Essays
Crafting Creepy Crime Fiction in the Danish Countryside
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So there you are, sitting in a cozy café in Odense, the hometown of the great fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen, enjoying a flaky Danish pastry and a strong coffee. As you gaze out the window at the old, charming city streets, an unsettling thought pops into your head: What sinister secrets might lurk behind…
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 a rig of worshipful attention, all spectacle satiation and ritual subjugation. Before every contest, the screen starts at black. Our heart races. The device ignites. Let’s…
Delusions of Grandeur: The Scandalous Crime of a Los Angeles Millionaire
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The couple walked on the beach at Santa Monica that September afternoon in 1903, then stopped at a shop to buy postcards. Once they were back in their suite on the third floor of the oceanside Arcadia Hotel, Tina Griffith began to pack – they were heading home to Los Angeles in the morning. Her…
The Discovery of ‘Wind Sprints,’ the Lost Ralph Dennis Novel
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Nearly a decade ago, I fell in love with the twelve, out-of-print, Hardman crime novels by the late Ralph Dennis… an obsession that led me to acquire the copyright to his work, published and unpublished, and to co-found Brash Books, a publishing company to get his novels back into print. His Hardman series, with numbered…
What Makes a Novel Unique? On Retellings and Plagiarism
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My latest novel, The Fiction Writer, is a modern-day gothic mystery that explore the boundaries of creative freedom. It asks questions about writing and ownership and who owns the right to tell any story. My main character, Olivia, is a writer, whose most recent novel, a retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca was a flop….
Remembering Tim Dorsey and His Wild Florida Stories
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I am sad to report that we lost author Tim Dorsey at the end of November. He died at his home in Islamorada in the Florida Keys at age 62 – far too young, if you ask me. Tim, a bear-sized guy who frequently wore colorful tropical shirts, was the rare writer who was as…
My First Thriller: Patricia Cornwell
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“There was no call for him to be as unkind as he was,” says famed author Patricia Cornwell, who single handedly created the forensic science crime fiction genre. Robert Merritt, the theater and arts critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1989, trashed his fellow Richmonder’s first crime novel, Postmortem, calling her protagonist, Medical Examiner Dr….
Fictional Versus Real Settings: A Writer’s Dilemma
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Every story has to start somewhere. And be somewhere. Take Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, Mystic River. Its setting is so pivotal to the plot that you can find it right there in the title. As it happens, Mystic River is a real river in Massachusetts, coursing seven miles through the towns of Arlington, Somerville, Everett,…
The Many Words for Yakuza
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“It seems fairly evident that the selection of such simple terms must to a certain extent depend upon the chief interests of a people; and where it is necessary to distinguish a certain phenomenon in many aspects, which in the life of the people play each an entirely independent role, many independent words may develop,…