Genres
Memory, Place, and Hauntings: On Toronto’s Seedy Seventies-Era “Sin Strip”
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In the late 70s my family emigrated to Toronto and stayed for two years. In those days, downtown was notorious for its Sin Strip. Four blocks concentrated on Yonge…
The Enduring Appeal of Murder and Mystery: A Brief History
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“Thou shalt not kill,” commands the King James Bible— without, as opponents of capital punishment like to point out, riders or qualifiers. Curiously, this translation of an injunction in…
Stephen Spotswood On “Queering the Narrative of the Golden Age of America”
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When things seem to be going badly in a society, people sympathize with characters who distrust or operate outside of that society’s governing systems…In eras tinged with chaos in…
Femi Kayode Considers Groups, Belief Systems, and the Village of Readers
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When I am asked if my new novel, Gaslight, was inspired by real events, I answer no. But while the events themselves didn’t happen; the emotional center of the…
The Mysterious Mr. Badman Is A Masterpiece of Macabre Humor
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The Mysterious Mr. Badman is a long-forgotten but entertaining crime novel, its light-heartedness all the more unexpected given the author’s reputation as a master of the macabre. The teasing…
Troubled Teens in Crime Fiction
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Teenagers don’t have it easy. On top of navigating a microculture rife with veiled rules and unspoken expectations—also known as high school—they often get a bad rap. Adults tend…
Tis the Season to be (Fictionally) Murdered
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I’ve never been one for a beach read at the beach. Recently in Ventura and Monterey, I read a New-Jersey-set legal thriller (Robyn Gigl’s Survivor Guilt), a desert-set horror…
All the (Crime) World’s a Stage: The Irresistible Pairing of Mysteries and the Theater
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Crime writers utilize an extraordinarily wide range of back-grounds for their stories, but the stage is one of the most popular of them all. Stories set in—or connected with—the…
Beyond Treasure Island: A Brief Introduction to Pirates in Fiction
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Not too long ago I found myself nearly alone in the Maritime wing of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. The Peabody Essex was formed from the gradual merging…
Parties Gone Wrong: A Beloved Trope in Crime Fiction
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Parties are terrible at the best of times. So much hope and anticipation is heaped onto them, they can never live up to the pressure, collapsing into tears and…