Essays
An Argument for the Unintentional Villain
.
A good villain is essential to a good mystery. He or she is the author of the crime, the driver of the plot, and the key to solving the ensuing investigation. Often, the more cunning and deceitful the villain, the more satisfying their unmasking and capture. This is one reason for the public fascination with…
Healing Through Horror
.
Oh, the Horror! It doesn’t often come up but when it does, people are often surprised when I tell them I never set out to be a horror writer. Sure, I’m a die-hard, lifelong fan of the genre, and it was reading Stephen King’s The Shining at thirteen that opened my mind and imagination to…
What Spy Fiction Taught Me About Breaking the Rules
.
As a kid, I broke what I like to think was a normal amount of rules. There was the time in kindergarten when we were sitting on the rug for storytime, and the boy in front of me kept leaning back against my legs, even when I asked him to stop, and eventually I got…
The Regency Mystery Arrives to the Ball
.
I’d wager a box of my favorite tea that you’ve heard of Bridgerton by now. Maybe even that it’s that occasionally spicy period drama based upon author Julia Quinn’s romance series of the same name. And, most likely, that it’s set during the Regency period and features lots of ballroom dances, courtly manners, a few…
Love Behind Bars: On the Complicated World of Incarcerated Romance
.
Of all the correspondents I’ve had in my life, Sam Israel has been among the most consistent. Sam was serving a twenty-two-year sentence in federal prison for fraud when we met. He’d been running a Ponzi scheme out of a hedge fund that began with him stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and…
The Best Locked Room Mystery You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
.
From the very first sentence…we are into the realm of nightmare. Miracles gather and explode. A dead man returns—or does not return. A flying ghost, apparently, swoops down and attacks. No angels, but goblins and wizards seem to dance on a pin. “Rim of the Pit” is a beauty. –John Dickson Carr This may be…
Rhys Bowen on Using Real Experiences As Inspiration
.
My new book, The Proof of the Pudding, is the 17th in the series featuring Lady Georgiana, 35th in line to the throne in the nineteen thirties. When I started this series in 2006 I couldn’t have imagined that it would still be going strong and have readers around the world in 9 languages to…
Killing the Rich: Why Privilege Has Always Been at the Heart of the Whodunnit
.
For more than a century we’ve been addicted to a particular flavor of murder mystery story. A group of wealthy, upper-class people are gathered together in a country house. There’s a butler, people dress for dinner and talk about fox-hunting or how frightfully vulgar Lady Stuffington’s necklace is. And then someone dies. It’s a trope…
Psychology Is Important For Motivation, But Your Characters Need More Than Diagnoses
.
I teach creative writing at a public arts high school in Chicago. If you’re picturing Fame, with students breaking into song and dance in the hallways, you’re not far off. But for all the joy they bring to the classroom, my students often want to write about characters who have bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression,…
On Horror and Humanity’s Enduring Love Affair with Fear
.
Hold, friend. I only have fifteen hundred words to save your life. You and I are bound in a bargain spanning hundreds of years, across dozens of types of media and thousands of artists. There’s a monster hiding in these words, ripping through the sentences and syllables, trying to get to your soul. It wants…