Harry, and squeaks. Ace goes for a gun. Meryl just backhands him, giving him his first concussion of the book. (If you "see stars" after getting hit in the head, that's a concussion). Harry tries to ask them to hang on second, but it comes out rather garbled, on account of the fresh head trauma, causing Fix to panic further, until Meryl throws Harry into the dumpster. To be clear, this involves throwing him about ten feet through the air, which is our first unambiguous indicator that she, at least, isn't entirely human. 

Harry lies there for a minute, trying to recover, while the changeling squad runs off. A minute later, Billy appears. He brought pizza. I don't think it was actually established anywhere that Harry asked Billy to come here or do this, but I may be forgetting something, if it happened earlier than Chapter 11. 

I apologize for the lack of pictures, and likely greater than usual incidence of typos, in this post. I spilled tea on my laptop charger, like the block part, apparently killing it, which I did not know could happen. It's not like I haven't spilled tea on my charger before. My charger is if a mildly unusual type, and I don't live within easy reach of a decent electronics store, so my new charger won't arrive until tomorrow. (Being this rural also means that sometimes I just straight up can't get overnight or two day shipping, even if I'm willing to pay for it.) It's coming up on the end of my working year, so I'm gonna be trying to get as much done as possible between now and October 1st, but also Silksong just came out which is... likely to affect my productivity. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!