Most mystery fans are aware that Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express was inspired by the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping. In the classic mystery, Poirot investigates the murder of Samuel Ratchett. Years ago, Ratchett was behind the kidnapping of “Little Daisy Armstrong,” but he escaped punishment. As Poirot discovers, everyone on the train has a…
Years ago, I had lunch with some friends in a London restaurant. It was in a courtyard near Holborn, a strange cobbled yard with a stranger name: Bleeding Heart Yard. When I got home, I Googled the location and found that, in the seventeenth-century, a woman called Elizabeth Hatton (of Hatton Garden fame) was murdered…
Everyone who’s old enough remembers where they were when Kennedy was killed. The mention of Elvis and Lady Diana Spencer provoke similar recollection. Why is that? Simply because they were famous? Or because they touched the lives of so many? Maybe your favorite Elvis song, played continuously on a loop, woke you from a ten-year…
Is it disrespectful and inappropriate to use a real historical atrocity in a work of fiction? Or is it worse to make one up? A problem I was confronted with when placing spy Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov in 1944 Rome for my novel The Double Agent. History, and novels, are made from significant events, and in…
I’ve written three trilogies so you’d think I would know how to do it by now. You’d be wrong. The first three-parter I wrote had a tortured journey to publication, with all three books in the series getting released by different publishers. That was the Lars & Shaine series, starting with The Devil Doesn’t Want…
My mother was the one who showed me that love stories and mysteries are alike. A lifelong Victorian lit fan, she introduced me to the romances of Austen, the mysteries of Collins, the horror of Dracula. And each of them lead further down their genred paths: Dracula led to the gothic (and me dyeing my…
Ecologically, New York City is an estuary; a giant, cleansing filter. Figuratively it is the same, and I know of no place on earth that can be so described in identical terms as accurate as they are disparate. Among the many gifts bestowed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, there is revolutionary 18th century NYC as…
When I started writing space murder mysteries, I went to the master for inspiration: Agatha Christie. I didn’t read all of her books, but I read my favorites multiple times, trying to coax out every clue, red herring, and other uniquely-Christie nuggets she slipped in. Her books are obviously brilliant, but as I delved deeper,…
Ten novels—and more than a few screenplays—into my writing career, an interview question rather took me by surprise the other day. What prompts you, I was asked, to open your computer and start writing a new story? Is it the characters, the setting, the politics, the moment in time? And I thought; hell, yes, what…
Before a big race, swimmer Michael Phelps listened to a playlist to amp up his energy, increase his focus, and get in the zone. Maybe you can picture him, headphones on, bopping his chin to a beat that was audible only to him. I’m exactly the same. You heard it here first. Michael Phelps and…
