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…
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…
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…
“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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…