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 began his career as an assistant director on various projects including the Jim Brown/Gene Hackman flick Riot (1969), eleven episodes of The Brady Bunch and a…
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 an audience that the filmmakers never had in mind. A cult movie is nothing to be ashamed of; The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Donnie Darko, and…
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 days plotting heists and piecing together a scheme for righteous revenge. One, the show had some far-fetched moments, starting with the idea of a ‘gentleman thief.’…
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 an episode of television. The vivid nature of the storytelling, the feeling that you’re in the room watching the events happen, is high praise for a…
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 the desert it rises fast. It hung on the horizon like a solid neon pumpkin, beaming through our windshield. It grew warmer all the time. The…
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 is set during the 2006 34-day Hezbollah-Israeli War. My novel came out shortly before Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel and my interview was a few…
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 because the eighties were wild like that. There are four other girls and one mom hanging out in the living room, braiding each other’s hair, and…
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 it for both the title of his third solo record on Mercury and for the title of the album’s opening track. The album was a breakthrough…
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, well, rhyme and reason. Crime novelist and CWA Diamond Dagger winner Martin Edwards has been quoted as saying that the pair share “the importance of form…
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. By the time Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street hit screens, moviegoers couldn’t get enough of the jump-scares, and the unsettled sleeps that inevitably followed.…