Essays
A Roundtable Discussion on Dark Academia
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Darkened libraries, exclusive elite schools, looming Gothic towers, charismatic professors, illicit affairs, the tang of autumn in the air… rivalries and obsessions that lead to murder. Why is dark academia…
The Albatross of Smartphones in Young Adult Mysteries
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There’s a joke among millennials that our favorite childhood television shows would have sucked if the characters had owned smartphones. Videos of Buffy fighting vampires would have been uploaded…
The Sleuthing Spinster: Why Single Women Rule Cozy Fiction
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When people talk about great fictional detectives, there are classic names that come to mind: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot; Sam Spade; Phillip Marlowe; and Columbo trip easily off the…
Bloodstock Sales: The Biggest Gambles in Horseracing
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Horse racing and gambling are intertwined – always have been, and always will be. But the biggest gambles in racing are not made at the races or with a…
How Subplots and Plot Filaments Lend Texture and Depth to Any Novel
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More than any other variant included under the umbrella of “crime fiction,” mystery novels embody a straightforward setup of the conflict-and-resolution components of storytelling. The conflict is murder. The…
Murder Ballads, the Original True Crime
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It’s hard to spend much time online these days without bumping into true crime of one form or another. Countless podcasts examine murders and trials, and television offers an…
Port-au-Prince: Crime Fiction as a Window into a Nation’s Soul
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Haiti has never been an easy place to live. From colonialism to liberation by the ex-slave revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture at the start of the nineteenth century – the…
When Characters Fake Their Own Deaths
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Pseudocide, or faking one’s own death, offers a tantalizing escape from reality, and the possibility of starting fresh. There’s something thrilling about the idea of disappearing and starting over,…