Essays
Beyond Treasure Island: A Brief Introduction to Pirates in Fiction
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Not too long ago I found myself nearly alone in the Maritime wing of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. The Peabody Essex was formed from the gradual merging…
Parties Gone Wrong: A Beloved Trope in Crime Fiction
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Parties are terrible at the best of times. So much hope and anticipation is heaped onto them, they can never live up to the pressure, collapsing into tears and…
“The Mousetrap”: Still Going Strong After 28,000 Performances
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On the day Agatha Christie died in 1976, London theaters dimmed their lights for an hour in a show of esteem for her. While best known as the top-selling…
Learning to Be Lost (and Found) in Fiction and in Life
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It’s 1986, and I’m lost in the forest. I’m ten years old, huddled at the base of a Ponderosa pine at the far reaches of Silver Lake, California, one…
Queen of the Supermarket
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There’s a wonderful world where all you desire And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips Where aisles…
Why New Zealand Noir?
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Several years ago, I was sitting in a café with a group of fellow New Zealand writers, discussing books we’d recently read. With several of us, me included, working…
There’s Nothing Better Than A Good Bad Guy
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“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.” —Alfred Hitchcock Let’s start with the simple assertion that all great fiction is crime fiction. From classic Greek tragedies…
From Academic to Crime Writer
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“You can’t be serious.” Twice in my life, academic colleagues and friends have had that reaction when I’ve told them what I was planning to do. The first time…
1987: The Thrilling-est Year in Hollywood History
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Recently, I saw an article that claimed that 1999 was the best year in Hollywood history. Then another claimed it was…1971? I beg to disagree. It is my belief…
Thrillers Where Natural Disaster Looms Large
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It’s a perennial question at readings and signings: Where do you get the ideas for your books? I usually mumble something that amounts to (phrased politely), “I pull them…