Culture
Shane’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…
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 Finkel’s,…
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? I’m in the first group: I fell under the spell…
Rian Johnson on the Genius of John Dickson Carr
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You hold in your hands one of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics, a series that resurrects out-of-print gems in handsomely designed new editions. I owe this series a great…
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 Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage is an atmospheric and amusing Golden Age mystery with a memorable puzzle at…
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 they’re mysteries without on-the-page violence, physical intimacy or naughty words. That’s the…
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 today’s bestsellers, but what makes a forest such a seductive setting for fiction?…
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…
The Rise of “Mom-Noir”
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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…
10 Crime Movies Set at New Year’s Eve
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You might remember our series “10 Crime Movies You Forgot Take Place During Christmas.” We have six installments: one from 2018, one from 2019, one from 2020, one from…