Here’s how it commenced: One night when I was twelve, maybe thirteen, I caught the film Ten Little Indians on TV. It was the 1965 version, not the best (see 1945’s Then There were None) but compelling all the same. The set-up and execution (literally!) really grabbed me: Take ten strangers, strand them in an isolated mansion, and toss in some shadowy past sins, a slew of quirky murders, and an embedded killer, and what have you got? The beginning of a Christie reader.  

Not long after that evening, I learned that the person who’d dreamed up that dastardly little soiree was a rather renowned Englishwoman, well-born and cultured, who’d been responsible for scores of cold-blooded murders. That week I invested in my first Agatha Christie novel. It was a Dell paperback called Murder After Hours (aka The Hollow.) The cover art reminded me of the Golden Book Encyclopedia covers: a collection of seemingly random objects arranged in still-life. Here, scattered upon a window ledge, were a glowing flashlight, a crumpled note, a teacup and a revolver. Just outside the cracked windowpane, a large owl—shorthand for all things mysterious—sat on a bare black branch and stared forward menacingly. Good stuff. 

[Keep Reading, It's What Agatha Would Have Wanted...]

...baby name expert [Laura Wattenberg] took stock of the increase in gun and hunting-themed baby names. Her statistics [from 2002-2012] show a steady rise in firearm nomenclature.... “Colt, Remington, and Gauge have all soared, and Gunner is much more common than the traditional name Gunnar.”

Ruger is also a surprising new star among current boys' names. But what about the girls?

According to Wattenberg, the fastest growing name for girls in the past year was Cataleya, the main character in the movie Colombiana, where Zoe Saldana plays a child of murdered parents who grows up to be an assassin.

Read the rest by Abby Haglage at The Daily Beast for more unusual trends in baby names. Apparently, by New Mexico state law, you can't name your kid Scrotum anymore. Killjoys.

Providence Rag, the third book in the Liam Mulligan series by Bruce DeSilva, forces a journalist to dig through his town's archives in order to keep a convicted serial killer in jail (available March 11, 2014).

Bruce DeSilva, 2011 Edgar winner for Best First Novel, reflects his 41 years as a journalist in his new novel, Providence Rag, a crime novel inspired by a true story.

The captivating beginning of Providence Rag describes the thoughts of a convicted serial slasher, Kwame Diggs, who is at the heart of this novel. Here, Diggs is a child torturing a grasshopper.

“The grasshopper struggles, its six legs making a faint scratching sound as they rake the stone. The boy burns the legs off one by one, and the scratching stops. Carefully, he amputates each antenna. A brown, unblinking eye stares up at him, pleading for an end to this…”

In the end of the scene, Diggs is amazed at his power:

 “With a start, he feels a swelling in his jeans. He wonders: Am I God?”

Many chapters are introduced with Diggs’s twisted thoughts as he grows into full adolescence driven by sexual needs and the physical power to fulfill those needs.

He lingered under the tree, giving her time to fall asleep. Then he laid his binoculars in the pine needles, crawled out from under the branches, vaulted her white picket fence, and crossed the wet grass to the rear door. There, an overhead lamp was burning. He reached up and gave the bulb a twist, extinguishing the light.
He tried the door. It was locked. He considered breaking a pane of glass to reach the inside latch, but that would make too much noise. Instead, he edged along the back of the house, looking for another way inside.

[Hold on while I go make sure my door is locked...]

Candles can be soothing, aromatic, and perfect for adding some warmth to a cold winter's night. But if you prefer a side of “creepy critter” with your candles, these might just be the ones for you. These candles will be available at PyroPet later this month, just in time to send those winter blues running—or maybe just send you running away screaming “Kill it, kill it with fire!” Either way, we think it'll be a fun addition!

Brooklyn Graves by Triss Stein is the second traditional mystery featuring historian Erica Donato, who'll research Tiffany glass as well as the murder of a family friend (available March 4th, 2014).

Erica Donato is a single mother of a teenage daughter and an overworked, underpaid, dissertation-writing apprentice historian. In the space of one twenty-four hour period, all of the balls she has been juggling drop around her. At work, she is assigned a historical research project involving the Tiffany family—yes, that Tiffany. Between exploring dilapidated mausoleums containing Tiffany artwork in Green-Wood Cemetery and digging through turn of the century letters, Erica must complete all of her other academic work.

Then Erica’s daughter, Chris, drops a bombshell. A good friend of the family, Dima, who worked as a custodian at Chris’ school, has been killed. He was shot through the head and found lying on his front lawn. In the days after the news breaks, Erica tries to help her friend, Natalya, Dima’s wife, navigate the waters of police interviews and grief. However, as she works to help Natalya, Erica discovers there’s more to this family than meets the eye.

And history doesn’t always stay in the past.

Brooklyn Graves is the second novel in the Erica Donato series. Here history meets modern Brooklyn. With her contacts and background in New York history, Erica is where the past and present meet. She sees connections and links where others don’t.

Neat, historical touches are woven throughout the story. Erica’s first brush with Tiffany artwork takes place, macabrely enough, in a cemetery: Green-Wood Cemetery. There are mausoleums with stained glass windows attributed to Tiffany’s work. Erica visits the cemetery with the preeminent Tiffany expert, Dr. Thomas Flint. Together they learn there may have been damage to the windows, a circumstance that greatly bothers Dr. Flint and causes Erica a mountain of follow-up work.

[The broken-windows theory of solving murders?]

Board Stiff by Annelise Ryan is the 5th in the Mattie Winston Mystery series about a small-town coroner who'll investigate the death of a nursing home owner (available March 4, 2014).

Mattie Winston is a nurse-turned-coroner by profession, living in a small town in Wisconsin. Mattie is tough, never dainty, and sweet on Steve Hurley, a local homicide detective whose ex-wife, Kate, just moved back in with him. When Kate shows up on his doorstep, Hurley finds out that she’s not so much his ex-wife as his current wife (since she never signed the divorce papers) and she’s not so much alone, as she's traveling with the 15 year-old daughter that he never knew he had. Feeling bad, Hurley lets them stay with him, causing Mattie to enter a downward slide. Losing your boyfriend is one thing, but finding out he’s still married and has a daughter is more than most people can handle.

As the story opens, we find Mattie attending a mandatory therapy session, ordered by her boss, Izzy, at the coroner’s office. It’s a requirement to getting her old job back, which she desperately wants. She might as well work for the coroner if she’s not going to date Hurley. Since they broke up, the conflict of interest issue is a moot point. In addition, she’s been spending a little too much time at the casino, and kind of needs to stop.

[Troubles beget troubles...]

In case you missed it, last week Criminal Element took a look at this year’s Academy Awards nominees and ranked them based solely on three categories: murder, mystery, and mayhem. In researching these films, CrimeHQ found a list detailing the 25 deadliest films based on total body count.

The list mixes critically acclaimed films pretty evenly with less distinguished ones, including three Best Picture winners: Braveheart, with 184 bodies, Titanic with 307 bodies, and the winner, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, with 836 bodies!

And in case you were wondering about movies where planets, planes, or cities explode, the count is just reflective of on-screen body counts.

HT: Thanks to Movie Bodie Counts for tallying the totals and to Randal Olson for creating the chart.

City of Darkness and Light by Rhys Bowen, the thirteenth novel in the Molly Murphy historical series, follows the young mother to Paris in 1905, where she loses track of friends and stumbles onto a murder (available March 4, 2014).

Molly Sullivan, nee Molly Murphy, is a fighter. She’s had to be. She escaped from Ireland and is wanted by the law in New York City. She’s become a private detective, facing all manners of dangerous criminals. Now married to police Captain Daniel Sullivan and mother to baby Liam, she winds up traveling to Paris, but it’s not as glamorous as she’d expected. Firstly, she’s escaping the Cosa Nostra gang, who are presumably the culprits behind the house fire that killed her nanny and almost cost Molly her life. Secondly, when she arrives at the rented apartment of her friends Sid and Gus, she discovers them missing. Ever intrepid, Molly sets off to find them, navigating the unfamiliar city and language with her usual plucky courage.

Along the way, she lands in the midst of the burgeoning Parisian art scene. Bowen has great fun with inserting Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Gertrude Stein and Mary Cassatt into the story. Molly’s usual stomping grounds of Greenwich Village are replaced by her wonder at the culture of Paris, though she has little time for sightseeing as while investigating the mystery of her missing friends, she stumbles ontothe murder of a renowned painter Reynold Bryce.

[Will Molly be able to see the whole picture...]

Many people believe that Alice Crimmins got away with the 1965 murder of her two children. But could the Crimmins case have provided fodder for a future child killer?

Alice Crimmins always maintained her innocence, but the police and much of the press believed Alice Crimmins was a slut and therefore a murderer. She was convicted of manslaughter, but that conviction was overturned. She was retried in 1971 and convicted of the first-degree murder of her son and manslaughter of her daughter. In 1973, she was again set free. Upon review, the Appellate Division reversed the murder conviction, and affirmed the manslaughter conviction, but Crimmins never returned to jail. While in jail she had married her wealthy lover, Anthony Grace. She lived with him, and his money, until his death.

Fast forward to October 25, 1994. Susan Smith, then 23, claims that a black man hijacked her car and drove away with her children inside. A nation watches horrified as the grieving mother makes emotional pleas on television for the safe return of her two small boys, three-year old Michael, and 14-month old Alex. Nine days later, the children are found dead, strapped into their seats in the car, lying at the bottom of John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina.

The police arrested Smith and tried her for murder.

Was history repeating itself? Or is it possible that Susan Smith knew Alice Crimmins’s story? A made-for-TV movie called A Question of Guilt based on the Crimmins affair came out in 1978. John Guare wrote a play inspired by Crimmins, Landscape of the Body, that opened in 1977 and has since been restaged many times. Two Small Bodies by Neal Bell was made into a film in 1993.

Did Smith decide that if one slut could murder her kids and walk away with a rich husband, why not two?

Sheer speculation, to be sure, but Smith might easily have seen some of herself in Alice Crimmins. Both were in troubled marriages, both had wealthy men on the side, both had two children cramping their style.

[An awful tale, old as time...]

Thirty seconds into the show, and already I’m smiling. The theme music by Angelo Badalamenti is a slow, sugary mix of synth and strings that’s, well, goofy. Along with the green neon credits, the music practically screams 1990. But what the hell, there’s no shame in screaming 1990. (The beginning of Casablanca screams 1942, etc.) These credits go on for a surprisingly long time, though, and the longer they go on, the more interesting the music becomes. Or perhaps a better way to put it is to say that by the end of the credits, I’m not so sure they scream 1990 anymore. Yes, they seem very much of their time, but there’s also a deliberate oddness to them, an almost stubborn insistence on pathos that I am shortly to learn will be a consistent quality throughout this pilot episode.

We begin with the discovery of a dead girl, naked and wrapped in plastic next to a river in the logging town of Twin Peaks, Washington.  Ah ha. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” The line itself floats up from the past like a question from a game of Trivial Pursuit.

[There's always more than meets the eye...]

Thank goodness she has a tote bag!

This bounty of Good and Evil from our sweepstakes found its way to winner Pat D., who was nice enough to send us a picture!

We're sharing it with you, too, so you'll see CrimeHQ delivers. And, no, we simply can't imagine why people who read crime stories have developed such suspicious minds.

Last episode, we saw the true detectives' fiery breakup. Maggie dealt Martin a dose of his own unfaithful medicine, we met founder of the Wellspring schools Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle, and modern-day Rust and Martin met after leaving the interviews with Gilbough and Papania. Rust talks Martin into a discussion over beer, and Martin follows Rust's truck… but only after checking the cylinder of his revolver.

The episode's title, “After You've Gone,” plays on the break-up angle. We meet the former detectives in a roadhouse. “Angel of the Morning” by Juice Newton plays on the juke, a bittersweet love song that references freedom and bondage:

There'll be no strings to bind your hands/not if my love can't bind your heart

Cohle is now a bartender and Martin is a private dick, rather fitting, since that's what he thinks with. They verbally spar like exes. “I don't dwell in the past,” Martin says. Rust counters. He goes on to give his old partner a hint of what he's found about the Dora Lange case, and Martin is about to walk away when he lays it on the line: “A man pays his debts. We left something undone.”

Beware: spoilers and the spoiled will follow.

[But we're gone too far to turn back now...]

The Player by Brad Parks is the fifth book in the Carter Ross series that follows the reporter as he investigates a suspicious disease, and in doing so, becomes sick himself (available March 4, 2014).

Carter Ross is an investigative reporter with the Newark Eagle Examiner. He’s got story trouble and girl trouble and he’s not sure which is worse. Then what seemed to be a tip from a crazy person may turn into a story of a lifetime.

Edna Foster and her neighbors are getting sick – their bones were breaking for no reason and they had sudden flu symptoms. And then Edna went into renal failure and died. Her granddaughter, Jackie, a Rutgers pre-med student, reaches out to Carter for help.

“Hi Mr. Ross, my name is Jackie Orr,” came the voice on the other end. It was the voice of someone young, black, and determined.

“Hi Jackie, what can I do for you?”

“Do you ever do stories about people getting sick?”

“That depends,” I said. “Who’s getting sick?”

“Everyone.”

“What do you mean ‘everyone’?” I asked. So far, so good: kooks often insisted that whatever troubled them also afflicted others.

“Well, first it was just my grandmother. Or we thought it was just my grandmother. But then it turned out to be the whole neighborhood.”

“Sounds like you need a lawyer more than you need a newspaper reporter,” I said.

“I tried that. I tell them people are sick and they’re interested. But once they hear it’s not some open-and-shut mesothelioma case, they don’t want anything to do with it. I talked to one lawyer who sounded a little interested, but then he wanted a fifty-thousand-dollar retainer. If we had fifty thousand dollars, we wouldn’t be bothering with lawsuits. We’d just move. Our case is a little more complicated than anyone seems to want to take on.”

I felt myself sitting up in my chair and paying closer attention. There are certain words kooks tend not to use. “Mesothelioma” is one of them. So while that was a little disappointing – no kook call for me today – it was also more promising from a journalistic standpoint. As a newspaper reporter, I have a certain bias towards the disenfranchised, disadvantaged masses that others, not even sleazy lawyers, want to listen to. Maybe it’s because, deep down, I fancy myself a good-hearted human being who wants to help the less fortunate. Or maybe it’s because the Pulitzer committee shares the same bias.

[How far will the disease spread...]

Zero Volume 1: An Emergency by Ales Kot and illustrated by various artists is a collection of five comics that follow Edward Zero, the top spy for The Agency who learns he's been working for the wrong side (available March 4, 2014). 

When I think of spy thrillers, the first thing that comes to mind is James Bond. Lots of slam-bang action, a good helping of espionage and double-crosses, secretive organizations at cross-purposes seeking to outwit one another through the maneuvering of their agents – all these were popularized by the books and subsequent movies and have become hallmarks of the genre. The first volume of the comic book series Zero has all these elements in spades, but also brings to the forefront another aspect of classic spy novels that is often overlooked, despite being of critical importance to the driving plot: technology so advanced that it reads like science fiction. Think of Q before his gadgets were rendered “realistic” in the last few Bond movies, or of the evil plans in Moonraker and Diamonds Are Forever.

[The name's Zero, Edward Zero...]

Wrecked by Tricia Fields is the third book in the series about West Texas Chief of Police Josie Gray, who is tasked with finding her lover, a man who is missing and suspected of murder (available March 4, 2014).

Josie Gray, Chief of Police of a small West Texas town, is a tough, capable woman, but her strength is put to the test when her lover, Dillon Reese, goes missing. Dillon’s secretary is dead, his office ransacked, and his car is gone. Did he flee for his life? Or did he flee from the crime?

Distraught as she is, Josie has to maintain her professional composure and proceed with the investigation in her normal, methodical way. However, to do this, she has to turn the investigation over to her lead detective, Otto, allowing him to take charge. Though it’s for the best, it still grates against her need for control and leadership.

Adding to her troubles, the mayor, who dislikes women in leadership roles, is dragging her into his dirty little affairs, providing another distraction.

[Maybe the mayor did it...]

When J. Kingston Pierce of     The Rap Sheet   brought back the crime cover contest this year, we were delighted—so here's more from him, including a chance to share with you!

I come from a very visually oriented family—my father was an architect, my mother had worked in the field of technical drawing. And I remember well the first time I realized that book-cover design meant something special to me. It was in the early 1970s, when I was still a boy. I had purchased (for the then princely sum of 75 cents) a 1969 Ballantine paperback edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 alien invasion novel, Childhood’s End. Subsequently, the same publisher released a revamped edition of that book (this time priced at $1.25!), which featured what I decided was a more captivating cover illustration. I promptly started saving coins enough to buy that new version, in addition, despite my mother’s protestations that it was not worth the price, that—save for the cover—they were the exact same book. I was less than eloquent in explaining why I needed both versions, but I did finally add them to my bookshelves.

My interest in book jackets has only grown since. It wasn’t long after I launched my crime fiction-oriented blog, in 2006, that I began writing about the state of the genre’s cover designs, which I often found wanting—especially as they demonstrated a tendency to use the same photos over and over, as if nobody would notice. In 2009, I introduced a second blog, Killer Covers, which focuses primarily on crime novel fronts, vintage as well as contemporary. And in between those start-ups, I debuted a competition to judge some of the best covers produced every year.

The Rap Sheet's cover contest for crime titles published during 2013 kicked off near the end of last month. It offered readers the choice of 15 jackets from crime, mystery, and thriller works. “All of them …,” I wrote by way of introduction, “are special in their own ways, whether it’s because of their typographical excellence, their bold imagery, or the manner in which they suggest the intensity of drama to be enjoyed between their covers.” And here are those finalists:

[Read on for the winners and a chance to win one!]

Here at CrimeHQ, the more murder, mystery, and mayhem you can fit into your movie, the more we’ll like it. This year, nine films were nominated for Best Picture, so we've created a custom carnage count to score the winners (if there were any justice in the world). Each movie will be judged on its three categories on a scale from 1 to 10, which will then be added together to give a final ranking. Yes, I have seen all nine movies, and yes, these rankings are exclusively the byproduct of my opinion.

There will be some minor/obvious spoilers. You’ve been warned.

[Okay, let’s get to the carnage!]

Here, we sometimes talk about very nightmare-enducing topics. However, artist Joshia Hoffine is spending much of 2014 bringing those nightmares to life. The above picture is from a series of photoshoots (and a soon-to-be film) that brings those very fears to your screens. Ever felt like there was a monster under your bed? You're covered! Hate that feeling like someone is under those creaky stairs as you walk down? Those, too! His collection of horror photography features everything from these childhood nightmares to visions of the undead, cannibalism, and just general creepiness. Here's part of the statement from his website:

I am interested in the psychology of fear.

We are all born with certain inherent and instinctual fears, such as fear of the dark, the fear of lurking danger, and the fear of being eaten. As we grow older these fears lose their intensity and are slowly shuffled away into our Unconscious.

Horror, as an art form, draws its strength from the Unconscious.

Hoffine does manage to capture that.

Hat tip to the gallery at Buzzfeed for sharing this gruesome collection.