Hosted by Christopher Golden and actor and bestselling author Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Once Upon A Halloween Night featured St. Martin’s Press and Tor Nightfire authors teaming up to write a horror short story in real-time. The end result was “HACK.” A special thank you goes out to all of the participating authors (in…
Crime has inspired so much music that multiple volumes could be devoted to the subject. Certainly the blues, country, punk, and hip-hop have all produced songs with crime at the center, but so have Cole Porter (“Miss Otis Regrets”), Berthold Brecht (The Threepenny Opera), folk singers, and big bands. There are whole categories of songs—“murder…
Why are so many crime authors writing historical novels today? It’s a great question with about a hundred answers. Some are writing about specific people or events in the past, both public or personal, that have piqued their curiosity. Others are writing about an era in which civilization and people were so different from today…
On this, the 171st anniversary of his death, Edgar Allan Poe is more popular than ever and more misunderstood. Mystery writer S. S. Van Dine describes the detective story as a contest, in which the author seeks to “outwit the reader” by presenting a puzzle that the reader is unable to solve, despite being given…
When Prohibition shut off the taps on January 17, 1920, everything changed. The roaring twenties came on “with a bang of bad booze, flappers with bar legs, jangled morals and wild weekends,” the singer Hoagy Carmichael said. For mobsters, the explosion of speakeasies and illicit nightclubs was an unexpected windfall. Men who had scrabbled for…
Tom Hanks made a charming (and drooly) movie with a dog. Stephen King wrote a big book (followed by a movie) about a dog (if maybe a slightly less endearing one). One of the funniest, most gruesome scenes in A Fish Called Wanda featured dogs. Small ones and one LARGE one. And Lassie. Rin Tin Tin. I…
Hello everyone. I’m Terrie Farley Moran and I write cozy mysteries including the Read ’Em and Eat series. In those cozies, Sassy Cabot and Bridgy Mayfield own a café and bookstore in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. At the Read ’Em and Eat book lovers can find such luscious treats such as Old Man and the…
Some of the best fiction I’ve ever read—and I’m not just talking crime fiction—are noir and neo-noir stories that, for whatever reason, not enough people know about. And no, I’m not one of those people who, in an attempt to be cool, intentionally seeks out relatively obscure yet brilliant authors and books just so I…
As a reader, I have eclectic tastes. I tend to avoid bestseller lists, which is why my shelves are filled mainly with novels from the early-nineteenth to late-twentieth centuries. Putting aside a few staple classics, such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, this list comprises 10 books that rank among…
I didn’t know what a grand jury was when I got a letter telling me I was on one. The name made it sound like a regular jury but more fancy. Perhaps we’d get to wear big white wigs. We did not. The jury consisted of me and twentyish other disgruntled citizens who met every…
