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Real, Raw, and Funny
The Red Widow centers around a journalist whose addictions and secrets turn an already collapsing marriage into a transcontinental snare of murder and intelligence leaks. Why was the world of a struggling newspaper the right setting for this story?
Because it was an environment I knew and loved. I spent 37 years in the newspaper business. I know that world inside and out. The business was dying, and I wanted to chronicle that decline in a creative way.
The story moves through murder, cover-ups, intelligence leaks, and criminal networks. How did you approach managing such a wide-ranging plot?
I just made it up as I went along. No formula involved. If the chapter worked, I kept it. If not, into the digital trash bin it went.
Which scene or character moment was the most enjoyable to write?
The scene in the newspaper where the editors had a huge fight over the validity of the Red Widow’s story. I loved writing that chapter. It was real, raw, and funny in its own way.
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The narrative takes place over 15 years, starting in the days just prior to 9/11/01. On center stage at the start is an unhappy reporting couple stationed in Sydney, Australia for the mythical New York Herald. The duo-Angela and Rafer Flanagan-is known to their editors in New York City as the ‘Tandem Couple From Hell.’ Their loathing for each other (and occasional lust) knows few limits. Her correspondent career is ascendant, his is on the rocks after winning a Pulitzer Prize early in his foreign reporting career. His drug of choice is alcohol, hers is cocaine.
The Flanagans are in New York area on home leave when the terrorists strike the World Trade Center. Rafer is supposed to be in an interview at the top of the north tower when the first plane hits at 8:46 on that nightmarish morning. He isn’t there–and that’s how the mystery begins.
The narrative bounces from America to Australia and back again-from steamy Washington D.C. to even steamier Darwin at the very top of the Aussie west coast. The chase is on for the Red Widow (Angela). In hot pursuit are reporters, editors, mobsters, gang members, local cops, federal cops and a takeover tycoon poised to pounce on the carcass of the Herald.
The climax plays out near Darwin where the fearsome salt-water crocodiles rule the waterways and mudflats.
Entertaining. Educational. Authentic. The Red Widow is all three.
The Red Widow: A story of journalism, treachery, betrayal and murder
The Red Widow, by T. Castle Furlong, follows Angela Flanagan, a magnetic and dangerous Herald journalist whose ambition, addictions, appetites, and secrets turn a collapsing marriage into a transcontinental snare of murder, cover-ups, newsroom politics, mob favors, intelligence leaks, and Australian outback reckoning. Around her orbit Raffy Flanagan, fallen Pulitzer winner; Rem Dabovitch, the relentless reporter trying to untangle the truth; and a bruising cast of editors, cops, gangsters, lovers, and fixers. The result is a big, lurid, newsroom-driven crime saga where journalism is both weapon and alibi.
I liked the book most when it leaned into its old-school newspaper bloodline. The scenes inside the Herald have the acrid smell of coffee, ego, deadline panic, expense-account rot, and institutional decline. Furlong writes as someone who knows the newsroom not as a backdrop but as a habitat, and that gives the novel its strongest pulse. The book is not delicate; it barges, wisecracks, ogles, threatens, and drinks its way through the plot. At its best, that blunt-force energy gives the story a coarse comic momentum, like a tabloid headline that somehow grew legs and started kicking doors open.
I also found the novel overstuffed in a way that is part of its charm. There are many characters, many side alleys, and a taste for outrageous dialogue that will thrill some readers and exhaust others. The prose can be sharp and mordant, especially when skewering media vanity and corporate cowardice. I do feel that the book’s sexual frankness, profanity, and occasionally abrasive characterizations make it a rougher ride than a conventional mystery. Still, Angela is a memorable creation: glamorous, ruined, clever, and venomous, less femme fatale than red-haired weather system.
I highly recommend Furlong’s novel to readers who want crime fiction, murder mystery, noir suspense, and conspiracy thriller elements packed into one raucous story. It reminded me of an Elmore Leonard crime caper crossbred with a hard-bitten newspaper novel, though Furlong’s voice is louder, messier, and more tabloid-bright. The Red Widow is a brash, unsentimental thriller about what happens when the people paid to chase the truth start burying bodies of their own.
Pages: 444 | ISBN : 978-1958943977
