Read this exclusive guest post from Michael Cannell, author of Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, and make sure to sign in and comment below for a chance to win a signed copy of the book! New York convulsed with anxiety in 1956 as police searched in vain for…
Crime and mystery fiction’s diversity attracts a broad readership. For instance, I prefer the soft stuff and am attracted to the puzzle rather than grizzly details, while many of my friends enjoy peeled skin and body parts. Knowing that, it seems immensely impertinent for me to try to compile a “best of” list on my…
As the presidential election campaigns end and the polls begin to close, we'd like to take a break from the real world and lose ourselves in our favorite place—a good book! From Agatha Christie's Miss Marple to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, there are several fictional characters we'd love to see duke it out on…
“My first case,” says Father Brown in The Mask of Midas, “was just a small private affair about a man’s head being cut off.” It’s not surprising that G.K. Chesterton’s sleuth begins with a paradox; a great many books belonging to the genre known as cozy mysteries have, in fact, a paradox at their heart.…
In the second Lord Peter/Harriet Vane case, a walking tour of the English coast hardly goes according to plan when Miss Vane, mystery writer and once accused murderess, stumbles across a body on the beach. Exonerated of the poisoning murder of her former lover, Harriet is vacationing far from London in the hopes of distancing…
London, 1929 Miss Harriet Vane is on trial for murder. It's a most scandalous case. The victim, Philip Boyes, was not only an author who advocated free love and anarchy—he was the accused murderer's lover for more than a year. But following a nasty split, Boyes started falling ill, and always after a chance…
When Harriet Vane receives an invitation to attend her Oxford Gaudy — a class reunion — she's also given a most unusual request from her old professors. A poison pen is running amok at the ladies' college of Shrewsbury and the dons are terrified that the nasty notes, malicious vandalism, and obscene threats against them…
All too often, people assert that so-called “genre” fiction (a class that includes mystery fiction) is separate from “literary” fiction. I think not. Why should literary fiction and mystery fiction be mutually exclusive categories? Who makes such distinctions? If literary fiction is driven by plot, complex characters, serious tone, and elegant narration, then the subsequent…
The fun of reading mysteries laced with romance is the double plot: 1) solve the crime; and 2) watch the characters banter while solving the crime. Romance is often about how they compromise and learn to trust. There’s no better way learn that than if you’re working together to stay alive. Note: I left Nick…
The period immediately following World War I was a time of particular social turmoil, involving issues such as labor, class, and colonialism. People were changed as individuals, too. Former soldiers had to deal with their return from battle to families who might not understand them any longer. Those who’d stayed on the home front had…
