Culture
Why Horror Fiction Matters for Telling Indigenous Stories
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I’ve been consuming horror films and books from perhaps a too young age, though it’s worked out fine for me. It’s been a formative genre for me as a writer and a person. I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it premiered, when I was eight years old, and it was long my favorite…
The Pigeon Tunnel, the New Film About John le Carré, is Intimate and Illuminating
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John le Carré (born David Cornwell) hated giving interviews. “First you invent yourself, then you believe the invention”, he wrote in his autobiography The Pigeon Tunnel. Despite these reservations, Le Carré/Cornwell ended up participating in a documentary about his life. Surprisingly, the resulting film—also called The Pigeon Tunnel, and directed by Errol Morris, feels so…
How Scarface Became a “Foundational Influence for Hip Hop”
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It’s hard to think of a $21 million dollar motion picture as a “cult movie” but that’s what Brian DePalma’s 1983 Scarface almost became until it was saved by an audience that the filmmakers never had in mind. A cult movie is nothing to be ashamed of; The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Donnie Darko, and…
The New Season of “Lupin” Is Extravagant, Spectacular, and Occasionally Hard to Believe
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Two things jumped out at me back when I started watching the first season of Lupin, Netflix’s wildly successful show about a ‘gentleman thief’ in Paris who spends his days plotting heists and piecing together a scheme for righteous revenge. One, the show had some far-fetched moments, starting with the idea of a ‘gentleman thief.’…
Finding Inspiration for Mystery Fiction in Soap Operas
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What JR, Alexis, and Domingue Taught this Mystery Writer One of the best compliments I’ve received from readers about the Lady Mystery series is that each mystery unfolds like an episode of television. The vivid nature of the storytelling, the feeling that you’re in the room watching the events happen, is high praise for a…
A Murder of Poets: Or, the Inescapable Connections Between Crime Fiction and Poetry
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“Murder will out…” –Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Poetry and pathology. Verse and victim. Meter and murder and mayhem. Poetry and crime fiction seem to go together like, well, rhyme and reason. Crime novelist and CWA Diamond Dagger winner Martin Edwards has been quoted as saying that the pair share “the importance of form…
90s Horror-Thrillers Created a New Generation of Would-Be Detectives
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For two now-distant decades, horror movies were less about whodunit, and more about how-the-hell-do-they-stop-this-guy? In 1978, Halloween burst onto the scene, followed, two years later, by Friday the 13th. By the time Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street hit screens, moviegoers couldn’t get enough of the jump-scares, and the unsettled sleeps that inevitably followed.…