I set my second novel in Cuba in the closing months of 1958, when American power brokers in Washington—namely the CIA, FBI, White House, and State Department—dithered between support for the corrupt but reliably pro-American Batista regime and the popular but largely unknown Castro-led rebellion. The tension between democratic ideals and predictable tyranny was on…
Especially prescient in today’s times, Michael Cannell's Incendiary whisks us through the streets of Manhattan—to Grand Central, Times Square, Penn Station, Radio City Music Hall—where for almost two decades New Yorkers faced the lingering threat of terrorism. Clues were sparse, and as the bombings continued, pressure forced the police to look elsewhere for help. Enter…
The Lost Codex by Alan Jacobson is a thriller about two ancient biblical documents that reveal long-buried secrets that could change the world forever (available November 3, 2015). Read this exclusive excerpt of The Lost Codex by Alan Jacobson, and then make sure you're signed in and comment for a chance to win an advanced reading…
Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s is a box set of work by Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Dolores Hitchens, Helen Eustis, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The website for the collection is worth exploring, with galleries, also essays from Sarah Weinman, the editor, and…
Hiding in plain sight! Espionage author Frederick Forsyth reveals his 20 years of spying for MI6 in his upcoming autobiography. Read more in the Telegraph: “It is 55, 60 years later. There have been memoirs written, highly secret minutes have been published. There's no East Germany, no Stasi, no KGB, no Soviet Union, so where's…
Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil is one of the great pieces of cinematic trash. It’s a frantic film, wildly over the top, in love with its own squalor, infatuated with the feel and smell of decay. Among the director’s attempts at pulp, it is his masterpiece. At its center is Welles himself, joyously grotesque in…
I first saw Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir The Big Heat decades ago, and I just viewed it again this week. This time I watched it immediately after reading William P. McGivern’s novel of the same title. This is the latest in my series of posts where I rave about an underappreciated noir novel while…
In the vast criminal menagerie that Margaret Millar created over the course of her long career, there is a special place for the “woman in distress” plot. She wrote many different kinds of stories — and her novels were as likely to feature male protagonists as female — but one of the things that she…
Note: This post kicks off a series celebrating the career of one of mystery fiction’s true giants, beginning with the novel Do Evil in Return. This month marks the centennial of the great Margaret Millar. At her peak, Millar was about as successful as a mystery writer could be. She published 27 books, won the…
“Audiences want a new type of freak. Something different,” Dandy proclaimed. The season finale of Freak Show was not exactly different from its sister incarnations, but we did get some nice (and by nice, I really mean absolutely horrific) moments during “Curtain Call.” Dandy (Finn Wittrock) is as much a whining brat managing a freak…
