Historical
5 Christmas Mysteries To Get You Ready for the Holiday Season
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It’s a rare crime fiction reader who doesn’t love curling up with a mystery during the winter months, especially if that mystery is one of the many Christmas-themed puzzles…
6 Thrilling Reads That Blend Folklore and Horror
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From tales told around the campfire to major literary classics, there’s a reason we turn to folklore when we want a scary story with staying power. Stories from mythology…
5 Historical Mysteries Featuring Unforgettable, Unconventional Women
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A lawyer in 1920s Bombay. A computer hacker/tech investigator in 1990s Paris. A deputy sheriff in 1914 New Jersey. What unites these characters, separated by time and diverse locales?…
The Four Corners of Subjectivity
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One hears it all the time. A reader praises a book because they find the characters “likable” or “relatable.” Another reader dismisses a book because they couldn’t “identify with…
When Contemporary Fiction Ages Into the Historical
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I find myself reflecting on my own teen years as I tackle Frankenstein-author Mary Shelley and her step-sister at age sixteen years for my new series, which begins with…
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,…
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…
The Art of Writing Mysteries Featuring Real-Life Figures
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My objective is to list the six best mysteries that feature real people. Quite a challenge given all the published stories meeting this criterion. There are, for example, several…
Murder Ballads, the Original True Crime
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It’s hard to spend much time online these days without bumping into true crime of one form or another. Countless podcasts examine murders and trials, and television offers an…