reading
The Many Ways to Be a Scoundrel in Early America
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In the summer of 1787, as the Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia, General James Wilkinson journeyed to New Orleans to visit Spanish Governor Esteban Miró, ostensibly about obtaining…
Sinking Into the Gothic Gloom: My Favourite Works
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I’ve always struggled with some of the prevailing definitions of ‘gothic’ fiction. Tradition dictates there should be elements of fear, threat, woe, that hauntings should occur and vile things…
The Mystery of Real Estate Porn
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It’s a game in New York and we all play. Everyone talks real estate, how the condo market’s soft, how the rental market’s skyrocketing, how Manhattan’s suddenly affordable but…
Crime and the City: Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight
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Portsmouth – known to the locals as “Pompey” – is, and has been for centuries, England’s largest Royal Navy base, 75 miles south of London in the country of…
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…
Troubled Teens in Crime Fiction
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Teenagers don’t have it easy. On top of navigating a microculture rife with veiled rules and unspoken expectations—also known as high school—they often get a bad rap. Adults tend…
Getting Ready to Say Goodbye to Fargo
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This November, FX released the fifth and possibly final season of the popular anthology series Fargo. Based on the 1996 film by Joel and Ethan Coen, and set in…
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…