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 of the Essex Institute, once the historical society for Essex County in Massachusetts, and the Peabody Museum, a descendant of the once-storied, now mysterious East India…
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 piles of vomit. Not only the teenage ones, either… The preparation is the best part, when hope still springs eternal as the canapés come warm from…
“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 novelist of all time, Christie also set a record for the longest running stage production. The play she predicted would last 8 months, The Mousetrap, opened…
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 of innumerous small, high Alpine lakes strewn across the Sierra Nevada mountains like blue-green jewels in a tangled necklace. It’s getting dark, and I haven’t seen…
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 and aisles of dreams await you –Queen of the Supermarket, Bruce Springsteen, 2009 Last year crime writer Duane Swierczynski, author of the forthcoming California Bear, mentioned…
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 on thriller or suspense projects, we meandered onto the subject of thrillers and mysteries set in Iceland, as well as Norway and neighboring countries. And it…
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 to Shakespeare’s plays to film noir, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of The Rings or Stars Wars or Game of Thrones—something has been stolen, someone has…
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 was in the early 1990s, when I decided to teach a course on LGBT politics at the University of California, San Diego, one of the first…
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 that the greatest single year in Hollywood was 1987. Here’s my thinking. To me, a classic film is basically one that you can see time and…
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 out of thin air.” But when it comes to Best Be Prepared (Severn House), my most recent in a series featuring amateur sleuth Nora Best, I…