Features
Shane’s Lot: How a 1949 Gun-Toting Loner Still Rides Through American Literature
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A stranger comes to town. He is stern, quiet, with a whiff of criminality, seductive to women and men alike, his life like an arrow shooting him onward. He…
Exploring the Isolation of the British Countryside
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There is a magnificent bit in a Sherlock Holmes story, which—subconsciously in the beginning, I guess – gave me the inspiration for my first detective novel, Death Under a…
How An Obsession With Art Crime Became a Thriller
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If you have ever wanted to know how it feels to snatch a painting from a museum wall, slide it under your shirt, and take off, then Michael Finkel’s,…
Passionate Distortions: Patricia Highsmith and the Female Protagonist
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What is it about the work of Patricia Highsmith that attracts some readers as powerfully as it repels others? I’m in the first group: I fell under the spell…
Rian Johnson on the Genius of John Dickson Carr
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You hold in your hands one of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics, a series that resurrects out-of-print gems in handsomely designed new editions. I owe this series a great…
Rian Johnson and Olivia Rutigliano talk Poker Face, Knives Out, and Golden Age Mysteries
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Reissued for the first time this century, John Dickson Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage is an atmospheric and amusing Golden Age mystery with a memorable puzzle at…
Running Away with the Fairies
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Here in Avalon was never supposed to be about fairies. I’d envisioned the novel—a literary thriller about two sisters, one of whom, Cecilia, goes missing after getting involved with…
Cozy Mystery Subgenres: Making the Perfect Blend
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Cozy mystery is a subgenre of crime fiction. When readers ask what are cozy mysteries, I explain they’re mysteries without on-the-page violence, physical intimacy or naughty words. That’s the…
What Makes a Forest Such a Seductive Setting for Fiction?
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The woods have been a popular setting in literature for centuries, from the Grimm Brothers to today’s bestsellers, but what makes a forest such a seductive setting for fiction?…