It's All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives is a prose series of unpublished interviews with, and a visual retrospective of, the seminal mid-to-late 20th-century literary crime writer, Ross Macdonald. Lew Archer, the private investigator who was Ross Macdonald’s signature literary character, is a guy who a lot of the younger generation saw as…
Robert B. Parker's Slow Burn by Ace Atkins is the newest Spenser novel, where Boston PI Spenser faces a hot case and a personal crisis (Available today!). An assessment of a new Spenser novel requires this reviewer to reveal a bit of my adoration for series creator, Robert B. Parker, and why I was initially…
Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person focuses on a private detective, introduced as Guy Roland, who investigates himself. The location is Paris; the time period, the mid-1960s. I say “introduced as Guy Roland,” because from page one of this novel, we comprehend that we are dealing with a detective narrator with little sense of his own identity. “I am nothing,” is…
Road trip – had to be a winner, right? As a kid growing up in the narrow streets of northern England, I knew America as surely as I knew the grey concrete of my own back yard. For years, I had a recurring dream; I was driving along a winding coast road – steep rocky…
Many readers develop a deep affinity for a continuing detective or mystery series beyond well-sculpted plots, fast action, and wisecracks, that is, if they are going to stick with it for the long read. I know I do. An emotional hook, so to speak, that I can identify with in the main and supporting characters.…
Note: This post kicks off a series celebrating the career of one of mystery fiction’s true giants, beginning with the novel Do Evil in Return. This month marks the centennial of the great Margaret Millar. At her peak, Millar was about as successful as a mystery writer could be. She published 27 books, won the…
In our series on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, we looked at the films the great screen duo made between 1944 and 1948. After 1948, however, the two never made another movie together. (Though they did star in the radio adventure series Bold Venture in 1951 and worked together on a 1955 television production of…
I suspect most people think of science fiction and fantasy when they hear the name Ray Bradbury, who—along with Isaac Asimov, Phillip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke—represented the very best of modern thought-provoking and socially-conscious escapism. His Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, to name a few, are required…
Let’s face it: a book cover is a seduction. No one knew this better than the pulp fiction publishers of the 1940s and ’50s, their covers all gussied up with lurid colors, barely clad women, big black guns, and promises of what was between the covers. But what’s a seduction without a good pickup line?…
I hesitated to write about a Ross Macdonald title for this series, for two reasons. For one, he’s so well known in crime fiction circles that it’s hard to think of any of his titles as being “lost.” For another, while Macdonald authored some of the finest suspense novels ever committed to the page, mostly…
