Culture

  • Shaneโ€™s Lot: How a 1949 Gun-Toting Loner Still Rides Through American Literature

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    A stranger comes to town. He is stern, quiet, with a whiff of criminality, seductive to women and men alike, his life like an arrow shooting him onward. He meets a family, he befriends a boy, he almost falls for another manโ€™s wife, and then he saves them all in a burst of gunfire. Rider…

  • How An Obsession With Art Crime Became a Thriller

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    If you have ever wanted to know how it feels to snatch a painting from a museum wall, slide it under your shirt, and take off, then Michael Finkelโ€™s, The Art Thief is for you. Finkel puts you in the scene and in the mind of Stephane Breistwieser, a man who stole more than 200…

  • Passionate Distortions: Patricia Highsmith and the Female Protagonist

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    What is it about the work of Patricia Highsmith that attracts some readers as powerfully as it repels others? Iโ€™m in the first group: I fell under the spell of her weird, chilling, compelling voice the first time I read her. Wondering what all the fuss was about, I went to the bookstore and randomly…

  • Rian Johnson on the Genius of John Dickson Carr

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    You hold in your hands one of Otto Penzlerโ€™s American Mystery Classics, a series that resurrects out-of-print gems in handsomely designed new editions. I owe this series a great debt because it introduced me to the work of one of my favorite mystery authors, John Dickson Carr. Carr was an American but lived and worked…

  • Rian Johnson and Olivia Rutigliano talk Poker Face, Knives Out, and Golden Age Mysteries

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    Reissued for the first time this century, John Dickson Carrโ€™s The Problem of the Wire Cage is an atmospheric and amusing Golden Age mystery with a memorable puzzle at its center. Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling โ€œimpossible crimeโ€ plots in which corpses are discovered in scenarios that seem to lack any logical explanation….

  • Cozy Mystery Subgenres: Making the Perfect Blend

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    Cozy mystery is a subgenre of crime fiction. When readers ask what are cozy mysteries, I explain theyโ€™re mysteries without on-the-page violence, physical intimacy or naughty words. Thatโ€™s the quick-and-simple answer. Then I watch as their faces light up with understanding. I love that moment. Of course, people who read cozy mystery novelsโ€”also called coziesโ€”know…

  • What Makes a Forest Such a Seductive Setting for Fiction?

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    The woods have been a popular setting in literature for centuries, from the Grimm Brothers to todayโ€™s bestsellers, but what makes a forest such a seductive setting for fiction? When I started putting together ideas for my second novel, What Waits in the Woods, I turned to this interesting and ubiquitous setting. But why? What…

  • 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 inspirationโ€”in Flynnโ€™s case, the disappearance of Laci Petersonโ€”and take liberties. Change names, character backgrounds, and crucial plot elements. Twist…

  • The Rise of โ€œMom-Noirโ€

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    It was a few weeks in that I realized why I was finding motherhood such a shock to the system. As I leaned over the sink to tearfully rinse another streak of projectile vomit from my unwashed hair, I wondered why my expectations of the newborn phase had been so unrealistic. The answer, I realized…

  • 10 Crime Movies Set at New Yearโ€™s Eve

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    You might remember our series โ€œ10 Crime Movies You Forgot Take Place During Christmas.โ€ We have six installments: one from 2018, one from 2019, one from 2020, one from 2021, one from 2022, and one from 2023. We also a list of the ten MOST obvious crime movies set at Christmas. But you know what…


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