So, yeah, the Bible. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s a classic piece of crime writing, full of violence and betrayal, sexual slavery, greed, deception and murder. Been a bestseller for years. Some decades ago, I married a Latina Catholic from Ecuador. As the child of Marxist-atheist Jews myself, it’s fair to say that I…
The involvement of animals in popular mystery fiction, as Martin Edwards notes in his excellent introduction to this collection, has been a large and lively part of the genre from its very inception. From what’s commonly acknowledged as the first detective story, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders In The Rue Morgue,” to the plethora of…
“COVID-19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain. The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue,…
Life Is Short and Then You Die is the Mystery Writers of America’s first teen anthology, edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong. Short stories aren’t easy to write. I wrote my first short story in Killer Year, an anthology edited by Lee Child, published more than a decade ago. It was one of the…
Life Is Short and Then You Die is the Mystery Writers of America’s first teen anthology, edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong. Below, enjoy an excerpt from the story “In Plain Sight” by Y. S. Lee, the author of a YA mystery series set in a Victorian-era girls’ academy that acts…
“If I could make a living writing short stories I would” That was Jeffery Deaver earlier this week at The Mysterious Bookshop at the launch event for Invisible Blood, a brand new anthology series edited by crime fiction legend Maxim Jakubowski. Cards on the table, I hadn’t heard of Maxim until a copy of Invisible…
Growing Things and Other Stories is a chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from multiple award-winning author Paul Tremblay. Paul Tremblay and I have something in common. We’re both high school teachers. That being said, he’s more likely to teach Calculus while I teach English. One of my most well-worn rules when teaching…
The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming, edited by Stephen Jones, is the third volume in the new interconnected trilogy that reveals the origins of “The Lovecraft Squad”—a super-secret worldwide organization dedicated to battling the eldritch monstrosities given form in H. P. Lovecraft’s fevered imagination. The Lovecraft Squad is a secret branch of the FBI created to hold…
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, Olen Steinhauer’s contemporary thriller combines with another fantastic anthology edited by Otto Penzler to highlight a great week of books! See what else we’re…
“I Take Care of Myself in Dreamland” by Ross Klavan Bartok is horribly scarred. Wounded in the Army, he roams through 1970’s New York, a city of perpetual night, punctuated by crime and populated by streetwalkers, hooker bars, strip clubs, easy drugs and a feeling of doom. There’s one thing on his mind: an experience…
