High Society Meets Low Murder in Jones’ Imperial Vienna

J. Sydney Jones’ introduction to Vienna came in 1968, when, as a college student from Oregon, he took advantage of a year-abroad program to study in the history- and culture-rich, but then rather “rough-hewn” Austrian capital. “Other kids my age,” he’s written before, “were off killing and being killed in Southeast Asia; I had a bad back and a high lottery number—4F and a lucky winner....I went to Vienna planning to become a lawyer; I left knowing I would be a writer.” That experience marked the beginning of Jones’ love affair with the old imperial city, a ...

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O No, Canada: Snooping Out Crimes North of the Border (Part II)

In my last column, I looked at some of the difficulties facing today’s Canadian crime novelists as they seek attention for their works beyond the precincts of their own nation. American publishers are often leery of taking them on, their fiction has trouble achieving notice amid the contesting torrents of U.S. and U.K. mysteries and thrillers, and international readers don’t necessarily find Canadian settings “exotic” enough to be interesting (unlike the frosty, rolling reaches of Scandinavia).

Some of the best-recognized crime-fictionists living north of the U.S. border—Peter Robinson, Linwood Barclay, J. Robert Janes and ...

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O No, Canada: Snooping Out Crimes North of the Border (Part I)

Most readers, when they deliberate over the geographical wellsprings of modern mystery and thriller fiction, think of either the United States or Great Britain. Well, and maybe now also Nordic countries where this strain of storytelling has suddenly become as exportable a commodity as timber, petroleum and ready-to-assemble furniture. Somewhere behind those sources might fall Ireland, South Africa, South America and Australia, which are slowly but surely establishing themselves as beguiling backdrops for tales of a felonious bent.

But Canada? Despite a history of contributions to this genre that dates back at least to the early 19th century, the Western ...

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First Offenses: Getting Started on a Life of Crime (Fiction)

For the last few years, I’ve provided part-time help to an independent bookshop in my north Seattle neighborhood. This started out primarily as a way to lever me out of my office chair more often, and expand my social contacts beyond my wife and our cosseted feline. However, I have come to relish these opportunities to talk with other people about books they’ve enjoyed, and some they found disappointing.

Not surprisingly, I fall easily into the proselytizer mode when it comes to selling crime, mystery and thriller fiction. Which is swell for some customers, especially those who deliberately ...

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Seizure and Search: Wilson Executes a Kidnapping in "Exotic" London

Sadly, the specialized and secretive business of kidnapping response and recovery is booming these days. That’s especially true in high-risk corners of the globe, such as Latin America and certain parts of Eastern Europe. Yet, as Robert Wilson makes clear in Capital Punishment, the snatch-and-ransom game can be played with equal dexterity and drama in a big, rapidly changing place such as London.

British author Wilson rose to renown on the rungs of such psychologically intriguing thrillers as A Small Death in Lisbon and The Blind Man of Seville, the latter of which introduced his best-known series sleuth, Spanish ...

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Spring Gleaning: A Little Darkness and Death for Sunnier Days

OK, call me an optimist, but I’m looking forward to sun. Lots of it. And soon. This last winter has provided a great opportunity to hunker down beneath blankets, with coffee in hand, and engage in serious digestion of criminal yarns both fresh and famous. However, I have missed my front porch and the languid hours I am prone to spend there on warmer days, ignoring every passing neighbor and dilatory butterfly as I stretch out in an Adirondack chair and wait for death to come. In the pages of the latest books, that is.

Below, I’ve gathered ...

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Tropical Heat: Hunting Bombers and Assassins in Gage’s Brazil

OK, let’s have a quick show of hands. How many of you have ever read crime fiction by South American authors? Maybe Patricia Melo’s The Killer, Mempo Giardinelli’s Sultry Moon, or Jô Soares’ Samba for Sherlock? Perhaps Ernesto Mallo’s International Dagger Award-nominated Needle in a Haystack, or Juan de Recacoechea’s American Visa? How about Guillermo Orsi’s Holy City, which captured Spain’s Dashiell Hammett Prize back in 2010?

All of these works and many others from south of the Panama Canal—especially from Argentina and Brazil—have been translated into English and collected critical ...

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'Teens Beat: Crime, Commerce and Culture of the Great War Era

Next year will mark a full century since the outbreak of World War I in Europe. The four years of that conflict (including the year and a half of U.S. involvement) caused tremendous societal and political stresses, and a head-spinning sense that the old order of things was in swift decline and the future uncertain at best.

However, the seeds of change—mass production of goods, the explosive growth of cities, the failure of landed-class aristocracies and rising middle-class incomes, and globalization that brought foods from distant parts of the globe to dinner plates in London and Chicago—were ...

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Gumshoes Don't Quit: Perry Mason's Crime-Solving Cousins

Thanks to the popularity—even today, in reruns—of the TV series Perry Mason, most people think of Erle Stanley Gardner solely as the creator of that extraordinarily successful Los Angeles criminal attorney played by Raymond Burr.

But before shuttering his own legal practice and becoming a full-time writer, Gardner also penned dozens of short tales (many for Black Mask magazine) about other protagonists, from both sides of the law. “Phantom crook” Ed Jenkins, “human fly” detective Speed Dash, gentleman thief Lester Leith, millionaire adventurer Sidney Zoom, confidence man Paul Pry, crusading defense attorney Ken Corning—all of those, and ...

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Robinson Heats Up a Cold Case in 'Watching the Dark'

When I first interviewed Peter Robinson, back in 1999, the British-born Canadian crime writer was still largely unknown and underappreciated. Even after publishing a dozen novels, a couple of which had captured major awards.

But that was the year his “breakout book,” In a Dry Season—his 10th police procedural featuring dogged and hunch-trusting Yorkshire Det. Chief Insp. Alan Banks—reached stores. The recipient of widespread critical acclaim, it boosted his profile significantly, not only in the United States, but also in the UK and mainland Europe. Ever since, he’s been regular contender in fiction-prize competitions on both sides ...

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Preliminary Investigation: 6 Crime-Fiction Leads for 2013

Now that we’ve survived yet another predicted end of the world, and are finally winding down the holiday season in a polychromatic flurry of wrapping paper and New Year’s party hats, it’s time to look forward to what works of crime, mystery and thriller fiction 2013 will offer. Or at least what you’ll see in stores over the next three months.

Many of the best-known contributors to this field, from both sides of the Atlantic, have new books scheduled for release between January 1 and the end of March. Those include Robert Crais (Suspect) and Charles ...

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A Spy Is Born in Sansom's Fascist Britain

It’s likely true of anybody who’s interested in history: he or she wonders what might’ve happened had the rush of time executed different swerves now and then.

But novelists are the people most prone to play those scenarios out to their logical extremes. Thus, readers have been invited over the years to envision England being conquered by Spain in the 16th century (Ruled Britannia, by Harry Turtledove), “Honest Abe” surviving his 1865 visit to Ford’s Theater (The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, by Stephen L. Carter), Alaska becoming a Jewish homeland (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by ...

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You're the Tops: 2012's 10 Best Crime Novels

Accept my apologies right off the bat for having not read every crime novel published during the last 11 months. I’m only one person, after all. And I have to sleep sometime. Fortunately, my all-too-human limitations haven’t prevented me from enjoying a wide range of distinctive and even memorable works within the genre. Herewith, my favorites of the bunch, most of them from U.S. publishers, but a couple from across the pond.

The Blackhouse, by Peter May: Fleeing a crumbling marriage in Edinburgh, Det. Sgt. Fin Macleod hies off to the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s ...

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Sex, Sects and Scandal in the Last Frontier

British-born Melanie McGrath first came to widespread critical notice after the publication of her non-fiction book The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic (2006). It recalled Canada’s forced relocation, in 1953, of three dozen Inuit natives from their traditional home on mammoth Hudson Bay to the frigid, Great North wilds of Ellesmere Island, in what’s now the province of Nunavut.

But it was her chilling (in more ways than one) debut novel, last year’s White Heat—which she published as “M.J. McGrath”—that turned the heads of crime-fiction readers ...

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Fowl Play in Max Byrd’s Jazz Age Paris

Every reader has his or her own appetite for detail in historical fiction. Personally, I tend toward gluttony. Give me a wordy but wholly verisimilitudinous re-creation of some city of yore, a forgotten rural landscape or an archaic industrial enterprise, and I shall gleefully dine upon it page after glorious page. I do have my limits, and some novels manage to exceed it; Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian comes immediately to mind. However, I can be very forgiving of an author’s earnest efforts to transport me, through the supple vehicle of English expression, into a period, place and culture ...

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Background Check: Investigating Crime Fiction’s Creators

Even before I began reviewing crime fiction for a living, back when I was just a reader with a much smaller library, I was fascinated by books about this genre. Like the motion-picture fans of the early 20th century who devoured each issue of Photoplay magazine, or the omnivores of superstar quidnuncery who continue to keep People afloat, I was curious to know more about the folks—authors, filmmakers and TV producers alike—who brought me my favorite entertainment in all its forms.

Thus it was that I found room on my shelves for biographies of Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie ...

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The Case of the Celebrity Sleuths (Part II)

As I explained in my previous column, the crime-fiction genre—not content with introducing wholly imagined private eyes, cops and part-time mystery solvers—has, over the last several decades, recruited many genuine historical figures into its plots. The majority of those have made cameo appearances or played secondary parts. But some have been cast as series snoops, detouring from the known timeline of their lives to pursue killers, kidnappers and assorted other troublemaking types.

Of that latter group, a number have acted as independent amateur detectives. Their numbers include singer Elvis Presley (the star of four mysteries by Daniel Klein ...

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The Case of the Celebrity Sleuths (Part I)

It’s hard to know for sure who was the first author to conscript a real-life historical character as an amateur detective in mystery fiction. Often, though, credit is laid at the feet of Lillian de la Torre, a onetime president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Beginning in the early 1940s, she published more than two dozen short stories—later collected in several volumes—that cast 18th-century poet, editor and lexicographer Samuel Johnson and his renowned biographer, James Boswell, as Holmes-and-Watson-type partners, solving myriad transgressions of the law through the force of their superior intelligence and with the aid ...

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Lee Child's 'A Wanted Man'

Thriller writer Lee Child (born Jim Grant) spent almost two decades working in television in his native Britain before threats of industry downsizing convinced him that the time was right to re-create himself as a novelist.

His first book, Killing Floor, was published in 1997 and introduced the character who has gone on to star in every one of his novels since: Jack Reacher, a former military policeman—and aspiring knight errant—who drifts from one American town to the next, getting involved in various troubles and trying to win justice for people in need. And if a modicum of ...

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D.E. Johnson Finds Death and Insanity in Old Detroit

D.E. “Dan” Johnson says he didn’t start out as an author determined to compose historical thrillers. “The first book I wrote, in 2006-2007, was a religious satire,” he recalls sheepishly. “How I thought I might get that published is a historical mystery to me now. I think it was something I just had to get out of my system.”

After failing to find an agent for that book, he took a different path, combining his interest in “great historical fiction” with his fondness for “smart crime fiction by people like Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley.” The result has ...

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