From Queen of Suspense, Agatha Christie, The Last Séance is an all-new collection of her spookiest and most sinister stories, including the never-before-published in the USA, “The Wife of Kenite!” With Halloween just around the corner, what better time to delve into a collection of spooky and mysterious tales written by the Queen of Suspense…
There’s something inherently interesting about a mystery set on an island. There are those that are set on small islands: ones that are remote, wind-swept, and hopefully facing a devastating storm. The threat of isolation without the possibility of outside assistance makes for great storytelling. Then there are the ones that explore those tiny close-knit…
My thriller, The Escape Room, set in an elevator, is a 21st-century twist to the locked-room mystery genre of crime novels. The locked-room mystery novel developed in the late 19th century and the early 20th century when readers were invited to solve the murder mystery using clues in the story, and they’ve been popular ever…
As we filed in, there at the head of this class was someone who could best be described as an older gentleman, in the truest sense of both words. En verité, his head was not egg-shaped, and it was thinly covered with white hair. He was easily in his 60s, had a thin white mustache,…
I love the combination of cinema and literature. I studied English Literature and was a screenwriter before writing my first novel, The Silent Patient—a psychological thriller about a woman who shoots her husband five times and then never speaks again. I’ve been reading mystery writers like Agatha Christie since my childhood and I’ve always been…
A country house, a dead body, a pack of suspects—sounds like Agatha Christie, no? Of course, it does. It’s said that Dame Agatha named 1958’s Ordeal by Innocence as one of her two favorite novels (Crooked House being the other), though she was known to change her answer to that particular question, as would any…
Since today is Halloween, let’s give a spooky classic the GIFnotes treatment—take a visual tour of Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party! At a Halloween party… Joyce—a hostile thirteen-year-old—boasts that she once witnessed a murder. When no one believes her… She storms off home. But within hours, her body is found, still in the house, drowned in…
I do love a book with a house in it. When I write one, I draw a floor plan with cupboards, light switches and door hinges marked. When I read one, well, I draw a floor plan with cupboards, light switches . . . and I’m not alone. A quick search online yields the Waltons’…
Every Wednesday, we here at Criminal Element will put together a list of Staff Picks of the books that published the day before—sharing the ones that we are looking forward to reading the most! This week, Hank Phillippi Ryan’s first standalone novel combines with Sophie Hannah’s third mystery in Agatha Christie’s legendary Hercule Poirot series…
The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah is an authorized installment of Dame Agatha Christie’s legendary Hercule Poirot series, where the world’s most beloved detective must solve a diabolically clever mystery set in the London of 1930. For one reason or another, I’ve had to put off reading Sophie Hannah’s authorized continuation of Dame Agatha Christie’s…
