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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…