David Fincher and the World's Weirdest Hitman

Some movies just leave you perplexed.

A few quickie items before we scamper down the rabbit hole:

• If you’re a book reviewer/blogger/TikToker, today is your lucky day: WHERE THE BONES LIE is up on NetGalley, where you can download it for your reviewing/blogging/TikToking pleasure.  

• In conjunction with the loveable scamps at Rock and Hard Place Press, I’m teaching an online class on action writing on October 12. You can find the sign-up at EventBrite; syllabus soon (seats limited)!

I realized I’ve been giving a lot of Substack space lately to assassins and lone wolves. That wasn’t intentional; such characters are an overwhelming presence in the movies and books I consume, which means they’re inevitably present in whatever my mind spits back, text-wise.

Many of those narratives hew to a template established decades ago, most notably in existential assassin movies such as “Le Samourai.” The killer is alone, isolated from the rest of society, utterly consumed by the minutiae of his work. When he botches a hit, his employer sends …