At the 1993 Edgar Awards banquet, the best first novel award went to a new author named Michael Connelly, whose debut Harry Bosch novel The Black Echo had been published the previous year. The promise of that first book has clearly been fulfilled, with Connelly going on to become one of the most prolific and…
Ken Follett published Eye of the Needle in 1978, and the book achieved a level of success that few other Edgar Award winners have matched; I can only think of a small handful of Edgar winners that ascended to similar heights (The Long Goodbye, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and The Day…
Like many other distinguished science fiction and fantasy authors, Jack Vance won multiple Hugo awards, a Nebula award, a World Fantasy Award, and plenty of other honors. Unlike most other holders of these awards, Vance also has the highest award in the field of mystery writing, an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.…
As several philosophers will tell you, all things eventually transform into their opposites. To see the proof of that, we need look no further than the final three episodes of Luke Cage Season 2. Luke (Mike Colter), who has sought to avoid shifting from Harlem’s hero to just another destructive force hurting his neighbors, finds…
Episode 7 ended in a bloodbath (Comanche, Piranha, Captain Ridenhour, Mariah’s brownstone), so it’s no surprise that Episode 8 has the cops rushing in and taking things over. We’ve come to that point in the crime story where the damage has grown so great that law enforcement starts getting the bulk of the face time.…
The only difference between the poor and the rich, according to a highly disputed piece of conventional wisdom, is hard work; conventional wisdom also says that the only difference between crime and legitimate enterprise is the law (this can also be disputed). So at what point does a criminal’s hard work result in legitimate success?…
One difference between a comic book story and a crime story is the amount of face time given to the villain. In the early days of comics, only the heroes had to make tough choices; villains rarely stayed around beyond a couple of issues. In contrast, a crime story gives its dangerous characters a chance…
After a slump that had Luke Cage getting wheeled on a gurney for almost three whole episodes, Cage and his show come roaring back to life in Episode 11, shielding decent people with his indestructible frame and sending bad guys to the floor with flicks of his wrist. As I said in my first wrap-up,…
Like a lot of story types—Westerns, soap operas, romantic comedies—there are limits to what superhero tales can deliver. You don’t have to read too many Marvel or DC comics before you start seeing familiar patterns and structures, and when you translate those comics to the big and small screens, you don’t break free of those…
In 1994, Marvel Comics released a four-issue comic book miniseries by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross called Marvels, and it was built on an interesting concept: It told the stories of four classic superhero encounters from the point of view of an average-joe bystander named Phil Sheldon. Phil witnesses the Submariner battle the Human Torch…
