crime
How a Trip to a Museum Turned into the Perfect Start to a Mystery
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School field trips. Exhibitions. Guided tours. It might be easy to dismiss museums as stuffy or even boring, but they are far from that—especially to an aspiring crime writer looking to write her first murder mystery. The idea for my debut historical mystery, A Traitor in Whitehall, came to me while standing in the middle…
The Best Hotels – and Hotel Bars – in Espionage Fiction
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Bars in grand hotels figure prominently in the canon of spy literature. One of the pleasures I get from reading the novels of Joseph Kanon, Graham Greene and other masters of the spy genre, is that the anonymous guests in the grand hotels come alive with a backstory and confidential business discussed over martinis is…
Nine Crime Novels Featuring Found Families
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My historical novel published in 2021, Death at Greenway, used research on the real people who had lived on the estate of Agatha Christie’s holiday home in the English Riviera during World War II. Faced with the universe of facts I could lay my hands on, I had to be selective about which details were…
A Country Road, in the Dead of Night: On The Historical Hauntings of Irish Folklore
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First published in 1936, On Another Man’s Wound was written by Earnán Ó Máille and recounts his time as a guerrilla fighter during the Irish War of Independence in the nineteen twenties. It is generally considered to be the one bona-fide piece of literature to arise from that conflict. No dry military memoir, Ó Máille…
When a Dispute Over the Pronunciation of ‘Newfoundland’ Turned Deadly
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The argument erupted at the supper table in a Colorado lumber camp near Castle Rock, a spot on the map at the edge of the Rocky Mountains and about thirty miles south of Denver. William Atcheson, who was working at Hocker & Gray’s sawmill in March 1876, had a large dog and the landlady asked…
The 10 Best Bounty Hunter Movies
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The bounty hunter is the ultimate outsider in law enforcement. Neither elected like a sheriff nor sworn in like a cop, the bounty hunter gets in harm’s way as much as officers but with less authority and even lesser respect. Also known as bail enforcement or fugitive recovery, bounty hunting is uniquely American. The profession…
Crime and the City: Hamburg
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I think it’s fair to say that, in general, Hamburg is a rather underrated German city. Berlin and Munich get the crowds, Frankfurt the money, and Hamburg gets a bit overlooked. But not by crime fans as Hamburg has a long history of being, shall we say, a bit sleazy? It’s a port city (always…