I wish I could have eavesdropped on the Edgar committee for 1987. “Are you kidding me?” someone might have said. “A Dark-Adapted Eye? Barbara Vine, whoever that is, tells who did it on page one! What kind of a mystery is that?” Someone else may have chimed in. “Listen, Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth…
I love the combination of cinema and literature. I studied English Literature and was a screenwriter before writing my first novel, The Silent Patient—a psychological thriller about a woman who shoots her husband five times and then never speaks again. I’ve been reading mystery writers like Agatha Christie since my childhood and I’ve always been…
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…
Over the weekend, we (and everyone else) noted the death of crime writer Ruth Rendell at the age of 85. As prolific and talented as she was, even a Labour Party member of the House of Lords as Baroness Rendell of Babergh, one could simply accept as proof of her accomplishments the scores of books…
Life is alarmingly full of unsolved mysteries, from the mundane (where did the mate to my favorite sock go?) to the profoundly unsettling, like unsolved murders. Although there are no precise statistics available, one study of FBI records found that 6,000 killers get away with murder each year. Even in our modern era of computer tracking,…
