Most of us probably know Hallmark as the greeting card people, but if your cable TV lineup extends beyond the basic selections you may have noticed that somewhere higher up there in the channel range is a creature known as the Hallmark Movie Channel. While Hallmark’s not going to give Hollywood a run for their…
As a genre, mystery is famous for its loners, guys like Jack Reacher, Monk and Lucas Davenport. But mysteries are also rife with bromances, all you have to do is look. What exactly is a bromance? The term is used to describe a non-sexual relationship between two men that are unusually close. In mystery, this…
Here on Criminal Element there’s been talk about horrific casting decisions (Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher) and ones that make you go “hmm” (Jason Statham as Richard Stark’s Parker), but there’s also another class of casting decisions that gets less notice, those that just absolutely work. In fact, this post was inspired by one of…
Pro football season is upon us once again much to the chagrin of my wife. “Are they always playing a game?” she will voice. With ESPN, NFL Network, and the broadcast channels, Sunday morning through Sunday night games, Monday night football, plus games on Thursdays and what not, there’s a lot of dang football to…
This is the third installment in our Death Brackets: Toughest Dicks vs Baddest Thriller Heroes. In the intro, you learned the rules and met the contestants. In Part 1 of the First Round, we gave you the first four matches of our Savage Sixteen. Today, the last four. And then the competition gets really stiff!
Mysteries and thrillers, by nature, are populated by tough guys. Detectives who hunt down serial killers. Spies who uncover dangerous traitors. Assassins who take out the worst bad guys on the planet — and anti-heroes like Dexter and Hannibal Lecter with enough goodness in their dark hearts that they sometimes turn their characters around and…
I was not among the 218,000 first-day buyers of Janet Evanovich’s Smokin Seventeen. Sixteen was enough for me. In fact, eight was enough. Writing book after book with the same characters and gimmicks is a difficult proposition. Arthur Conan Doyle set an unfortunate example. He tired of Sherlock Holmes and tried to kill him off.…
Robert B. Parker’s latest Spenser novel, Sixkill, hits shelves and e-readers everywhere on May 3rd. Though Parker passed away unexpectedly last January, it may be premature to assume this will be the last time we see Spenser in action. I mean, Parker died last year and still released three books. For all we know, he…
Back in 2004, Max Phillips and I launched a labor-of-love project we called Hard Case Crime, intended to revive the style of the great old paperback crime novels of the 1940s and 50s. We thought it might, if we were lucky, last a half dozen titles before people stopped humoring us. Last August, we…
