Essays
Peril in Paradise: A List Of Thrillers In Which Bad Things Happen In Beautiful Places
.
Conflict lies at the heart of all mystery and suspense, and what could be more conflicting than taking a trip to paradise only to get caught up in the…
‘UNSUB’ Is Mostly Forgotten, But It Launched a New Era of Crime Procedurals
.
Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I was hanging around our local prosecutor’s office when an investigator for the prosecutor was fondly recalling his days as a police…
Memory, Place, and Hauntings: On Toronto’s Seedy Seventies-Era “Sin Strip”
.
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…
Never Vacation With Old Friends: The Locked-Room Thriller Problem
.
People love to share vacation photos on social media. Some try to act nonchalant about their expensive getaways. Others aim to impress. The more remote the location, the better. …
The Bane and Boon of an Unreliable Narrator
.
There has long been a discussion of whether or not a reliable narrator in fiction is something that truly exists. Since humans are prone to biases and judgment, a…
Stephen Spotswood On “Queering the Narrative of the Golden Age of America”
.
When things seem to be going badly in a society, people sympathize with characters who distrust or operate outside of that society’s governing systems…In eras tinged with chaos in…
Femi Kayode Considers Groups, Belief Systems, and the Village of Readers
.
When I am asked if my new novel, Gaslight, was inspired by real events, I answer no. But while the events themselves didn’t happen; the emotional center of the…
The Mystery of Real Estate Porn
.
It’s a game in New York and we all play. Everyone talks real estate, how the condo market’s soft, how the rental market’s skyrocketing, how Manhattan’s suddenly affordable but…
Crime and the City: Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight
.
Portsmouth – known to the locals as “Pompey” – is, and has been for centuries, England’s largest Royal Navy base, 75 miles south of London in the country of…
60 Years of ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’
.
–Adapted from a Center For Fiction conversation between Joseph Kanon and Paul Vidich, November 9, 2023 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was published in September 1963…