My wife Ellen’s maiden name is Highsmith. And yes, she’s related. Which was the entire flimsy reason that I decided to read each of Aunt Pat’s five Tom Ripley thrillers. That and my love of all things Alfred Hitchcock—especially Strangers on a Train, the movie Hitch made from Patricia Highsmith’s… Read more
Everyone loves a good suspense film. The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl are two of the best and most interesting mystery films of the last few years, grossing nearly $140 million between them. The casting of these two films—Emily Blunt, Justin Theroux, and Alison Janney in Train and… Read more
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… Read more
In 1960s New York, the Stackhouse family appears to be living the good life—seemingly perfect in every way. But Walter Stackhouse has grown weary of his wife Clara and lusts after another woman. But when Clara ends up dead, his picturesque life turns into chaos as he’s forced to prove… Read more
Read this exclusive guest post from Kate Horsley, author of The American Girl, about the thrill of traveling to strange and foreign places and how that creates the perfect setting for crime novels. Then, make sure you're signed in and comment below for a chance to win a copy of the… Read more
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… Read more
When writing about a film adaptation of a work of fiction, it can get a little tricky when the movie in question is actually based on two different novels. But in the case of the 1977 neo-noir title, The American Friend by Wim Wenders, it’s really not all that complicated…. Read more
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… Read more
Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s is a box set of work by Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Dolores Hitchens, Helen Eustis, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The website for the collection is worth exploring, with galleries, also essays from… Read more
An observation I had in my years working for Sports Illustrated: athletes and the heroes of crime fiction have much in common, but most simply this—a ruthless clarity of purpose and an ability to perform at their best when the action reaches its climax. Below I’ve assembled a football team… Read more
