Saying goodbye can really suck. Way back in ye olden days of 2017, I wrote a noir novella titled A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps. It featured three central characters: Bill, a sarcastic and luxury-loving conman who wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was; Fiona, a hard-driving mob assassin (and Bill’s on-again, off-again…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that mystery readers crave a little holiday homicide along with their eggnog. The holiday puzzler first caught on in 1936 with Mavis Doriel Hayes’s The Santa Klaus Murder. By 1938 Agatha Christie had jumped in with her hugely popular Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, which Robert Barnard called a “welcome interruption…
I’m frequently asked, “Where do your book ideas come from?” It’s a tough question because every book always has multiple influences working in concert. Which partial idea that contributes to a whole book should I point to? For my newest book, The Secret Next Door, I have so many answers but one of the inspirations…
I called upon a lifetime of reading for my latest novel, A Thousand Steps, a coming-of-age thriller set in Laguna Beach in 1968. There have been so many thousands of volumes written about coastal Southern California in the last century and a half, it’s not possible to read but a fraction of them. But certain…
Just as you can tell a lot about a person from their books, you can tell a lot about a person from their noir preferences. These are seven favorites from my shelf that show what kind of reader I am, and what I was inspired by while writing my novel, Repentance. The Latin American…
Humans are curious by nature. We want to see mysteries resolved. The bigger the mystery and the stranger the clues, the deeper our craving for answers. Nowhere is this more on display than in the true crime community when faced with a death or disappearance that has gone unsolved. Authors aren’t immune to this. Sometimes,…
A Note from William Martin I like to write on a broad canvas, about high stakes, with a big idea driving me on from the first scene to the climax. For December ’41, I found them all at the movies. I was watching the World War II film, Darkest Hour. About halfway through, Churchill…
Somehow, despite what feels like mounting evidence to the contrary, we’ve nearly arrived at 2022. And while we’re still in denial, it seems all but certain to happen. So rather than sulk, we’ve decided to take a look at more than 50 of the most highly anticipated mysteries and thrillers hitting shelves between January and…
From the start, I wanted to make “place” as much a participant in my now 32-volume Joe Gunther series as the humans driving the plots. The books are set in Vermont, so the famously touted beauty and natural drama of that state supplied an easy starting point. But in addition, I wanted to ferret out…
Who’s in control of your life? You? Or someone or something else? It’s a heady question, asked about as long as humans have thought about anything, and it’s at the heart of crime fiction, especially noir. Much of crime fiction is predicated on inevitability (chances are the detective is going to solve the case, order…
