crime
How Should Fiction Talk About War
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“Does your novel speak to Hamas’s attack on Israel?” I got the question during a podcast interview I was giving to support the launch of my new novel, which is set during the 2006 34-day Hezbollah-Israeli War. My novel came out shortly before Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel and my interview was a few…
5 Christmas Mysteries To Get You Ready for the Holiday Season
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It’s a rare crime fiction reader who doesn’t love curling up with a mystery during the winter months, especially if that mystery is one of the many Christmas-themed puzzles that the genre is famous for. The tradition goes back to the Golden Age of detective fiction, that period after World War II when authors like…
James Reich on Indie Publishing, Taking Risks, and the Beauty of Melancholy
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In 2017, I read the novel Patricide, by D. Foy. It’s a brutal and challenging book, full of ungodly sorrow and heartbreak. It’s the kind of book you can’t read before bed because it’ll make sleep impossible. But it’s also a beautiful and tender piece of work. I was curious who would publish such a…
How the Intensity of Female Relationships Leaves the Door Open for Horror
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Picture it: Woodstock, Georgia, 1988. I’m at a sleepover party. We’re eating pizza and watching The Amityville Horror and probably drinking Ecto Cooler and jumping around on Pogo Balls because the eighties were wild like that. There are four other girls and one mom hanging out in the living room, braiding each other’s hair, and…
Every Picture Tells a Story: Cinema Speculation, The Getaway and Me
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Every picture tells a story. If you don’t believe me, just ask Rod Stewart. Sir Rod practically coined the phrase in 1971. He liked it so much he used it for both the title of his third solo record on Mercury and for the title of the album’s opening track. The album was a breakthrough…
A Murder of Poets: Or, the Inescapable Connections Between Crime Fiction and Poetry
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“Murder will out…” –Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Poetry and pathology. Verse and victim. Meter and murder and mayhem. Poetry and crime fiction seem to go together like, well, rhyme and reason. Crime novelist and CWA Diamond Dagger winner Martin Edwards has been quoted as saying that the pair share “the importance of form…
Bluebeard’s Castle
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Being inside a church always made her feel good, and her anxious brow relaxed as she absorbed the peaceful and uplifting atmosphere. A few people were milling around admiring the architecture, and several worshippers were praying. She brushed past a group of tourists and sidled down one of the pews, groping in her handbag for…
The Political Assassination That Transformed Africa, the UN, and the CIA
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Nothing much happens in Mélin, a picturesque village of little over a thousand people about an hour’s drive from Brussels. If the sleepy town has a claim to fame, it is that many of its buildings — farmhouses, the church and the vicarage, the restaurant —are built from a chalky sandstone unique to the region….
8 Cozy Mysteries Featuring BFFs and Women Supporting Women
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So often in books and movies, women are put against one another. There is some sort of competitive spirit or revived childhood rivalry over social status, a job promotion, or even a love interest. The stereotypical “mean girl” of the cast brings out a malicious and spiteful side to the main character when they interact. …