Inevitably, all authors get the same question about their book: How on earth did you come up with this idea? I can’t answer that question in a single sentence. My recent book, Opium and Absinthe, is the third historical medical mystery I’ve written. The creation of each novel has been like stitching together a monster…
I picked up a strange book called The Dog Fighter without any prior knowledge of the author. This was in 2004, and the high praise this debut novel was getting intrigued me enough to give it a shot. One of the hooks was that the writer used no punctuation beyond periods and question marks. No…
The golden sands, verdant hills, and crystalline waters of the Caribbean Sea have called to authors since the age of piracy ended. Indeed, one of the first works set there, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, was about that most Caribbean of occupations. Following Stevenson’s path, the greats (Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream), the near-greats…
The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris is a thrilling debut, featuring a stolen Hemingway manuscript that may contain clues to the location of a bigger prize. The Hemingway Thief is a tight, well crafted thriller, which, like all good books, has characters who are neither entirely good nor completely bad. A bit, I understand, like…
Charlie Martz and Other Stories by Elmore Leonard is a collection of short, previously unpublished stories of both the Western and crime varieties (available June 16, 2015). Charlie Martz and Other Stories could be slightly jarring for unsuspecting Elmore Leonard devotees. The fifteen short stories—eleven never before published—were written early in The Dickens of Detroit's…
My fifteen-year-old son is reading Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories for his high-school English class. He started with “Indian Camp,” the story in which Nick and his father leave their summer cottage in the Michigan woods and row across Walloon Lake to help a Native American woman give birth. My son could easily picture their…
“I used to be able to open the bonnet, take out a wrench and fix my car. Now I need a degree in electronics. Even easy things are difficult now,” a character tells Johnny Worricker in Turks & Caicos, which airs on Masterpiece Contemporary this week. Difficult or intentionally incomprehensible? I say it’s more…
Ernest Hemingway is one of the biggest names of 20th century literature. He won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and his star seems in no danger of burning out even with tastes shifting away from the controversial sport of his beloved bull fighting and his outdated machismo. Though he didn’t write…
In tribute to the late Lauren Bacall, we’re looking at the four classic films she made with husband and screen partner Humphrey Bogart between 1944 and 1948: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo. First up is Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not. I have to be honest…
To grass, in British underworld parlance, means to inform on others to the police. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it derives from the word “grasshopper,” Cockney rhyming slang for copper. The term has been around in Britain awhile, since the 1930's. In the 1970's, British journalists invented a new word, “supergrass,” to label an…
