Crime and Popular Culture
How to Write Fiction about True Crime
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If you are going to write a sensational, news-worthy crime story into your fiction, you have a few models for how to proceed. First, there is the Gone Girl model. Use a real-life crime as your inspiration—in Flynn’s case, the disappearance of Laci Peterson—and take liberties. Change names, character backgrounds, and crucial plot elements. Twist…
Memory, Place, and Hauntings: On Toronto’s Seedy Seventies-Era “Sin Strip”
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In the late 70s my family emigrated to Toronto and stayed for two years. In those days, downtown was notorious for its Sin Strip. Four blocks concentrated on Yonge between Gerrard and Dundas. They were loaded with strip joints, adult bookstores, rub ‘n’ tugs and movie theatres which, according to The Globe and Mail, made…
The Enduring Appeal of Murder and Mystery: A Brief History
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“Thou shalt not kill,” commands the King James Bible— without, as opponents of capital punishment like to point out, riders or qualifiers. Curiously, this translation of an injunction in the ancient Hebrew Torah did not lead the list of Yahweh’s rules; it arrives after other warnings, such as no swearing and no bowing to the…
Queen of the Supermarket
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There’s a wonderful world where all you desire And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips Where aisles and aisles of dreams await you –Queen of the Supermarket, Bruce Springsteen, 2009 Last year crime writer Duane Swierczynski, author of the forthcoming California Bear, mentioned…
A Cultural History of the Erotic Thriller
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The strip mall video rental store was an emporium of illicit dreams. Its doorway in the small town where I came of age, located in between candy store and pharmacy, doubled as a portal into fantasy, dark explorations of human nature, and cheap thrills that looked mightily expensive. Beginning in my early teenage years, I…
Spooky Shenanigans for Halloween
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I’m such a sucker for holidays. I love to completely immerse myself in a theme: holiday decorations, holiday meals, holiday baking. As soon as the leaves start to turn amber and scarlet; the air goes crisp; and when the windows have that little bit of frost in the mornings, it’s time to think of pumpkins…
6 Thrilling Reads That Blend Folklore and Horror
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From tales told around the campfire to major literary classics, there’s a reason we turn to folklore when we want a scary story with staying power. Stories from mythology and folklore persist through the centuries because there’s something in them that speaks to us on a deep human level—and makes us check over our shoulder…
Lately I’ve Been Dressing For Revenge: What Taylor Swift Teaches Us About Genre Fiction
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I used to say I hated Taylor Swift. The year was 2008. I was a poor grad school student subsisting on cheap slices and dollar Bud Lights, the latter of which brought me to a dive bar close to campus one night after an evening poetry seminar. Crowded and loud, I was sipping from my…
Note to Self, and Other True Crime Fans: These Tragedies Are Real
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The scene couldn’t have been written any better. It was the middle of the night and a father bolted upright in bed, hearing noise downstairs in the kitchen of his suburban home. His wife and children slept peacefully, but the man suspected an intruder had entered the house. And not just any intruder, he feared,…