Andrew Clavin’s Hillary, Sex and the Character Issue skewers media hypocrisy by framing Hillary Clinton’s scandals—from bathtub "smoking gun" satire to Clinton Foundation pay-to-play schemes—as proof of a double standard, where her email deletions and Bill’s sexual misconduct are downplayed while Mitt Romney’s bullying is weaponized. He ties this to a broader cultural rot: Freudian sex-and-money reductionism replacing ideals like mercy, citing Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globes vulgarity as performative "authenticity" masking elite detachment. With Bob Woodward’s impunity analysis and Juanita Broderick’s rape allegation ignored, Clavin argues only legal trouble or a Bloomberg-style outsider could break Clinton’s media shield. [Automatically generated summary]
There are reports today that the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of private email while Secretary of State has now expanded to examine whether Clinton may have violated public corruption laws by trading favors for donations to her foundation.
Mrs. Clinton responded to the rumors immediately by rising from her bathtub screaming, all right, you lousy gringos, you want to play?
Let's play.
Say hello to my little friend.
She then sprayed the room with machine gun fire while shouting, you'll never take me alive, G-Men, and rushed outside where she climbed to the top of an enormous globe-shaped gas storage tank, shouting, I made it, ma, top of the world.
The tank then exploded in a rising dome of fire, consuming both Mrs. Clinton and much of the Democratic Party.
In the aftermath, ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos said, despite the charges, there was no smoking gun, except for the gun that lay smoking next to the wreckage of the DNC.
But not counting that, there was no smoking gun.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
There's no smoking gun.
So that's what we're going to talk about.
We're going to talk about, we've got a lot to talk about, but we're going to talk about Hillary Clinton and the character issue.
I wrote a novel a while back called True Crime, and it was made into a Clint Eastwood movie.
It was a big book.
And it was a death row thriller, but it was also a satire of the news industry.
And in it, one of the characters says, we invented the character issue so we could write about sex.
That's all it is.
And I feel like, I feel like that's all I'm talking about now.
I feel like I'm just even with the rapes and cologne and everything.
I feel like all I keep talking about all day long is sex, X, X.
And I don't know if that's, you know, I think the character issue is more than that or should be more than that.
There was a time in my life when I was a Freudian.
You know, I kind of believed in the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, and I thought everything leads back to sex.
And that was actually part of a major strain in Western thinking, which was the materializing of everything, the materializing of spiritual ideas.
So for a long time, there have been these spiritual ideas.
It was kind of an overreaction to science to think that everything could now be thought of in spiritual terms.
So where before you might say the two most important things in a person's life, and actually Freud did say this, he would say, are love and work.
Love and work became sex and money, because that's the way people's minds work.
You know, the material thing that is built to represent the spiritual truth becomes the idol.
That is why in the Bible they say don't make graven images because they know you make a little, there's nothing wrong with having a little statue of God, but pretty soon you're going to be worshiping the statue and that's it.
And that's what worshiping sex and money is.
But the thing is, once you live in that world, once you live in that world, being grotesque, speaking bluntly about sex and private functions and greed and wealth and how, and you sparkle, how dazzling my jewelry is and all this stuff, that becomes a kind of authenticity.
It used to be thought it was just kind of lower class.
It was kind of low rent to do that.
But now it's kind of considered that's honesty, that's searing honesty, because you're getting at the things that really matter.
When you talk about love and work, that's not the real stuff.
The real stuff is sex and money.
So let's just talk about sex and money.
You know, that's how we're going to get places.
And I don't want you to misunderstand what I'm saying.
There was never a golden age.
There was never an age when people didn't care about sex and money.
There was never a time when people didn't cheat on each other.
There was never a time when people didn't rob each other.
They always did.
But there was a time when people thought that those were bad things to do and being grotesque about sex and being blunt about sex and being blunt about money were uncouth because we recognized the higher value that we were at least trying to live up to.
You know, I was thinking yesterday as we were talking about the rapes in Germany, and I was talking about rape as it's not just a spiritual crime against a woman, but it's also an invasion technique, a way of replacing the population that's there with a new population, with your own genetic strain.
And I was thinking as I was talking about a famous painting by, I think his first name was Gustave.
His name is Gustave Courbet.
He was a 19th century French realist, and he swore that he would only paint what you could see.
There was no such thing as a spiritual world.
He was only going to paint what you see.
And he has a famous painting called The Source.
It's called The Source, which is obviously kind of a spiritual term, the source, and it's just what in pornography, the pornography world, they call a crotch shot.
It is a very, very graphic painting of a woman's legs, of between a woman's legs.
And that's all it is.
I mean, it's incredibly graphic.
And the postmodern post-Freudian psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan, was supposed to have a picture of this in his office or in his private office or something like this.
And that was the idea that the source, that's the source.
That's it.
We're just flesh coming out of flesh ad infinitum, and there's nothing beyond that, okay?
But there was a world before that where people didn't believe that.
And that made me think of the play The Merchant of Venice, which is Shakespeare's kind of dissertation on the way that race and values play into things.
And Merchant of Venice is the play with Shylock in it, the Jewish moneylender.
And it's an anti-Semitic play.
I saw Dustin Hoffman do it on Broadway, and they tried to make Shylock the hero of the play.
But Shakespeare was no more free of the anti-Semitism of his time, as great as he was, than George Washington, as great as he was, could fully understand what holding slaves meant morally.
Or some people today can understand what abortion is.
I mean, I think we know that there are perfectly people that we would consider good people who nonetheless have had abortions.
And they can't see what that's doing in the same way Washington couldn't see what slaves are, and Shakespeare couldn't see what anti-Semitism was.
But anyway, he had a very complicated idea about race.
And his idea was that, yes, by hating people, we turn them into what we think they are.
So Shylock, I'm quoting from memory, but he says something like, you called me a hound, so now beware my fangs.
You hated me into being what I am.
But at the same time, Shakespeare understood that people had different values, sets of values.
And Shylock in the play, all he cares about is money and revenge.
And he turns, he wants a pound of flesh in return for his loan.
So you're just a piece of meat, and a pound of flesh is the same as money, and the fact that he's going to kill this person doesn't count.
Then, of course, the Christian heroine Portia gets up and says the quality of mercy is not strained.
And the idea is the Jews are just thinking about things in material terms, but the Christians understand the quality of mercy is not strained.
And meanwhile, there's this subplot where the suitors who come to win Portia's hand have to choose the right box.
And the box is a gold box, a silver box, and a lead box.
And of course, the Muslim and the guy from Aragon, which may also have religious connotations, but never mind that for a minute.
They come in and they pick the gold and the silver box and they get it wrong.
And the worthy man picks the lead box because he understands that it's not what a woman looks like.
He understands it's not the outward show.
It's not the little statue of God that is God.
It is the inner truth that he has to get at.
And that's Shakespeare talking about that.
Shakespeare's Truth00:02:16
All that's gone.
Forget about it.
Forget about it.
Sex and money.
And, you know, this came to mind as I was watching, I don't watch award shows because I don't care.
I really don't care who wins awards.
I don't care what they have to say.
I kind of like seeing the pretty girls in the dresses in the, you know, the next morning, but I don't really care at all.
But I heard about this Ricky Gervais appearance on the Golden Globes on Sunday night.
And so I looked it up.
Take a look at this.
This is Gervais.
And, you know, he's a staunch atheist, kind of a grotesque comic, a talented guy.
I think he was in the office.
He was really good.
But this is his introduction, talking to our royalty, but we have instead of royalty, which is Hollywood people.
Shush!
Shut up!
You disgusting, pill-popping, sexual-deviant scum.
I want to do this monologue and then go into hiding, okay?
Not even Sean Penn will find me.
Snitch.
Hello, and welcome to the 73rd annual Golden Globe Awards live from the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
With all these rich, beautiful celebrities having the time of their lives.
Let's hope no one spoils that.
Yeah.
Relax.
I'm going to try and be nice.
You're global megastars with amazing talent, most of you.
A few of you just married well.
You know who you are.
We all do.
We all do.
All right.
So he comes in and he then goes on to make a bunch of grotesque jokes about old men coming on and doing sexual things to him.
And he introduces Mel Gibson, a very funny thing because he made all these jokes about Mel Gibson.
And Mel Gibson comes on and says, Yeah, I like seeing Gavais every now and again because it reminds me to get a colonoscopy, you know, which is actually a funny line, but it's also grotesque.
This is our royalty.
These are these guys in tuxedos.
I mean, go back and look at like Lawrence Olivier winning the Oscar and getting up and making this beautiful, elegant, you know, Shakespearean speech that comes out of this perfect diction.
High School Scandal00:15:56
And this is what these guys have become because this is their idea of authenticity is to be uncouth and grotesque.
And I never, you know, it's funny.
A lot of people worry about the sex and violence in movies.
I never worry about that.
That's what movies are about.
That's what Homer was about.
That's what Shakespeare's about.
There was, you know, that's what all those beautiful paintings of nudes that now hang in museums.
That's what they were about.
That doesn't bother me at all.
But it does sort of bother me that these guys who live off the fat of the land, okay, these are not guys who make anything that we need.
These are not guys who produce bread.
These are guys who live off our favor.
Like me.
So do I. I'm an artist.
I live off your favor.
I live off the plumber and the guy who builds the roads.
Those are the guys who build the house that I live in.
And I respect that.
And I'm humbly grateful for being able to do what I do.
These guys just behave like this.
They behave like trash.
They're supposed to actually represent something better.
So in a world, in a world where our royalty acts like this, what is the character issue?
What is the character issue?
And I think that there is a major, major character issue facing our nation in this election year.
And I think Hillary Clinton is part of that and represents that.
And so I'm going to look at her for a minute, but I want to get at the even bigger character issue that I think underlies that.
Hillary Clinton is now accused.
Some of these emails, one of these emails shows her telling an aide to take the classified notice off something and send it as what's called non-paper, essentially make it disappear.
They want it to disappear.
Woodward, Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, the guy who helped expose the Watergate scandal, he's on TV and he explains what it means when she says this, why this is important.
That's the wrong one, though.
We want Bob Woodward.
By taking it off, it's just a piece of paper that has a bunch of paragraphs and there's no classification, there's no subject.
So it's not in the system, so no one can discover it through Freedom of Information Act or some sort of subpoena.
I mean, look, here is Hillary Clinton, somebody who worked on the staff of the Nixon Impeachment Committee.
And what was the lesson?
One of the lessons from that?
Never write anything down.
She did years of Whitewater investigations where she was the target.
And here, many years later, she's saying, oh, let's subvert the rules and writing it out herself.
You know, whether that's some sort of crime, I think is not the issue.
The issue is it shows she kind of feels immune, that she lives in a bubble, and no one's can ever find this out.
Well, now we have.
Okay, so that's Woodward saying that this reveals character.
He's not talking about the legal issue.
I think it probably is a legal issue to make a classified document vanish.
I think if I did that, you would actually, as you were watching this, you'd see me carted away.
But okay, Woodward is saying this is about character, making a class.
This is the Secretary of State, right, one of the highest offices in the land, making a piece of classified material disappear.
Now, just for comparison, I just want to flash back for a minute to George Stephanopoulos, former Clinton aide and chief anchor of ABC News.
Just flashing back to the last election where Mitt Romney was found to have bullied somebody in high school.
I just wanted you to see for just a minute how they covered that.
New questions today about whether Mitt Romney's teenage pranks went too far.
The candidate apologized yesterday after one report that he bullied a classmate by pinning him down and chopping off his hair.
ABC's David Muir covers the Romney campaign.
And David, I know you've been talking to people who are there, and overnight the bullied boy's family spoke out as well.
Yeah, the family is speaking out this morning, George, reacting to that troubling account from those five grown men, all former classmates of Mitt Romney, among them a lawyer, a dentist, a school principal, all who described a troubling scene.
The group, they say, including Mitt Romney, pinning down a fellow student and cutting off his hair because he was different.
Mitt Romney's apology comes after five of his former high school classmates described the same incident to the Washington Post, the targeting of another boy because most of them thought he was gay, holding him down and cutting off his long hair that he dyed blonde.
One of those former classmates, Philip Maxwell, now a lawyer, telling ABC News, it's something you don't forget.
Mitt Romney is a, I think he's 67, so he's 65, let's say.
I'm kind of estimating, but I think he's 65, 66, and he's running for office.
This is something that happened in high school when people do terrible things to each other in high school.
I mean, I am not immune.
I would hate to have to answer for the things.
I mean, I will answer for the things that I did in high school, but I hate to have to answer in front of George Stephanopoulos or somebody else who hated me about things that I did in high school.
We all do terrible things in our life as our character is developing.
And hopefully at some point your character forms, and then you're even more answerable.
An adult, of course, is always answerable.
And you can do things in high school.
Sure.
You can kill somebody that you're going to be answerable for your whole life.
What can Mitt Romney say about this, except that he was a teenager and he did a dumb thing?
He's already apologized.
Why is that their lead story?
The lead story is a troubling story.
I'm troubled.
You know, we're all supposed to be troubled about this story.
Okay, so now there are rumors that the FBI is investigating the Clinton Foundation's use of funds.
And this was detailed before any of this came out in a book called Clinton Cash by Peter Schweitzer.
And he showed how, not just while she was Secretary of State, but while she was senator, she took, the Clinton Foundation received cash donations from businesses that then received favors from Senator Clinton.
And as a Secretary of State, she took, the Clinton Foundation took money from places it was not allowed to take money from under ethical rules, and that these places did receive the favor of the United States from Secretary of State.
Now, of course, when Stephanopoulos says there's no smoking gun, when he says that, of course there's not.
You can't prove that that's why she did it, but there is this troubling, as we are going to be troubled by Mitt Romney's life.
There's troubling connections between the donations and who got the favorite.
So now, just for comparison, we saw George Stephanopoulos, our chief journalistic, whatever he is for ABC News.
We saw him covering Mitt Romney and being very, he was very troubled.
He was really troubled.
Let's watch him covering George Schweitzer's Clinton cash.
This was W World News Daily made this montage of him doing this both on his own show.
He's questioning some points, he's questioning Schweitzer, and at others, he's talking to Jon Stewart.
You know, I read the book that this is based on Clinton Cash, and I actually interviewed the author on Sunday.
This is a tough one.
As you know, the Clinton campaign says you haven't produced a shred of evidence that there was any official action as secretary that supported the interests of donors.
You didn't disclose in your book that he had sold the interest beyond that.
There's no evidence at all that Hillary Clinton got directly involved in this decision.
We've done investigative work here at ABC News, found no proof of any kind of direct action.
He said there's no spoking gun, no evidence that she changed a policy based on donations to the foundation.
No smoking gun.
The Democrats have said this is indication of your partisan interest.
They say you used to work for President Bush as a speechwriter.
You're funded by the Koch brothers.
How did you respond to that?
Because when you actually look closely at it, he even says there's no evidence of any direct action taken on behalf of the donors.
Well, Donna, I got to talk to you first.
I know you're close to the Clinton team.
They did not want to put anybody out to talk about this book today.
Hillary Clinton has this whole scandal now about some form.
Are you familiar with the Clintons?
Hillary Clinton.
Are you familiar with the Clintons?
He was White House Communications Director under Clinton.
He was a Clinton aide when he was running.
He became the senior advisor for policy and strategy.
Our good friends over at Newsbusters run a story.
Well, first of all, we should point out that George Stephanopoulos, it was recently revealed, had donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation himself, okay?
An action which he didn't tell the people at ABC about.
But what did they expect?
I mean, what did the people at ABC expect?
Who did they think they hired?
The people at Newsbusters, which is part of the Media Research Center, one of the great sites on the internet, run this, found this piece of Stephanopoulos' memoir, where he recounts how he said goodbye to Hillary Clinton on the evening of Clinton's reelection.
And this is an excerpt from Stephanopoulos' memoir.
This is the chief anchor of ABC News, okay?
In an election year in which Hillary is very likely to be the Democrat candidate.
Hillary was in the back bedroom helping Chelsea get dressed.
Just before I left for a victory lap with the network anchors, I knocked on her door.
So he's going to go out and talk to the anchors about how Clinton has won.
Hillary Clinton peeked out just a minute, then came into the hall.
Only the two of us were there, separated by a wall from the suite where the returns were being announced and Clinton was holding court.
This was our private goodbye.
She gave me a hug, then held me at arm's length for an extra second, a hand on each of my shoulders, her eyes shining.
I'm touched.
My eyes well up as I read this.
We smiled through the silence.
Victory was vindication, even sweeter for her than her husband.
She paid a high price, taken harder hits, achieved fewer dreams.
Now she'd have a second chance, and I wished her luck.
She did the same for me.
All the stresses and threats and resentments, all the times the two of us had clashed because I blamed her for being too rigid and she blamed me for not being, quote, as tough as Kennedy's men.
All that was behind us now.
We had survived.
We had moved on.
All would be well.
I love you, George Stephanopoulos, she said.
I love you too.
And I walked out the door.
I was like, geez, that's the chief anchor of ABC News, the chief anchor of ABC News.
So now we're talking about the character issue, which, as I said, is so often a synonym for sex.
And of course, when they try to bring up the sexual issue, this thing that went on during the full Clinton administration, and let's face it, during his governorship and all this stuff, and if you think Hillary didn't know about it, that's insane.
Of course, Hillary, we know Hillary knew about it.
We know she ultimately knew about it.
When you discuss that stuff, they shut you down.
I mean, I'm not going to replay forever the piece of Don Lemon shutting down Kirk Schlichter, but this is all over.
Now, the guys and the Republicans, oh, this is off base.
This is off base.
You know, some of the candidates, the other Republican candidates, no, no, no, no.
We're not going to deal with this.
This is all business.
It's what Clinton did.
I just want to remind you for a minute, lest we forget, lest we forget what exactly it is that Clinton was charged with.
And remind you of this.
I'm going to play Juanita Broderick's story, just a minute of it, but this is the woman, one of the women, one of the women who claimed that Clinton raped her, not had an affair with her.
There are plenty of those, not molested her, not exposed himself to her, but raped her.
She's very, very plausible when you listen to her.
She was a nurse at the time.
She said that she had met Clinton when he was running for governor.
Okay, so this is back in the 70s, 1978.
He's running for governor of Arkansas.
She was very charmed by him, very charismatic.
She wanted to work with him.
She called him, said, I'll meet you in the coffee shop of the hotel.
He said, no, no, no, I'll come to the hotel.
And while they were there, he started molesting her and kissing her.
Just listen to this little excerpt.
And the second time he tries to kiss me, he starts biting on my lip.
Just a minute.
He starts to bite on my top lip and I try to pull away from him.
And then he forces me down on the bed.
And I just was very frightened.
And I tried to get away from him.
And I told him, no.
I didn't want this to happen.
He wouldn't listen to me.
Did you resist?
Did you tell him to stop?
Yes, I told him, please don't.
He was such a different person at that moment.
He was just a vicious, awful person.
That's still really upsetting tape.
I mean, that is really upsetting stuff.
And I just want you to remember that the networks buried this story.
They did not cover the story until after the impeachment trial.
After they waited, they held on to the story and did not put her on TV until after the impeachment style, our friends at the networks.
Remember, they spiked the Monica Lewinsky story.
It was Drudge who brought out the Monica Lewinsky story.
And just so we remember, just so we remember who Hillary Clinton is, remember what she was saying when all this stuff came out, especially the Monica Lewinsky thing.
The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.
And if you read the New York Times, a former newspaper, this is the way they cover bad news for Democrats.
The headline will be, Republicans make hay over bad news for Democrats.
Okay, it's a vast right-wing conspiracy.
It's all us.
It's all the bad guys bringing this out.
It has nothing to do with them doing what they do.
One more thing.
I just got to play one more cut.
Hillary today.
I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault.
Don't let anyone silence your voice.
You have a right to be heard, and you have a right to be believed.
We're with you.
When I say Hillary today, I mean Hillary in the modern times.
I don't mean she said that just this day.
But look, we've got a character issue on our hands, a serious character issue, and it's not about sex.
I mean, sex is part of it.
When you treat a woman like that, when you think it's okay to cover something up like that, that speaks to you, but of course, it's only part of what she's covering up.
And she's not the only one doing the covering.
Because we're all flawed, and because we are a Christian nation, and because we are basically people who are formed by Christianity, we all believe in forgiving people for their past sins.
That's why when I look at Mitt Romney bullying a kid, and I know how horrible bullying is.
I hate bullies.
I hate bullying people.
I've been in a lot of fights over bullying.
You know, it's a terrible thing.
I think the guy did a wrong thing.
But that's the kind of thing that we learn to forgive.
What you can't forgive, what you can't forgive is, of course, ceaseless, ceaseless corruption.
And more important, you can't forgive a conspiracy of silence that is based on prejudice.
It's based on bias.
I mean, we call it bias in the news media, but it's not bias.
It's corruption.
When George Stephanopoulos is appointed to be the chief news anchor of ABC and is giving $75,000 to the Clinton administration and is running interference for her while basically creating a non-scandal scandal over Mitt Romney's misdemeanor as a teenager, that is a problem.
So I think we have a four-point character issue at least, okay?
George Stephanopoulos's Bias00:04:48
We've got one Hillary's past cover-up for Bill Clinton, and that is not off base.
That is not something we shouldn't talk about.
It is something to talk about.
She did it again and again.
She stood by her man.
She used her daughter.
Remember, I played that last week of her saying, oh, yeah, he's with the other woman, his daughter.
You know, she pulled out all the stops to defend this guy who was, it is plausible to believe, raping women, okay?
That's one.
Hillary's abuse of the private email server, let alone all the other scandals in her life.
This is the one that's now on the table.
This is a woman covering up confidential, you know, classified information, trying to make it disappear down the memory hole so that nobody can get their hands on it in the Freedom of Information Act.
Third, there's Hillary's possible exchange of political favors for money, that she took donations, the Clinton Foundation took donations, and in return, they got the favor of our government, our elected government, the stuff we pay for from Hillary Clinton.
But fourth, and I think this is the worst character issue of all.
I think this is the most damning, most corrupt character issue of all, is the use of people like George Stephanopoulos by our networks to cover the news.
These are not newsmen.
They are Democrat operatives.
They remain Democrat operatives.
There is nothing, nothing to say that that guy is a journalist.
He is a Democrat operative with a press card, as Glenn Reynolds would say, over an Instapundit.
And that to me, that to me is a character issue that is pervasive in the media, in our media, and the people who are supposed to be our watchdogs for the press to run down people like Mitt Romney because you don't like their party, let alone their politics, because who even knew what his politics would have been.
You know, never mind that.
They don't like his party to run him down for misdemeanors in the past and to cover up Hillary Clinton.
That is the worst character issue of all.
And I challenge, I challenge the network news people to reform, to say, you know, we're going to be journalists for the course of this election.
We're going to do actual journalism fair and balanced by hiring people.
There's only one way to do it.
You've got to hire people from both sides.
They've got to argue in the newsroom.
I have been a newsman.
I have been in newsrooms.
There's no such thing as an argument between lefties and righties because there are no righties in the newsrooms.
They're very few.
And they say, well, you know, they say, well, one guy can be biased in his heart, but he can be objective in the news.
Yes, one guy, but not if he's surrounded by people who agree with him, because then it just begins to seem like the truth.
That, to me, is the big character issue.
And by the way, just let me add one thing, and you won't hear this anywhere else.
If Hillary gets into trouble, if she gets into real trouble because of this, there's going to be an independent who runs.
And I think it's going to be Mayor Bloomberg.
And I think that is one of the things they are so frightened about and why they will run protection for her to the ends of the earth.
Stuff I like.
Yay, stuff I like.
I'm doing crime stories, crime stories you may never have heard of.
And I picked today the Belgian, the famous Belgian novelist, Georges Simonon.
And I picked him for a couple of reasons.
One, he is a master of great, great suspense stories and very prolific.
He wrote over 500 novels.
He'd write them in like a weekend or something like this.
But also, he was an insane sex addict.
He was said to have slept with over 10,000 women, most of them prostitutes.
He would go out for sex like other guys go out for a cigarette.
And, you know, it is funny because with artists, who cares?
You know, who cares what they're doing?
He wasn't raping anybody, first of all.
That's a major, major thing.
But, you know, that little kink in his personality invests his work with this real sense of sexual tension.
Now, his famous character is Jules Magray, a detective and inspector.
And I don't like those books.
I mean, they're kind of straightforward detective stories.
They're filled with good psychology, but I just don't find them that interesting.
The books that I love are the books that aren't the Magray books, and one of them is called The Widow, 1942.
It's about a guy who's released from prison.
He's in prison for murder.
We don't know throughout whether he's guilty or not.
He's a killer.
And he takes a job working on the farm of this widow who owns this farm.
And it's kind of like Shane if Shane went really bad.
It really is that story about the wandering stranger who comes into town, takes a job with the widow, except it's all very, very dark, very troubling, really invested with a lot of sexual tension, and one of the great, great crime thrillers of all time.
So that's one you may have missed that is really worth reading.
The Widow by Georges Simonon.
That's it.
We'll be back with more irritation and yelling and screaming and condemning people.