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 a monopoly on trade down the Mississippi River from Kentucky. Wilkinson brought with him flour, butter, bacon, and tobacco—examples of the goods he said he hoped…
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 must transpire. Gloominess and atmosphere are everything: crumbling castles (gothic architecture inhabits many gothic novels, see Thornfield, Manderlay, High Place, the castle of Otranto), windswept coastlines,…
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 forget about Brooklyn, and really, the south Bronx is incredibly convenient on the 2, the 5, even the D, Hoboken’s way out of reach but have…
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 Hampshire. Home to two-thirds of the UK’s surface naval fleet and with a reputation you might expect of a town filled to the gills with sailors.…
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 tone is set right from the start, in the opening sentence: “When at two o’clock on a sultry July afternoon Athelstan Digby undertook to keep an…
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 to view them through the lens of popular culture, assigning labels born of books and screen: rebel, cheerleader, nerd. But while they may well cycle through…
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 that film’s extended universe (every property needs one these days), Fargo the series has been some ride thus far. Since its debut in 2014, the show…
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 (Catriona Ward’s Sunset), and Raynor Winn’s Landlines. But I do love a Christmas book for Christmas. A winter break in New York in 2004 started it.…
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 theatre, concert halls, or similar venues have entertained readers since the nineteenth century, and there is no sign of this changing. One of the main strengths…