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…
I’ve always been fascinated by cold cases. I’ve often thought about why—is it because I love mysteries? Is it about human nature and the need for answers? Is it a bit darker than that…a fascination with the unknown or the unknowable, or an interest in the murder of strangers? Whatever the reason, I’m not the…
We teamed up with six mystery writers to create a short story in real-time. The end result was “All Too Well” which you can read in full below! A special thank you goes out to the participating authors (in order of appearance): Gigi Pandian, Samantha Jayne Allen, Anna Downes, Camilla Sten, Alex Finlay, and Stacy…
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…
For a serial killer who enjoys provoking headlines, the greatest irony is that true fame requires being caught, and make no mistake—they do not wish to be caught. A few killers have managed to capture public imagination anyway. Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer have each inspired numerous books and movies. Theories about their…
