Most mystery fans are aware that Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express was inspired by the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping. In the classic mystery, Poirot investigates the murder of Samuel Ratchett. Years ago, Ratchett was behind the kidnapping of “Little Daisy Armstrong,” but he escaped punishment. As Poirot discovers, everyone on the train has a…
When I started writing space murder mysteries, I went to the master for inspiration: Agatha Christie. I didn’t read all of her books, but I read my favorites multiple times, trying to coax out every clue, red herring, and other uniquely-Christie nuggets she slipped in. Her books are obviously brilliant, but as I delved deeper,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
