Crime has inspired so much music that multiple volumes could be devoted to the subject. Certainly the blues, country, punk, and hip-hop have all produced songs with crime at the center, but so have Cole Porter (“Miss Otis Regrets”), Berthold Brecht (The Threepenny Opera), folk singers, and big bands. There are whole categories of songs—“murder…
Sherlock Holmes was, is, and likely will remain a solid fuel source for the entertainment industry, and the very latest offering is the Netflix film Enola Holmes, based on the Edgar Award-nominated YA series by Nancy Springer. Millie Bobby Brown, who launched her career playing Eleven on Stranger Things, dives into the part of Sherlock…
We teamed up with five crime writers to create a short story in real-time. The end result was “Axel’s Lament” which you can read in full below. A special thank you goes out to the participating authors (in order of appearance): C. J. Box, Ellison Cooper, Gregg Hurwitz, Michele Campbell, and Allison Brennan. The full…
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…
