Features
An Appreciation of Gardening Detectives
.
Gardening detectives, both professional and amateur, abound in crime fiction and they appeared early on. Wilkie Collins introduced the first horticulturally inclined investigator in The Moonstone. The serialized story first appeared in the United Kingdom in January 1868 in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round and simultaneously in Harper’s Weekly in the United States….
7 Crime Novels Set in Sin City
.
Like many of my books, it started with a seed of an idea: a businessman wakes up in a hotel room that isn’t his to find a dead woman in the bathtub. From there, bits and pieces began to materialize—who the businessman was, who the woman was, etc.—but the one thing that took a while…
Writing a Domestic Survival Thriller
.
I’ve always been obsessed with survival stories—people braving the elements, or out-scheming malevolent captors or striving to survive the end of the world. The apocalyptic trope might be my favorite of the bunch, as I never grow tired of the unique ways writers imagine the unwinding of modern society, and how those at the end…
On Crime and Its Discontents
.
The first crime was the most defining moment in the history of the human. It was not Cain’s murder. That was defining too. But the first crime began in the realm of the numinous. It could only be deemed an act of spirit. Philosophers and religionists and mystics struggle to define it. The closest anyone…
When True Crime Meets Police Brutality
.
In 2016, journalist Amelia McDonell-Parry and I were asked to look into the death of Freddie Gray for the Undisclosed podcast, a series that focused on wrongful convictions. Gray had been killed in Baltimore police custody the year before, which led to mass protests and riots and became a national news story. State’s Attorney Marilyn…
Celebrating the Iconic Suspense of Lois Duncan
.
I still own three of Lois Duncan’s books. Growing up, I read so many, but these are the three I have left: Daughters of Eve, Stranger with My Face, and Summer of Fear. The covers are creased and falling apart, and the pages are so fragile that they tear when I try to turn them,…
Some Conspiracy Theories Surrounding the Royal House of Windsor
.
One of the joys of writing historical fiction as opposed to non-fiction is that the author can take a well-reasoned conspiracy theory and run with it, imagining how such deliciously scandalous events might have unfolded. That is exactly what I have done in my new novel, The Royal Windsor Secret. The British Royals have been…
The Girl and the Faun: Eden Phillpotts, His Crime Fiction and His Strange Relationship with His Daughter Adelaide
.
“No biography or autobiography is true, because no one in his senses tells the truth about himself….Whoever wants to know me can find me in my work.” –Eden Phillpotts (quoted in Reverie, 1981, by his daughter Adelaide Ross) “Mr. Phillpotts has always avoided personal publicity like the plague.” —Plymouth Western Morning News, 6 April 1921…
The Gilded Age: On Invention and Excess
.
“We don’t have a choice in the matter, Mr. McAllistar, we must go where history takes us.” In the HBO Gilded Age series, these were Bertha Russell’s brave words to Ward McAllister on the night Thomas Edison flipped the switch to electrically light up the New York Times Building. McAllister had expressed a qualm about…