History of Mystery
Ruins in Rain City: Trouble in Mind and the Career of Alan Rudolph
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Filmmaker Alan Rudolph has been working in the movie business for most of his life. Coming from a Hollywood family where his dad Oscar was also a director, Rudolph began his career as an assistant director on various projects including the Jim Brown/Gene Hackman flick Riot (1969), eleven episodes of The Brady Bunch and a…
Crime and the City: Las Vegas
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Let’s go to Las Vegas with one of the great kings of the American hard-boiled Charles Willeford in his novel Wicked Wives (1956): ‘Once the sun comes up in the desert it rises fast. It hung on the horizon like a solid neon pumpkin, beaming through our windshield. It grew warmer all the time. The…
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 that the genre is famous for. The tradition goes back to the Golden Age of detective fiction, that period after World War II when authors like…
Every Picture Tells a Story: Cinema Speculation, The Getaway and Me
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Every picture tells a story. If you don’t believe me, just ask Rod Stewart. Sir Rod practically coined the phrase in 1971. He liked it so much he used it for both the title of his third solo record on Mercury and for the title of the album’s opening track. The album was a breakthrough…
What Is the Legacy of Walter Hill?
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Will the real Walter Hill please stand up? The screenwriter and director is hard to label. Should Hill, now in his 80s, be considered the screenwriter of classic crime films like “The Getaway” and “The Drowning Pool?” The director of uncharacteristic, offbeat films like “Streets of Fire,” “Brewster’s Millions” and “Crossroads?” Or the auteur of…
The Best Hotels – and Hotel Bars – in Espionage Fiction
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Bars in grand hotels figure prominently in the canon of spy literature. One of the pleasures I get from reading the novels of Joseph Kanon, Graham Greene and other masters of the spy genre, is that the anonymous guests in the grand hotels come alive with a backstory and confidential business discussed over martinis is…
Crime and the City: Hamburg
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I think it’s fair to say that, in general, Hamburg is a rather underrated German city. Berlin and Munich get the crowds, Frankfurt the money, and Hamburg gets a bit overlooked. But not by crime fans as Hamburg has a long history of being, shall we say, a bit sleazy? It’s a port city (always…
Spenser at 50: The Evolution of Robert B. Parker’s Iconic Character
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From where he sits and writes in his Long Island home – in longhand, 10 pages a day – Mike Lupica can see a framed photograph of Robert B. Parker, the prolific author of the Spenser mystery novels. Parker wears a grin on his face and a Pittsburgh Pirates cap on his head. Also easily…