I’ll never forget my Sunday school teacher telling us that little girls are born into more sin than little boys. I was probably seven or eight. I raised my hand and asked if it was true, and the teacher nodded slowly and sadly, citing Eve, and the Fall. Eve was both Adam’s prize … | Continue reading
Beach reads—we usually associate them with the summer. A steamy romance, a cozy seaside mystery, a horror story of beach parties and blood. Those are a great time, but right now in the northern hemisphere, summer is waning. Depending on where you are in the world, it might alread … | Continue reading
When he was young, bestselling thriller author J.D. Barker never thought he could make a living as a writer, so he instead studied business while unaware of his special gift. It would create barriers in his life and career that he would struggle to surmount. Yet it would help him … | Continue reading
The writers’ arsenal may come similarly equipped for most authors, but Jenny Milchman has a secret weapon that can’t be equalized: Joy. It’s the thing that sustained her through eleven years and seven unpublished manuscripts before Cover of Snow debuted in 2013. That book won the … | Continue reading
Since I was little, I’ve been raised on stories of my parents’ history and the controversial romance between my mother, the daughter of South Indian immigrants, and an Irish-German nobody from the green ridges of Tennessee. You might say there was friction on both sides of the fa … | Continue reading
There weren’t many of us growing up in small town England in the 1980s who wore a fedora hat. Even fewer, who affected a slight lisp and wore an oversized trench coat with the collars turned up. In fact, certainly in our small town, there was just one. Me. Humphrey Bogart made a … | Continue reading
When he died, on June 9th, 1870, Charles Dickens left behind an unfinished novel. It seems to have been a murder mystery of sorts, called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and he had only written six of the intended twelve installments. Dickens had told his good friend and John Forster … | Continue reading
There’s a war on. This war has been raging for generations. Each side has its warriors, its partisans, its propagandists. Most of the time the fighting is minimal, confined to minor skirmishes in the pages of small magazines or in the backwaters of social media. But from time to … | Continue reading
Death is a funny thing, in that it may be one of the only aspects of life that really isn’t funny at all. You’ve got the grief to contend with, and the loss, and usually some suffering in there at some point. It’s something we all have waiting for us, a terrifying unknown that fe … | Continue reading
Some people have a calling in life that supersedes all else. Matt Murphy’s is justice. It’s a mission that he recounts in his new memoir, The Book of Murder: A Prosecutor’s Journey Through Love and Death (September 17, 2024; Hyperion Avenue)—a refreshingly candid account of profe … | Continue reading
We are in a surprisingly plentiful era of Ladies MacBeth—or perhaps, Ladies MacBeath? What would be the collective noun, a murder? A hand-washing? Anyway, if you have always felt there to be many more stories to be told about the infamous murderess, than here are four new takes f … | Continue reading
At the Civil War’s end, under a quarter of Americans lived in cities; by the end of the Great War, the proportion was almost exactly half. All those people moving to the cities—both from rural America and from abroad— changed things. Size created anonymity, the possibility of los … | Continue reading
There are very few things I love more than combining different genres and elements just to see what happens. Some of these combinations work better than others and I think horror and Westerns were meant to be. There are so many things about the frontier era or the wild west that … | Continue reading
In fiction, I’ve always been drawn to the brains rather than the brawn of the operation. The individual who tries to think their way out of a situation before resorting to violence. This archetype comes in three distinct flavors although occasionally the roles do bleed into each … | Continue reading
Putting kids into crime fiction can be tricky. Even those of us with the blackest of hearts sometimes cringe when a child (or, let’s be honest, a pet) is harmed on the page. But there are lots of ways—and reasons—to bring children into dark stories. My latest novel, I Dreamed of … | Continue reading
In 1919, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. claimed, in his decision in Schenck v. United States, that the First Amendment right was not allowable if it hindered larger national strategic operations, but his particular phrasing of this verdict is notable for its idio … | Continue reading
Like a lot of writers, I’m always dreaming up hypothetical “what-if” scenarios—and sometimes I’ll run these situations past my wife, Julie, to ask how she would respond. For example, I once asked what she’d do if I was on a plane that vanished at sea—like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. … | Continue reading
We all like to think of a writer’s literary career as a clean straight line climbing in a gradual upward trajectory until boom, it takes a sudden turn into that steep rise to the top of the bestsellerdom. Reality for most authors—even the most successful—is more often quite diffe … | Continue reading
“Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones,” said Petrarch. For me, that goes double for any novel set in the Middle Ages, those liminal centuries when ancient magic mixed with new religion, when love and war, feast and famine, walked hand in hand. This contradictory a … | Continue reading
I am not the only writer I know who watched a lot of television during the pandemic. Too much television. My husband and I parked ourselves on the couch and watched Tiger King (oh come on, you know you did too!), every episode of New Girl (still funny, even the second time), and … | Continue reading
I had never met the two stern-looking young women sitting across from me in the train car, but I knew who they were. Both were wearing in vintage dresses, pressed and perfect, their hair waved and smooth in the style of the 30’s. The train, too, seemed to be old; the seats were w … | Continue reading
Imagine you’re an ambitious doctor in 1820’s Edinburgh. You don’t know anything about germs or anesthesia, but you have a medicine chest of calomel, blue pills, mercury and arsenic. You lance and bleed and carry a bag with all kinds of scalpels, forceps and syringes. Unlike the m … | Continue reading
“What’s a cult?” It’s everybody’s favorite question when it comes to religion and true crime. I guess because it seems so unanswerable. Except that it’s very answerable. It’s just a boring answer. A cult is an unsuccessful religion. One too young and not big enough to absorb crim … | Continue reading
You’ve probably heard of the “write what you know” theory, or the “know what you write” rebuttal, which has probably lead to a precipitous rise in both memoirs and cursory internet research. But a lesser-known strategy is the handy “write about what you did when you were drunk,” … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anne Rasche, The Stone Witch of Florence (Park Row 0“The Stone Witch of Florence sparkles with suspense and the magical power of women. An engaging and entrancing debut.” –Laurie Lico Albanese Sarah S … | Continue reading
So, we’ve all read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, right? Maybe it was an assigned reading in high school or college, or a voluntary read to see what the fuss was all about. Perhaps you were drawn to the theme of youthful alienation and the rejection of the phoniness of … | Continue reading
You’ve reached the end of the Reacher universe, at least until the next book comes out. There are no more small towns left to explore. The villains have all been defeated, and Jack’s toothbrush is safely stowed away. What do you read next if you need a fix from the land of well-c … | Continue reading
It’s autumn in New York, which means that I am inevitably, thinking about school. I haven’t taken classes in years, and I haven’t taught in years, but I attended one formal school or another in one capacity or another for every year of my life, from pre-school through the end of … | Continue reading
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Dreams are one of those things professors and editors and more seasoned writers all tell you not to write about. It’s a day-one “don’t,” right up there with adverbs and any speaker tag other than “said.” I … | Continue reading
When we think of fall, the imagery of pumpkins, the changing color of the leaves, and cozy sweater weather always seem to be at the top of most people’s minds. For myself, fall always brings to mind the “Back to School” commercials on television, lists of new school uniform requi … | Continue reading
Every October 5th, millions of people around the world mix up a martini, throw on a bowtie, or practice some deplorable puns in a Scottish accent, all while spinning some John Barry records. For diehard fans of precisely made drinks and glamorous action adventure, Global James Bo … | Continue reading
The yakuza have always been pretty good at reading the room, or as they say in Japan, “reading the air”. When Japan finally decided to slam the door on their more traditional lines of work back in 2011 with a wave of laws that made it tricky to extort, traffic, or gamble without … | Continue reading
Welcome to my latest labor of love: a list of true crime in translation, because as far as I can tell, no one else has bothered before. There isn’t much translated nonfiction, full stop—the following list has been assembled from the past 6 years, when I first started tracking the … | Continue reading
Our memories make us who we are. In his novella Story of Your Life (basis for the film Arrival), science fiction writer Ted Chiang describes memories forming in the narrator’s mind “like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesmal sliver of combustion that was my con … | Continue reading
When we read about a crime in the newspaper, we can usually guess the offender’s motive. Murder is often committed in a fit of rage, while robbery is driven by greed. But some crimes leave us scratching our heads in puzzlement. That was my reaction upon learning that customs offi … | Continue reading
Everyone knows Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It’s the story of a respectable, wealthy doctor who transforms into a murderous alter-ego and commits terrible crimes around London. Stevenson’s life offers many possible insp … | Continue reading
I grew up reading horror. Okay, as a kid “horror” was pretty much Scooby-Doo and some children’s ghost stories, but I still devoured everything I could find, and as soon as I got my adult library card at thirteen, I headed straight for the horror section. My favorite trope is the … | Continue reading
ALACHUA, FLORIDA APRIL 1, 2015 “This is our guy,” the FBI SWAT team commander said, indicating me to the hundred officers dressed in camo fatigues before him. “He’s one of us. Don’t shoot him.” We were assembled at 4:00 a.m. in the Alachua Police Department parking lot, the early … | Continue reading
There’s always been something about a story that’s set in a desolate and beautiful place, where the wind moans just right and the paint peels and there’s a sickly sweet scent that carries so much memory that it goes straight to your metaphorical head. At least that’s been true fo … | Continue reading
Hot girl summer is over; get ready for bog witch fall. Actually, get ready for bog witch decade. From Copenhagen Fashion Week to the 2024 Met Gala, from the cover art for Hozier’s Unreal Unearth to Kasey Musgraves’ Deeper Well, imagery redolent of wet earth, green moss, brackish … | Continue reading
Beyond the ivied brick, cloisters, and towers, they walk in twos and threes. The humanities students with their leather-bound books who debate Nietzsche by candlelight. Dressed in navy and forest green, they gather in their dorm rooms and societies, glass of wine in hand, as they … | Continue reading
There’s a reason we say, “Books are magic.” We enjoy stories, but we experience books. Even avowed non-readers have touchstones in their lives. The very first book they can remember puzzling over as a child (mine was Scuffy the Tugboat). A book their parent read aloud, every sing … | Continue reading
When I started writing the eighth installment in my private eye series, on Aug. 27, 2019, not in my wildest dreams did I think more than five years would pass before publication, or that I’d have a global pandemic to blame for the delay. Nor could I have envisioned that something … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan (eds), Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema (PM Press) “Andrew Nette, Samm Deighan, and their boisterous band of noteworthy collaborators serve … | Continue reading
In the weeks after having my first child, I found myself dipping in and out of a very dark place. Around six o’clock every evening, I’d cry—my body heaving—thinking about the long night ahead. The midnight spell when I would feel more alone than I’d ever felt in my entire life. S … | Continue reading
Most avid mystery fans have heard of The Lodger. After all, it’s been used as the basis for at least five films, a stage play, numerous television episodes, several radio plays, and even an opera. The first known work to fictionalize the tale of Jack the Ripper, it was originally … | Continue reading
Dump the body in a bog. Pin it to the mucky bottom with willow branches so the corpse does not float to the surface, and eventually the decaying moss and vegetation will pickle the victim. The skin will darken, and the hair turn red from the biochemical stew. As the bog dries out … | Continue reading
Dame Maggie Smith, the consummate English actress who immortalized such characters as Jean Brodie (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Diana Barrie (California Suite), Granny Wendy (Hook), Professor Minerva McGonagall (the Harry Potter films), and Dowager Countess Violet Crawley (Dow … | Continue reading