crime
The Backlist: Revisiting Steven Hamilton’s ‘The Lock Artist’ with Elle Cosimano
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When I started writing crime fiction, what I worried about most was all the stuff you had to know. I had never been a criminal, a detective, a private investigator, or a lawyer. I didn’t know how to steal a car or bury a body or fake an alibi. Of course there was always Google,…
Jesse Q. Sutanto on Toxic Friendships, Shrinking Attention Spans, and Finding the Muse
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As one of the terminally online, I really enjoyed the recent “how often men think about the Roman Empire” discourse on Twitter. One response that went viral claimed that the female equivalent of thinking about the Roman Empire is thinking about your ex-best friend, and after a recent friendship breakup and also tearing through Jesse…
The Four Corners of Subjectivity
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One hears it all the time. A reader praises a book because they find the characters “likable” or “relatable.” Another reader dismisses a book because they couldn’t “identify with the characters” or, more damningly, “didn’t care about the characters.” Why do some characters inspire empathy in some readers while leaving others cold? By what alchemy…
Shop Talk: Lou Berney Is a Fanatical Believer in Naps
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Lou Berney is one of the reasons I write crime fiction. Coming up, I cut my teeth on Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and Jesmyn Ward. It wasn’t until I found The Long and Faraway Gone, Lou’s third novel, that I realized the full power of crime fiction. I’m not alone…
When Contemporary Fiction Ages Into the Historical
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I find myself reflecting on my own teen years as I tackle Frankenstein-author Mary Shelley and her step-sister at age sixteen years for my new series, which begins with Death and the Sisters. Mary and her kaleidoscope of siblings gathered opinions and values from the books they read in their highly literary household. With both…
The Western Meets Weird Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion
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Once a narrowly defined genre—set in the American frontier of the 19th Century—the definition of Western has expanded with contemporary takes from such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Ivy Pochoda, Alma Katsu, Jim Harrison and Louise Erdrich. And now, along comes HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD: An Anthology of the Weird West (September 26, 2023; Dead Sky Publishing),…
Five Disturbing Books That Violate Your Sanctuary
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In another life, I’m sure I was a political assassin or, at the very least, a cold-hearted femme fatale who was on the right end of a gun or winning cause. How else to explain my long-standing obsession/fascination with mayhem, gore, and murder most foul? A voracious reader from a tender age, when I wasn’t…
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,…