Culture
And They All Died Happily Ever After: Cozies, Grimdarks, and Modern Morality
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Those familiar with Game of Thrones will recognize the hallmarks of “grimdark” storytelling. In a grimdark world, morals are flexible. Dark aesthetics and gritty details dominate. Today’s hero could…
Ferrari Performs an Opera of Capitalism and Comes Up Loud
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Movies are loud. They are often written and written about in clamorous verbiage: they leer and loom, assault, pummel, and thunder. They are religion and sex strapped together into…
Mr. Monk’s Last Case is a Sweet and Thoughtful Return to the Classic Series
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It’s been fourteen years since we last saw Adrian Monk. Monk, the anxious, observant detective protagonist of the USA Network series of the same name, which ran eight seasons…
The Best Young Adult Mysteries, Thriller and Horror Novels of 2023
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The young adult mystery continues to thrive, along with plenty of YA horror thrillers, and this year was distinguished by quality storytelling, careful constructions, and social justice elements placed…
Memory, Place, and Hauntings: On Toronto’s Seedy Seventies-Era “Sin Strip”
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In the late 70s my family emigrated to Toronto and stayed for two years. In those days, downtown was notorious for its Sin Strip. Four blocks concentrated on Yonge…
Crime Novels About Cursed Films
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In 2023, two new novels, and one older title, were published in a niche of the detective/thriller genre concerning, to coin a term of art, “sinister films:” films—often lost,…
The Enduring Appeal of Murder and Mystery: A Brief History
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“Thou shalt not kill,” commands the King James Bible— without, as opponents of capital punishment like to point out, riders or qualifiers. Curiously, this translation of an injunction in…