Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Though written in the 1970s, 'Falling Angel' is firmly set in 1959.
Britain proves to be an ideal setting for many a medieval-minded crime novelist, regardless of century.
'Child 44' has no room for inconsequential choices because Stalinist Russia had no room for them, either.
There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.
The make-believe world of 'The Black Tower' succeeds by broadcasting larger truths that might otherwise elude us.
Like so many other bored teens, I was a bored teen with a hobby. The only difference was mine was obsessing about crime.
The abundance of Roman historical mysteries contrasts with the surprising paucity of crime novels set in classical Greece.
Having set its tonal template, Vertigo Crime laid low for a few months before starting in earnest at the beginning of 2010.
In 1953, the idea of a single female police recruit to the New York City Police Department, let alone a handful, was big news.
As an inveterate lover of mystery, cracking the code of a writer's true identity has the same effect, for me, as tasting forbidden fruit.
Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.
If you think the shifting tectonics of world history might make for a juicy crime fiction backdrop, the last decade or so has proved you right.
I've waited for a novel from Charles Yu with eager anticipation since being bowled over by his 2006 short story collection, 'Third Class Superhero.'
With only one novel to her credit, Anna Jarzab can't quite be classified in Werlin country, but 'All Unquiet Things' is a big step in that direction.
I studied voice and piano fairly seriously during my elementary and high school days, and as such, I became very attuned to rhythm and cadence and voice.
It takes about seventy-five pages for a Parker reference - from 'The Score,' specifically - to show up in Geoff Manaugh's 'A Burglar's Guide to the City.'
Nabokov began writing 'Lolita' before he ever knew of Florence 'Sally' Horner, an 11-year-old who was kidnapped from Camden, New Jersey, in the summer of 1948.
Six books after the surprises of 'Full Dark House,' the Bryant and May novels continue to stay within the bounds of formula by straining against them in new ways.
In 2011, I contributed an essay to Tin House, 'The Dark Side of Dinner Dishes, Laundry, and Child Care,' talking about women writers I felt had fallen off the map.
Rereading 'Child 44' brought out the novel's meatier pleasures, its ability to create vivid characters in a world both alien to our own and chillingly recognizable.
I was pretty serious about pursuing forensic science as a profession. In fact, I pursued an internship at the office of the chief medical examiner here in New York.
After so many attempts to mount a musical version of 'Lolita,' the project was well and truly dead by the summer of 1971. Chief among those relieved: Vladimir Nabokov.
Dorothy B. Hughes - there's a robust elegance to her writing that I keep responding to again and again. I've read her novel 'In a Lonely Place' about eight or nine times.
Sue Grafton's 'A Is for Alibi', the 1982 novel that introduced the world to private detective Kinsey Millhone, wasn't seen as the pioneering achievement we now know it to be.
My focus will always be crime, but it might not always be fiction, nor always for adults, nor books entirely in prose. That's a lot of ground to cover, so I might as well begin.
The Boston run of 'Lolita, My Love' ended after a mere nine performances - though one of them was recorded at decent enough quality to be preserved by the New York Public Library.
Indeed, mysteries lead readers through an endless variety of subjects and settings; yet sometimes devotees of detection seek to be transported though another dimension as well: time.
What I learned in school made me a better journalist and a better writer because forensic science is, as scientific disciplines must be, about critical thinking and objective analysis.
Most people will pay tribute to Anthony Bourdain as a chef, as the author of 'Kitchen Confidential,' and as the host of several food and travel shows - most recently, 'Parts Unknown' on CNN.
When a novel is based on an actual crime, it should do much more than loosely fictionalize it. The novel must stand alone as a work of art that justifies using the story for its own purposes.
Oddly, the anti-heroes of both 'The Chill' and veteran comics writer Peter Milligan's 'The Bronx Kill' share a first name, though their occupations and plights couldn't be any more different.
One of the things that has puzzled me the most in my years of serious mystery reading is why there are relatively few standout books geared specifically for middle grade and young adult readers.
Yes, Charles Yu names his main character after himself. That main character, in fact, is both time-machine repairman and author of a book called 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.'
We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.
Despite the volatile mixture of family, politics and past misdeeds darkening the present, 'Hardball' doesn't have the sharp tang of the early novels or the expansive reach of more recent series installments.
I've tried to slow this down but realized that my natural reading rhythm is freakishly fast when an author friend asked me to go through the manuscript of her soon-to-be-published book for continuity errors.
'Laura' was overtly political for sure. Caspary was trying to make a point about women and independence and how men viewed them, with derision or condescension or on a pedestal, when the real person was ignored.
Five years before 'Kitchen Confidential' - and before then, the 'New Yorker' essay that led to the book - Bourdain published 'A Bone in the Throat,' a crime novel set in the restaurant world he lived and breathed.
Alan Jay Lerner needed a hit. The Broadway lyricist and librettist was a decade removed from his greatest successes when his partnership with composer Frederick Loewe produced something approaching unholy alchemy.
Joseph Wambaugh did not invent the police novel, but no one had seen anything like 'The New Centurions' when it was published in 1971. Here was a working, living, breathing cop with a decade of experience on the beat.
The interior nature of 'Basic Black' is central to its unfolding. Shirley Kaszenbowski, regarded from the outside, is the embodiment of the invisible woman. She is in her early forties, long married, with two children.
Vera Caspary wrote an essay called 'My 'Laura' and Otto's' where she talks about the arguments she had with Preminger. She felt that not only did he misunderstand the character but that he couldn't help but be misogynist.
'Basic Black with Pearls', upon its publication in 1980, was greeted with a mix of praise and misunderstanding. Critics sensed its daring and applauded its formal inventiveness, but those qualities also kept people at bay.
I retain characters more often than plot, but what seems to happen is that I latch on to specific moments, turns of phrase, and dialogue as touchstones for me to recall what happened in the book. Kind of like freeze-frame.
Wambaugh's naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned 'Centurions' and 'The Blue Knight' (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made him relevant to a larger audience and to the next generation of crime writers.
To understand the current state of mind of both Sara Paretsky and her private detective alter ego, one must first roll back the clock to 1982, when Victoria Iphegenia Warshawski took her first investigative bow in 'Indemnity Only.'
Film rights were in the offing for 'The Onion Field,' eventually made into a movie in 1979; 'The New Centurions' became a 1972 film starring George C. Scott, while 'The Blue Knight' starred William Holden in a 1973 mini-series version.
How can quality crime fiction not be produced with available subject matters as the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the creation of organized police forces, the dawn of forensic science, and the rise and fall of Romanticism?
Though 'Child's Play' is ultimately more concerned with subverting storytelling expectations and satirizing the expected trajectory of traditional mystery, Posadas does embed some insights about the writer's responsibility to the reader.
In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada's federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college.