Stories to the Rescue Why I Wrote A Killing in the Hills A few years ago I was sitting at my desk in the newsroom of the Chicago Tribune, armed with the two essentials of my craft, in order of importance: a cup of coffee and a computer. I was checking out the competition, clicking…
It’s funny how simple childhood memories can be the genesis of a book series on the most notorious criminals this country has ever known. One of my earliest memories is of a Dallas kitchen, with Marina Oswald cooking chicken for dinner with my mom. At the time, I didn’t know who the slim brunette was,…
Most crime stories have a beginning and an end. They start with the crime, then the investigation by law enforcement authorities—and finally the solving of the case. But that’s not the way it works with cold cases. All we have left is unanswered questions. Which is what makes cold cases so fascinating. As a longtime…
In a lot of ways, my dad was larger than life, a kid who was born on a farm to immigrant parents and who eventually moved to the big city where because of the Depression, he never finished high school. He joined the Marines in WWII and his many medals are now proudly displayed on…
One day, while I was engrossed in Dorothy L. Sayers’s wonderful Gaudy Night, a sentence leapt off the page at me: If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller—all other interests, your own and other people’s. I had been saying…
“Find my heart, and you will spy my treasure.” —”Gentleman George’s Lost Hoard” from Sugar and Vice Lost treasure. The phrase conjures up chests of gleaming gold, crates of sparkling gemstones, and every wish granted. In Sugar and Vice, the discovery of a pirate skeleton—one who was rumored to have been buried with a…
It’s almost May, and Mother’s Day is coming soon, but we all know Mother’s Day 2020 is going to be different. As I’m writing this, a lot of us are working through new parenting challenges because of stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders, and we’re turning to books to help escape. You have to admit, though, being…
Music means everything to me. If there were ever a day that music was to inexplicitly vanish from the planet as an art form, then I would most likely never be able to write another word. The two mediums are that intertwined with me. I’ll try to lay it out for you. I’m sure at…
Sam Spade Appearing in one novel and a handful of short stories, Dashiell Hammett’s dream private eye—“he is what most of the detectives I worked with would liked to have been”—remains the prototype. As good as Hammett’s Continental Op stories are, their nameless narrator lacks the charisma and iconic appeal that Spade engenders, even without…
One of the perks of writing fiction is that we can take our ugliest thoughts and our most frightening dreams, put them down on paper, and scare the pants off of our readers, making a few pennies along the way. We can create marketable monsters out of thin air: sewer-dwelling clowns, brilliant psychiatrists with cannibalistic…
