When I first started reading, I thought of fiction and non-fiction as two sides of the same coin, one nation perhaps, but cut in half. They were East and West Berlin, always divided, and with a heavily guarded border running down the middle, an impenetrable wall that could never come down. Then I read James…
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…
Saying goodbye can really suck. Way back in ye olden days of 2017, I wrote a noir novella titled A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps. It featured three central characters: Bill, a sarcastic and luxury-loving conman who wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was; Fiona, a hard-driving mob assassin (and Bill’s on-again, off-again…
One of the reasons I was compelled to write Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock was to illuminate the crucial role the screenwriter-turned-producer played as a literary force in Alfred Hitchcock’s career. Through the 1930s and ’40s Joan Harrison, more than any other person, was responsible for selecting which novels,…
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…
I called upon a lifetime of reading for my latest novel, A Thousand Steps, a coming-of-age thriller set in Laguna Beach in 1968. There have been so many thousands of volumes written about coastal Southern California in the last century and a half, it’s not possible to read but a fraction of them. But certain…
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,…
A Note from William Martin I like to write on a broad canvas, about high stakes, with a big idea driving me on from the first scene to the climax. For December ’41, I found them all at the movies. I was watching the World War II film, Darkest Hour. About halfway through, Churchill…
From the start, I wanted to make “place” as much a participant in my now 32-volume Joe Gunther series as the humans driving the plots. The books are set in Vermont, so the famously touted beauty and natural drama of that state supplied an easy starting point. But in addition, I wanted to ferret out…
I love crime comics—so much so that I hope to one day create an imprint dedicated to all things crime. I write crime fiction novels, too (my newest, Blue Religion, hits the shelves October 12), and screenplays, and just signed a deal to pen a new crime comic series. When I’m not writing, I look…
