History of Mystery
The Sleuthing Spinster: Why Single Women Rule Cozy Fiction
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When people talk about great fictional detectives, there are classic names that come to mind: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot; Sam Spade; Phillip Marlowe; and Columbo trip easily off the tongue. In the modern era there’s even Batman, whose cool gadgets are second only to his skill as a deductive genius (he did debut in Detective…
Port-au-Prince: Crime Fiction as a Window into a Nation’s Soul
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Haiti has never been an easy place to live. From colonialism to liberation by the ex-slave revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture at the start of the nineteenth century – the largest slave uprising since Spartacus – it’s been a country wracked by violence, foreign interference, and division. A country that seemingly has no luck – dictators,…
‘A Face in the Crowd’ Forecast Our Future – If We’d Only Been Paying Attention
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It’s a cliché to cite some decades-old book, movie or TV show and say, “This is as relevant today as it was back then.” That said, one 1957 film satire is possibly more relevant today than when it was first released to movie theaters. “A Face in the Crowd,” directed by Elia Kazan and written…
The Girl and the Faun: Eden Phillpotts, His Crime Fiction and His Strange Relationship with His Daughter Adelaide
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“No biography or autobiography is true, because no one in his senses tells the truth about himself….Whoever wants to know me can find me in my work.” –Eden Phillpotts (quoted in Reverie, 1981, by his daughter Adelaide Ross) “Mr. Phillpotts has always avoided personal publicity like the plague.” —Plymouth Western Morning News, 6 April 1921…
James Ellroy Reveals the Real Reason He Writes
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“A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all, and will not last.” Frank O’Connor laid it out. He wrote the words at the cusp of the 20th century. Said words prophesied the hard-boiled novel. Hard-boiled scorched its artistic debut on February 1, 1929. Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, hit bookstores. Hammett’s…
The Cowboy as Detective: Finding Charlie Siringo’s West
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When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid finally came to my boyhood mall, I saw it three times, wondering in the dark about the unnamed lawmen chasing the Wild Bunch outlaws around the West, the drumbeat of their horses’ hooves drawing Butch’s exasperated line, “Who are those guys?” One who chased the gang, I would…
The New York City Theater Where True Crime Was All the Rage…in the Early 19th Century
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Long before the doors opened, a crowd gathered outside the theater. Noisily, they bustled in, country folk and urban dandies alike, to find themselves good seats. The old mansion’s walls reverberated with their footsteps on the hardwood floors, spirited greetings, idle gossip, and talk of politics. The playhouse had once been the country home of…
The Backlist: Revisiting Vicki Hendricks’ ‘Miami Purity’ with Alex Segura
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I didn’t know what to expect from a novel called Miami Purity. Was it about nuns, or one of those creepy abstinence-only pledges for teens? I had no idea that the novel was a neo-noir cult classic, one that Megan Abbott in her introduction lauds for “its audacious and subversive play with a tradition it…