mystery
5 Books for Mystery Lovers Who Want to Be Transported
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Looking for a gift for the mystery lover who adores a smart heroine whose adventures will viscerally transport the reader somewhere else? Someone who loves the Miss Marple mysteries…
And They All Died Happily Ever After: Cozies, Grimdarks, and Modern Morality
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Those familiar with Game of Thrones will recognize the hallmarks of “grimdark” storytelling. In a grimdark world, morals are flexible. Dark aesthetics and gritty details dominate. Today’s hero could…
Peril in Paradise: A List Of Thrillers In Which Bad Things Happen In Beautiful Places
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Conflict lies at the heart of all mystery and suspense, and what could be more conflicting than taking a trip to paradise only to get caught up in the…
The Enduring Appeal of Murder and Mystery: A Brief History
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“Thou shalt not kill,” commands the King James Bible— without, as opponents of capital punishment like to point out, riders or qualifiers. Curiously, this translation of an injunction in…
The Mysterious Mr. Badman Is A Masterpiece of Macabre Humor
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The Mysterious Mr. Badman is a long-forgotten but entertaining crime novel, its light-heartedness all the more unexpected given the author’s reputation as a master of the macabre. The teasing…
Tis the Season to be (Fictionally) Murdered
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I’ve never been one for a beach read at the beach. Recently in Ventura and Monterey, I read a New-Jersey-set legal thriller (Robyn Gigl’s Survivor Guilt), a desert-set horror…
All the (Crime) World’s a Stage: The Irresistible Pairing of Mysteries and the Theater
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Crime writers utilize an extraordinarily wide range of back-grounds for their stories, but the stage is one of the most popular of them all. Stories set in—or connected with—the…
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…