Essays
Fighting Toxic Masculinity Through Young Adult Fiction
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When I was dreaming up the plot of my latest young adult thriller, The Revenge Game, I posed the following research question to my social media followers: “It’s hard to phrase, but did you ever experience kids at school/camp participating in, like, sexual conquest competitions? Example: at my camp, the *cool kids* would rank the…
How to Edit a Series of Crime Novellas with 30 Different Authors and Come Out the Other Side Feeling Grateful
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Talk to anyone who has edited an anthology, planned a Noir at the Bar, or even just tried to figure out where to go for dinner, and you’ll get the same sentiment—where writers are concerned, organizing anything is like herding cats. Except it really isn’t true. I mean, it is true where an anthology is…
Lee Goldberg on Westerns, Crime Novels, and Writing A Genre Mash-Up
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I’ve always loved crime novels and westerns. I’ve written dozens of crime novels, but not any westerns. Or so I thought. A few years ago, at a book signing event for one of my “Eve Ronin” series of police procedurals, a reader told me I was her favorite western author, which I thought was a…
From Sports Reporter to Crime Writer
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Ask me why I created a female sports reporter protagonist and the answer is easy. That’s my background. I intimately know the character’s experiences—the smell of the locker rooms, the chit chat with a camera operator and the adrenaline rush of a newsroom. Ask me why I decided to write a thriller—well, that question stumped…
A Childhood Full of Love and Death: On Growing Up With a Father in Forensics
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It wasn’t a surprise to those who knew me as a child that when I start telling stories for a living, they were centered around the forensic and crime investigation world. I started my forensic training almost at birth. My father was a medical examiner for three counties in north Michigan and the coroner’s office…
A Cultural History of the Erotic Thriller
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The strip mall video rental store was an emporium of illicit dreams. Its doorway in the small town where I came of age, located in between candy store and pharmacy, doubled as a portal into fantasy, dark explorations of human nature, and cheap thrills that looked mightily expensive. Beginning in my early teenage years, I…
James Kennedy: “Storytellers are manipulative cult leaders.”
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I missed my chance to be in a cult. In my twenties, a guy on the street handed me a pamphlet to join a “communal farm”—an obvious cult. Nevertheless, I was intrigued: maybe I could enjoy this farm’s bucolic vibes and free love, while shrewdly avoiding any mass suicide, or baby-eating, or barnyard chores. I…