Essays
Ruins in Rain City: Trouble in Mind and the Career of Alan Rudolph
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Filmmaker Alan Rudolph has been working in the movie business for most of his life. Coming from a Hollywood family where his dad Oscar was also a director, Rudolph…
How Scarface Became a “Foundational Influence for Hip Hop”
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It’s hard to think of a $21 million dollar motion picture as a “cult movie” but that’s what Brian DePalma’s 1983 Scarface almost became until it was saved by…
The New Season of “Lupin” Is Extravagant, Spectacular, and Occasionally Hard to Believe
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Two things jumped out at me back when I started watching the first season of Lupin, Netflix’s wildly successful show about a ‘gentleman thief’ in Paris who spends his…
Finding Inspiration for Mystery Fiction in Soap Operas
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What JR, Alexis, and Domingue Taught this Mystery Writer One of the best compliments I’ve received from readers about the Lady Mystery series is that each mystery unfolds like…
Crime and the City: Las Vegas
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Let’s go to Las Vegas with one of the great kings of the American hard-boiled Charles Willeford in his novel Wicked Wives (1956): ‘Once the sun comes up in…
How Should Fiction Talk About War
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“Does your novel speak to Hamas’s attack on Israel?” I got the question during a podcast interview I was giving to support the launch of my new novel, which…
How the Intensity of Female Relationships Leaves the Door Open for Horror
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Picture it: Woodstock, Georgia, 1988. I’m at a sleepover party. We’re eating pizza and watching The Amityville Horror and probably drinking Ecto Cooler and jumping around on Pogo Balls…
Every Picture Tells a Story: Cinema Speculation, The Getaway and Me
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Every picture tells a story. If you don’t believe me, just ask Rod Stewart. Sir Rod practically coined the phrase in 1971. He liked it so much he used…
A Murder of Poets: Or, the Inescapable Connections Between Crime Fiction and Poetry
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“Murder will out…” –Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Poetry and pathology. Verse and victim. Meter and murder and mayhem. Poetry and crime fiction seem to go together like,…
90s Horror-Thrillers Created a New Generation of Would-Be Detectives
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For two now-distant decades, horror movies were less about whodunit, and more about how-the-hell-do-they-stop-this-guy? In 1978, Halloween burst onto the scene, followed, two years later, by Friday the 13th….