Alger Hiss, the Soviet spy at the center of my novel, Gods of Deception, hardly fits the mold of his contemporaries, such infamous Cold War agents as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross (the Cambridge Five), who were all plagued by fears of exposure, alcoholism, and some would say self-hate…
Graham Greene's The Comedians (1966) opens as the Medea ship makes its way to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti with a rich assortment of passengers aboard, including a former presidential candidate, a military “expert,” and a hotelier named Brown who dubs all of them comedians—his rationale: Now that I approached the end of life it was only my…
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…
I can’t read a book of any kind—thriller, literary fiction, memoir, biography, even history—unless the setting speaks to me. I need to feel, with all my senses, the physical world in which the writer is trying to involve me. Often, that’s what I’m left with years later when I think of the work: not the…
Who threw over 600 books in total from his vehicle onto Colorado highways—would you believe it was a bookseller?! With upcoming conferences, not to mention Halloween, you may want to make one of these cute crime scene headbands as seen on Mystery Playground. Whether you've been to Bouchercon before or Raleigh's Murder Under the Oaks…
Joseph Cotten holds a peculiar place in movie history. He was a charismatic and bankable movie star in the forties, and he was a fine actor and an all-around nice guy, but he lived most of his adult life, and will likely live throughout the ages, in the shadow of his friend Orson Welles. Even…
For novelists, the Second World War is a canvas with the primary colors already filled in — a conflict of cataclysmic proportion that changed not only the map of the world, but reached deep inside the souls of nations. Moreover, it's the last major conflict in which writers feel comfortable embracing one side without reservation,…
Many of the world’s greatest writers have a touch of the pulp. They reveal characters not just in the traditional literary manner—profound thoughts, witty dialogue, yadda yadda—but by driving them to points of maximum stress and danger and seeing what they do. Great literature can get bloody. To fulfill his deepest ambitions, Macbeth doesn’t plot…
Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was my first brush with the notion that writers were spies. At nine I was Harriet, furiously scribbling in my notebook as I peered under gates and through knot-holed fences in my neighborhood. I spied on my family too. Great fun, until my intelligence activities were discovered. Writers are natural…
Former loves are sometimes best viewed in memory. Seeing them again after all these years can be depressing (“Could she have really twisted me up so bad?”) and even disillusioning (“OMG, let me out of here!”) So when I got the restored version of The Third Man (1949) it was with some trepidation that I…
