Crime investigation is a daunting process. It involves numerous hours of tedious and meticulous gathering and analyzing of physical and trace (forensic) evidence, searching for and interviewing wit… | Continue reading
In the early 1930s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was the most notorious banned book in the United States. Using a stream-of-consciousness style to describe twenty-four hours in the life of a lower-middle … | Continue reading
For those of us obsessed with them, stories about skyjackings offer retro fascination, criminal ingenuity and daring, and, in some cases, wackiness. Skyjackings have been around as long as aviation… | Continue reading
—Heather Martin is the authorized biographer of Lee Child and the author of The Reacher Guy (Constable at Little, Brown in the UK and Pegasus Books in the US) ___________________________________ On… | Continue reading
One of the first things you discover as a crime writer is that the range of plausible murder methods is disappointingly small. Basically, it’s stabbing, throat-cutting, strangling, shooting, drowni… | Continue reading
There was no centralized formal peacekeeping system in London until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police. Prior to that, in the seventeenth and eighteent… | Continue reading
“This is Brian Selfon, the chief investigative analyst here.” My boss at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office is introducing me to a pair of NYPD detectives, and there’s a wink in his voice when… | Continue reading
“It’s impossible to explain to young people today why we in the YCL felt such allegiance to the Soviet Union. In those days it was the workers’ fatherland—the only socialism on earth.” — Pete Seege… | Continue reading
Yes, that’s right. Apparently, Elliott Roosevelt, the son of Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, authored a long-running murder mystery series starring his mother as an amateur detective. … | Continue reading
The true crime podcast Serial was groundbreaking—an “audio game-changer,” according to the Peabody Award jurors who gave it the prize in 2014. Yet as host Sarah Koenig notes, the show’s serial form… | Continue reading
In spring 1877, Calamity Jane was out riding a trail and happened upon a runaway stagecoach from Wyoming that had been attacked by a Cheyenne war party. Promptly engaging in a breathless mounted pu… | Continue reading
From its inception, cyberpunk has shared quite a bit of DNA with crime fiction. Your archetypical (some might say stereotypical) cyberpunk anti-hero, hacking into the mainframe of a highly militari… | Continue reading
Bowie placed the shotgun on the ground and picked up the .22 rifle. “I always wanted one of these little guns when I was a kid,” he said. “That time they got me in Florida,” Chicamaw said, “and sen… | Continue reading
AGNES SOREL, MISTRESS of KING CHARLES VII of FRANCE, 1422–1450 On a cold winter’s day, twenty-eight-year-old Agnes Sorel, the most beautiful woman in France, lay dying in the tidy stone manor house… | Continue reading
–I now describe my country as if to strangers. I chose those lines as the epigraph for a novel called The Distant Echo, which was published in 2003. Although Scottish crime fiction had started … | Continue reading
When John J. Gotti took over the Gambino crime family after engineering the assassination of former boss Paul Castellano in December 2015, he knew he would become the object of intense FBI and NYPD… | Continue reading
In October 2017, the con artist, fake heiress, and Instagram influencer Anna Sorokin, who called herself Anna Delvey, was arrested for swindling approximately $275,000 from various high-end entitie… | Continue reading
Charles Dickens was, among many other things, an insomniac. While London slept, Dickens walked. He must have been possessed of extraordinary energy to sally forth, after a full day’s work as … | Continue reading
At 1:30 p.m. on Friday, November 29, 1983, a man the FBI called the Yankee Bandit walked into the lobby of a Bank of America in the Melrose district of Los Angeles and stood in line. When he got to… | Continue reading
But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his … | Continue reading
Let me tell you about the most popular mystery author you’ve probably never heard of. He sold 50 million of copies of his books worldwide. His work was translated into a dozen languages. The Myster… | Continue reading
Sandy Fawkes landed in Atlanta on the night of November 7, 1974. She’d spent the day in Washington on a fruitless quest to interview former Vice President Spiro Agnew, part of a one-month try… | Continue reading
The Past In the superhero extravaganza, Avengers: Age of Ultron, the villainous Ultron blossoms to life in a haze of confusion. The disembodied, James Spader-voiced Artificial Consciousness swims a… | Continue reading
Ten years after its publication in 1940, the literary critic Edmund Wilson sent his then-friend and future enemy Vladimir Nabokov a copy of The Big Con by David W. Maurer. It was just one of a batc… | Continue reading
“Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”–Saul Bellow 1. They found the body on Monday—in the field. It belonged to a woman, a mother, who is the… | Continue reading