Genres
On The Rise, Fall, and Seemingly Inexplicable Appeal of Golden-Age Sleuth Philo Vance
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Philo Vance—the creation of Willard Huntington Wright, writing as S. S. Van Dine—first appeared in 1926 and overnight became an American publishing phenomenon. Vance appeared in twelve novels and seventeen films, and was so successful and well-known that genre historian J. K. Van Dover declared that by 1930, “Philo Vance was the American detective.” Van…
Horror for the Holidays, Or, Scary Novels To Read While Being Nice to Your Family
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I find the holidays a good time for horror. Whether the festive season makes you happy or miserable, you can read about people who are (hopefully) in more immediate and serious trouble than you. If your family has gathered, as so many do at the holidays, you can finish the last page of a novel…
The Orchestral Stirrings of Death on the Down Beat, a Musician’s Murder Mystery
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Death on the Down Beat, originally published in 1941, is subtitled “An Orchestral Fantasy of Detection.” This is a highly unusual detective novel which is likely to appeal particularly to music lovers. A rare and little-known novel, it has nevertheless been described by the Golden Age mystery aficionado Barry Pike in The Oxford Companion to…
“The Mousetrap”: Still Going Strong After 28,000 Performances
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On the day Agatha Christie died in 1976, London theaters dimmed their lights for an hour in a show of esteem for her. While best known as the top-selling novelist of all time, Christie also set a record for the longest running stage production. The play she predicted would last 8 months, The Mousetrap, opened…
Literary Fiction Can Be Murder
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For a bibliophile, there’s nothing better than curling up with a good book. The last place most booklovers want to be is stuck in the middle of a crowd. However, nothing can draw an introverted booklover into a crowd better than a book event. Book clubs, book conventions, book festivals, and author readings and signings…
The White Priory Murders, A Christmas Mystery That Deserves To Be Remembered
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The White Priory Murders is an “impossible crime” novel by the master of the locked-room mystery, John Dickson Carr, masquerading as Carter Dickson, the name associated with his stories featuring Sir Henry Merrivale. Originally published in 1934, this was Merrivale’s second recorded case, written with youthful verve at a time when the author was still…
Books In Which Rich People (Think They Can) Get Away With Murder
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Having money offers many privileges. Beautiful clothes, houses, and spouses. Glossy lives, glossy hair, and the odd glossy-coated pony. Better healthcare and a better diet full of perfectly balanced macro and micronutrients. The rich may live longer, but they are not immortals. They are not untouchable. The Other Half, my debut novel, features a love-to-loathe…
Fall’s Best International Fiction
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Sorry, folks—we got a little behind with the column, but there’s been so many wonderful new novels in translation coming out this fall, I had to do at least one more new release roundup before the end of the year. Below, you’ll find an eclectic melange of mystery, thriller, and horror, with plenty of cross-overs…
Learning to Be Lost (and Found) in Fiction and in Life
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It’s 1986, and I’m lost in the forest. I’m ten years old, huddled at the base of a Ponderosa pine at the far reaches of Silver Lake, California, one of innumerous small, high Alpine lakes strewn across the Sierra Nevada mountains like blue-green jewels in a tangled necklace. It’s getting dark, and I haven’t seen…
Brave Women in Mysterious Circumstances: A Reading List
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When I was 12 or 13, I read a book called The Other Side of Dark by Joan Lowery Nixon. There wasn’t a ton of YA in those days (this was before cell phones and streaming music, back when we had to look up information in encyclopedias and dinosaurs roamed the earth) so whenever a…