It’s that time again! From March 16 – June 22, 2020, Sisters in Crime is accepting applications for the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award. Sisters in Crime is a wonderful organization that continues its mission to not only advance the career of women crime writers, but also serve as the voice…
One day, while I was engrossed in Dorothy L. Sayers’s wonderful Gaudy Night, a sentence leapt off the page at me: If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller—all other interests, your own and other people’s. I had been saying…
“Find my heart, and you will spy my treasure.” —”Gentleman George’s Lost Hoard” from Sugar and Vice Lost treasure. The phrase conjures up chests of gleaming gold, crates of sparkling gemstones, and every wish granted. In Sugar and Vice, the discovery of a pirate skeleton—one who was rumored to have been buried with a…
In 1993, Deborah Crombie published A Share in Death, her first Kincaid and James mystery. In October 2019, she released her 18th in the series, A Bitter Feast. As I discuss why this series is utterly compelling, beware of spoilers! Review: A Bitter Feast A Share in Death, set in a “luxurious Yorkshire time-share,” felt…
It’s almost May, and Mother’s Day is coming soon, but we all know Mother’s Day 2020 is going to be different. As I’m writing this, a lot of us are working through new parenting challenges because of stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders, and we’re turning to books to help escape. You have to admit, though, being…
Music means everything to me. If there were ever a day that music was to inexplicitly vanish from the planet as an art form, then I would most likely never be able to write another word. The two mediums are that intertwined with me. I’ll try to lay it out for you. I’m sure at…
Sam Spade Appearing in one novel and a handful of short stories, Dashiell Hammett’s dream private eye—“he is what most of the detectives I worked with would liked to have been”—remains the prototype. As good as Hammett’s Continental Op stories are, their nameless narrator lacks the charisma and iconic appeal that Spade engenders, even without…
One of the perks of writing fiction is that we can take our ugliest thoughts and our most frightening dreams, put them down on paper, and scare the pants off of our readers, making a few pennies along the way. We can create marketable monsters out of thin air: sewer-dwelling clowns, brilliant psychiatrists with cannibalistic…
More than 30 years ago, unhappy with my job as a lawyer, I read four books that changed my life. No, they weren’t self-help books. They didn’t advise me to take up meditation or yoga or psychedelic drugs. They were novels with flawed protagonists. I’ll tell you about them in a moment, but first, let…
She couldn’t have done it… Nan Patterson Nan Patterson was young, she was pretty. In fact, she was a Floradora girl, one of the celebrated lovelies in the Broadway smash of that name. She came from a good family; her father worked in the Treasury Department. Surely, she couldn’t have killed a man. When Caesar…
