I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting around trying to think of ways to kill people. Yes, it is for my books. Still, I sometimes worry about myself. Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much Criminal Minds, and I worry about being a psychopath. It’s a worry I share with ma … | Continue reading
From the time I began this column, nearly two years ago, I’ve been looking forward to interviewing Megan Abbott. I first became aware of her work in 2016, when I read The Fever over the course of a few days while holding my baby daughter, in the midst of a bleak election cycle wh … | Continue reading
We live in a world where the Supreme Court has already declared that a corporation is actually a person. Can the same or even more sweeping declarations be far off for our friends the computers? Like it or not, artificial intelligence is all around us. We play with it on our comp … | Continue reading
I have always heard Tough Guys Don’t Dance (both the 1984 novel by Norman Mailer and the 1987 film adaptation of the same name, screenwritten and directed by Mailer) described as a “noir,” which leads me to call into question NOT the designation of either of those works as noir, … | Continue reading
When I arrived in the city of Perm in the Ural region in 1994, I went to live in a students’ hostel. It was certainly not for the first time in my life. I had lived in undergraduate rooms at the University of Bologna, where the main activities were staying up all night, smoking a … | Continue reading
When I tell folks I have two degrees in sport management and an adult thriller coming out soon, I know the question I’m going to get before it’s even posed: How do those go together? During the summer of 2021, my two lifelong loves met up in Casper, Wyoming. I was 21 and had neve … | Continue reading
Unlike English native-speakers, I didn’t really encounter gothic novels in the first twenty-or-so years of my life. I grew up in the French-speaking part Switzerland, and my modern and medieval literature studies focused on French authors and their preoccupations. Therefore heari … | Continue reading
I was 15 in 1975 when the man then only known as the Yorkshire Ripper committed his first murder, and 21 when he was caught – in Sheffield, about a mile from where I was living – by a probationer PC checking a fake car number plate. I remember the fear taking a while to […] | Continue reading
My partner told me that she’d never seen the film Gaslight. I told her that she definitely had. –Zoe Coombs Marr Eighty years ago, George Cukor’s Gaslight was released. A noir masterpiece, it swept the Oscars and coined a term that’s used far and wide today. You need only check i … | Continue reading
Spy thrillers don’t get closer to real-world spycraft than the 1968 Soviet film Dead Season. Written under nearly literal dictation from the KGB, it’s based on true exploits — or at least the Lubyanka-approved version — of an intelligence officer named Konon Molody, who had spent … | Continue reading
In our novel The Starlets, we drew upon our love of the movies by placing two feuding movie stars in the crosshairs of international criminals, sending them careening together through the Riviera of the late 1950s, desperate to get to Interpol before the baddies catch them. It’s … | Continue reading
Everything you’ve heard about Miami is true and it is also a lie. Miami is duplicitous. It is beauty and cruelty. How could it not be with gorgeous beaches and yachts on one side of the 1,950 square mile county and a swamp of deadly reptiles on the other? Soon after its incorpora … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Idov, The Collaborators (Scribner) “A cutthroat international financial scheme with grave political implications . . . Unlike most spy fiction, it’s driven in the liveliest sense by young char … | Continue reading
Ah, the winter holiday season. The most wonderful time of the year—or is it? Most merry readers are familiar with ye olde traditions of telling ghost stories at Christmastime. While many believe this to be a primarily English holiday pastime—with Victorian-era celebrants gathered … | Continue reading
When I contemplated writing my action thriller series, I accepted advice that new authors should write about what they know. This was sound advice because over my twenty-eight year career in the Foreign Service, mostly within the Diplomatic Security Service, I felt my experiences … | Continue reading
All books, at least in part, are inspired by something or someone, if not entirely conjured by the inspiration of creativity alone, and my latest novel, Sleep Tight, is no different, even if that inspiration comes as a deeply rooted, convoluted bundle of fact, fiction, and miscon … | Continue reading
The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, it was just announced, have called off the search for Robert Nairac’s body. Captain Nairac was a 29-year-old Grenadier Guards officer who was working undercover, more or less off his own initiative, in Northern Irel … | Continue reading
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, my father faced a dilemma. At the time, he was an executive with the Butterick Company in Manhattan, which specialized in sewing patterns. He had worked for Butterick for many years, but the company was in the process of being sold to a giant conglome … | Continue reading
The big, balding man who visited Washington socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean in March of 1932 claimed he could solve a shocking, mysterious crime that was making headlines around the world. Gaston Means, a fifty-three-year-old former detective who had served time in federal prison f … | Continue reading
We are living in dire times and decaying homes, diseased bodies and disastrous policies, dark visions and disturbed mentalities. Perhaps that why the gothic revival continues apace, with 2024 as the best year yet to immerse oneself in the genre. The following titles are not only … | Continue reading
Inevitably, when I am making small talk at a cocktail party and someone finds out that I am a lawyer, I get asked one of two questions (or both): What’s the most interesting case you ever had? Do you watch Law & Order? I despise both of these questions. The first question is impo … | Continue reading
“Romantasy” is a recently coined term for a pre-existing and popular subgenre of books that combine elements of fantasy and romance, but there’s still some debate about exactly which books qualify. Does the term “romantasy” encompass standalone romance novels with fantasy element … | Continue reading
A historical mystery set in 1920s French-colonial Vietnam, Those Opulent Days is the debut of Vietnamese-Australian author Jacquie Pham. The novel opens with a death, and the prophecy that foretold it many years before. Four friends, close since childhood when they attended the s … | Continue reading
When I began my research for All’s Fair in Love and Treachery, the second book in my Lady Petra Inquires series, I already had two mysteries teed up for my plot. Both had been created in the epilogue of my first book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Lord. One was of the suspicious … | Continue reading
Books with a strong protagonist have always attracted me as a reader, from a very early age. I learned that young characters that drive an entire story can be in adult fiction and not necessarily reserved for children’s stories. The books I have loved and continue to love with su … | Continue reading
Leading up to the election, the Department of Homeland Security sounded the alarm: the country faces a “high risk” of foreign and domestic terrorism. These threats—both real and imminent—are eerily similar to the dangers portrayed in thriller novels over the years. Few authors ha … | Continue reading
Seeking the Pearl of the Orient What would have impressed Wallis Simpson on her arrival in Shanghai, as it did most visitors, was its modernity. In 1924, the International Settlement (largely run by the British) and the adjacent French Concession were significantly more developed … | Continue reading
I’ve always loved stories about thieves who rely on their wits. When I was writing Safecracker, I thought of my hero, Grantchester “Duke” Ducaine, a little bit like he was MacGyver if MacGyver had been a third-generation crook. Duke and his sister were trained to within an inch o … | Continue reading
By 10:30 on that summer night in 1972, the party at the remote woodland campsite had run out of steam. Beer cans littered the ground. Garbage bins overflowed with discarded food, greasy paper plates, plastic cups, and other refuse. Every now and then, the faint stench of overused … | Continue reading
My favorite detectives are involved studying their surrounding world as much as they are involved in solving crimes. Think of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles or Miss Marple in her garden. James Lee Burke in Montana. Think of Jim Hall or Carl Hiaasen in South Flor … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jacquie Pham, Those Opulent Days (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Pham debuts with a memorable and disturbing historical set in French-occupied Vietnam…Pham’s prose is lyrical, and her evocation of the perio … | Continue reading
Sheffield, South Yorkshire, Northern England. Once the powerhouse of the British Empire’s steel manufacturing – hardly a house or hotel in the British Empire didn’t have knives and forks stamped with the “Sheffield Steel” logo. It still exists, but late twentieth century deindust … | Continue reading
Pour yourself a hot toddy and grab your fluffiest blanket—this round-up from Queer Crime Writers* will entertain you as the days grow shorter and chiller. From sun-drenched Palm Springs to snowed-in lodges, 1950s San Francisco, and even the mysterious Northwoods, the list spans a … | Continue reading
Years ago, I read an article in which a journalist described living in a haunted house, and a line from the article has stayed with me ever since. It wasn’t about the bloodstain on the stairway, or the mirror that leapt inexplicably from the wall. It was what the journalist’s mot … | Continue reading
“Every novel that’s worth its salt is about something other than the story; something other than the plot.” — Walter Mosley “Be curious, not judgmental” — as quoted by Ted Lasso When I came out as a transgender woman and transitioned in 2009, I was the managing partner of a 19-la … | Continue reading
For anyone passionate about both Agatha Christie as well as a wee bit nerdy when it comes to names, in reading any of her novels or short stories readers are immediately provided with a wealth of memorable and often unique names: Hercule, Amyas, Linnet, Odell and Honoria are a sm … | Continue reading
Premiering in 1972, Sanford and Son was an every Friday night at eight o’clock event in my Harlem household. “What channel does it come on again?” my grandmother would ask every week and every week I’d turn the television to channel four and patiently wait for the cool-ass intro … | Continue reading
On March 26, 1925, during a Commons session, Mr. Cecil Wilson raised an eyebrow-raising question: why were so many women in prison repeat offenders? In fact, 2,886 women had been convicted more than twenty times that year. What is more, many of these habitual criminals were elder … | Continue reading
Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a … | Continue reading
I don’t even remember how I came across Vine Street, British author Dominic Nolan’s third crime novel, because it is published in the UK and not readily available in the U.S., but by the time I finished the first chapter, I was hooked. This was a major talent with an original voi … | Continue reading
In 1972, the late, great John Denver released his iconic song “Rocky Mountain High” extolling the beauty of the state of Colorado. As a teen, I lived on a cattle ranch near the small town of Saguache, surrounded by mountains in Colorado’s high altitude San Luis Valley. The song e … | Continue reading
Picture it, the perfect fall evening: you’re sitting in your comfiest chair with your coziest socks, you have a steaming mug of something delicious next to you and an autumnal candle filling the air with the scent of pumpkins or leaves, a cat is curled up next to you, and you hav … | Continue reading
When one thinks of Honolulu, I’m sure “noir” is not the first word to pop into one’s mind. Instead, one thinks surfing and hula—white sandy beaches and crystal-blue waters. Honolulu is a vacation destination. It’s a sanctuary for those seeking warmth during winter, sunny solace f … | Continue reading
Team W (the writing team of Karen White, Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig) cut their reading teeth on the G.O.A.T female sleuth series featuring the iconic Nancy Drew. Move over Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown. Nobody was as clever—or as well-dressed—as Nancy. Her powers of d … | Continue reading
Let’s look at three types of mothers who can drive action in crime fiction without being the flat-out-evil Bad Mother trope. I’m going to name these types The Status Queen, The Absent Mother (obviously not a term of my invention), and The Mom Who’s In It to Win It (aka The Hero). … | Continue reading
I have a friend who, like me, is a novelist who has metamorphosed a bit as a result of creative impulses and market demands. She read fifty pages of an early draft of Pony Confidential when it was a novella called Christmas Pony that had no murder plot. Recently she reached out t … | Continue reading
Unsure. Uncertain. Unwilling. When faced with a matter of conscience, a dangerous situation, a threat to your very being—or that of your family and friends—what would you do? Would you happily step up and lead others into the fray? Would you shrink away and hope that the problem … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig, The Author’s Guide to Murder (William Morrow) “Three pros unite again for this fun, dramatic mystery with an exotic setting and delightful characters. … | Continue reading