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Agatha Christie

Locked-Room Mysteries: Modern Interest in the Classic Mystery Subgenre

By Gigi Pandian

March 15, 2022

A locked-room mystery is the ultimate puzzle. Not only is the mystery plot fairly clued, so the reader can match wits with the detective, but the crime itself appears to be truly impossible.  This style of mystery had its heyday in what’s known as the Golden Age of detective fiction, a period loosely defined as…

The Essential Agatha Christie

By Nina de Gramont

December 3, 2021

Two billion books and counting. Agatha Christie is not only the best-selling fiction author of all time, she’s a cultural icon, almost synonymous with mystery itself.  Whether you’re a seasoned Christie fan who’s read every single one of her sixty-six detective novels, or just setting out on the great treat of discovering her work, these…

What’s Christmas Without a Dead Santa?

By Amy Pershing

November 9, 2021

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…

Four Beloved Novels and Their Real-life Unsolved Mystery Inspirations

By Darcy Coates

October 29, 2021

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,…

Feasting on Murder: A Highly Subjective List of the Top Ten Classic Foodie Mysteries

By Amy Pershing

February 23, 2021

How does one account for the sheer number of mysteries in which food, both for good and evil, features prominently? So prominently that it’s virtually a character itself—or at least a character witness. Perhaps it’s because food (the cooking of it, the eating of it, the sharing of it) offers so many lovely options for…

Eight of Elsa Hart’s Favorite Crime Short Stories

By Elsa Hart

August 12, 2020

Elsa Hart stops by to share eight of her favorite crime short stories. Add these to your TBR, and also make sure to save room for The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, the first book in a new atmospheric mystery series set in 1703 London—a time when the old approaches to science coexist with the new,…

Five Crime Novels That Inspired Fake Plastic Girl and Fake Plastic World

By Zara Lisbon

June 12, 2020

Ever since reading Nancy Drew in third grade, I’ve wanted to write about crime. Or, more specifically, the mystery that so often comes hand in hand with crime. Between third grade and the time I eventually wrote Fake Plastic Girl and Fake Plastic World, I had many years to dive deeper into the world of…

Writing Fiction from Real Life

By Christi Daugherty

March 9, 2020

Late on the night of May 29, 1997, a talented young musician named Jeff Buckley walked into a tributary channel of the Mississippi River near Memphis, and disappeared. At the time, his star was in the ascendancy—his first album had received widespread acclaim. He was 30 years old, dark-haired and beautiful, with a voice that…

Sleuthing from the Start: The Five Books That Shaped Me The Most

By Deanna Raybourn

March 6, 2020

The books you read shape the books you write, and nothing has influenced me more than mysteries, right from the very start. The first books I remember reading—after the Madeline and Winnie-the-Pooh years—were mysteries. Encyclopedia Brown and Jupiter Jones were the gateway adventures leading to Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew. I loved them for the…

The Best Crime Books for Non-Crime Readers

By Jessica Fellowes

January 30, 2020

If you are wondering why crime is such a big genre that doesn’t appeal to you because you prefer fantasy, romance, period drama or because you tried a Poirot once and didn’t get it (this was me, too), these might change your mind. They’re not just crime books—they’re good books. Best Book for Romance Readers…

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