Features
The Western Meets Weird Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion
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Once a narrowly defined genre—set in the American frontier of the 19th Century—the definition of Western has expanded with contemporary takes from such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Ivy Pochoda, Alma Katsu, Jim Harrison and Louise Erdrich. And now, along comes HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD: An Anthology of the Weird West (September 26, 2023; Dead Sky Publishing),…
Five Disturbing Books That Violate Your Sanctuary
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In another life, I’m sure I was a political assassin or, at the very least, a cold-hearted femme fatale who was on the right end of a gun or winning cause. How else to explain my long-standing obsession/fascination with mayhem, gore, and murder most foul? A voracious reader from a tender age, when I wasn’t…
How a Trip to a Museum Turned into the Perfect Start to a Mystery
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School field trips. Exhibitions. Guided tours. It might be easy to dismiss museums as stuffy or even boring, but they are far from that—especially to an aspiring crime writer looking to write her first murder mystery. The idea for my debut historical mystery, A Traitor in Whitehall, came to me while standing in the middle…
Nine Crime Novels Featuring Found Families
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My historical novel published in 2021, Death at Greenway, used research on the real people who had lived on the estate of Agatha Christie’s holiday home in the English Riviera during World War II. Faced with the universe of facts I could lay my hands on, I had to be selective about which details were…
A Country Road, in the Dead of Night: On The Historical Hauntings of Irish Folklore
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First published in 1936, On Another Man’s Wound was written by Earnán Ó Máille and recounts his time as a guerrilla fighter during the Irish War of Independence in the nineteen twenties. It is generally considered to be the one bona-fide piece of literature to arise from that conflict. No dry military memoir, Ó Máille…
The 10 Best Bounty Hunter Movies
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The bounty hunter is the ultimate outsider in law enforcement. Neither elected like a sheriff nor sworn in like a cop, the bounty hunter gets in harm’s way as much as officers but with less authority and even lesser respect. Also known as bail enforcement or fugitive recovery, bounty hunting is uniquely American. The profession…
Sean Howe on High Times Magazine and Its Enigmatic, Larger-than-Life Editor
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For someone who would dress all in black in the guise of a priest or in a dapper all-white suit, there remain shades of gray surrounding Thomas King Forcade (née Gary Goodson). He blazed out of Phoenix in the late ’60s, becoming the head of the Underground Press Syndicate—a national confederation of often-controversial and incendiary…
On Writing an Urbex Thriller and Exploring the Vertical City
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How far would you go to be the first? The only? All the great cities have become theme parks, and all the theme parks feed lots, Burning Man a millionaires’ mud-wallow, Everest an overbooked junkyard, even the once-infamous Area 51 is a tourist trap. But the most thrilling excursion you’ve never taken could be right…