Lithub
Beyond Treasure Island: A Brief Introduction to Pirates in Fiction
.
Not too long ago I found myself nearly alone in the Maritime wing of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. The Peabody Essex was formed from the gradual merging…
Parties Gone Wrong: A Beloved Trope in Crime Fiction
.
Parties are terrible at the best of times. So much hope and anticipation is heaped onto them, they can never live up to the pressure, collapsing into tears and…
7 Great Cozy Mysteries Set in the Fall
.
There are so many reasons to love fall, from the splendor of the changing leaves to settling back into a comfortable routine after a hectic summer. Cooler temperatures and…
On The Rise, Fall, and Seemingly Inexplicable Appeal of Golden-Age Sleuth Philo Vance
.
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
.
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
.
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
.
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
.
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….
Delving Into the Real Story of Charlie Starkweather, Spree Killer, Demon of the American ’50s
.
In 1958, America was at the peak of the post-WWII boom. The country had emerged from the war as the strongest economic and military power in the world. Prosperity…
The White Priory Murders, A Christmas Mystery That Deserves To Be Remembered
.
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…