We Make Our Own Monsters

By this point in the long game, I’ve interviewed a lot of crime writers. Elmore Leonard once read me the opening chapter of a novel—while he was in the middle of typing it up. I spoke with Walter Mosley and Donald E. Westlake within the same two-hour window one Christmas eve. Go toe-to-toe with Richard Price and you’ll come out of it feeling like the losing end of a prizefight.

But there is nothing in the world like a sit-down with Andrew Vachss.
 
I first interviewed Vachss a decade ago about his superb novella The Getaway Man ...

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A Stoned Sam Spade: Drinking in the Novelty of Moses Wine

Forty years ago, when novelist/screenwriter Roger L. Simon first introduced his countercultural private investigator, Moses Wine, in The Big Fix (1973), the American school of P.I. fiction was primed for change.

Two of its most influential contributors had already gone to their graves, passing away in quick succession—Raymond Chandler in 1959, Dashiell Hammett in 1961. Ross Macdonald, the third member of that school’s Holy Trinity, published his 17th Lew Archer novel, Sleeping Beauty, in 1973, but was able to finish only one additional entry in that series before he himself died 10 years later. A score ...

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Intrepid Heroine, Shrewd Author

Taylor Stevens doesn’t get it when people find her special. Forget that the widely acclaimed author of The Informationist, The Innocent and now The Doll successfully survived an abusive childhood inside a scary religious cult, presently travels to exotic locales researching intricate plot points and enjoys ownership of a hard-as-nails heroine regularly likened to Lisbeth Salander. Nope, the way Taylor sees it, her fictitious multi-lingual, martial arts-chopping protagonist Vanessa Michael Munroe is the real resourceful one. Now, please excuse the author while she pauses to sort out the middle school kids and the barking dog.

“I wish I spoke ...

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Making Good Use of Paranoia

Novelist Alan Glynn chuckles to himself as he reveals the secret of his success. In his soft Dublin accent, he recalls W. Somerset Maugham's advice. “There are three rules for writing a novel,” Maugham famously declared. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

It may very well be to Glynn’s advantage that he doesn’t have more of a plan, because one of the attractions of his twisty, ominous financial thrillers remains the fact that they are utterly, convincingly unpredictable. This is dark territory, where titans of industry brandish soul-crushing power with ruthless ambition, corrupting the very core ...

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Eight Is Enough: Summertime is Prime Crime Time

Back when I was a boy, growing up in northern Oregon, I suffered from pretty severe hay fever. So while other children in my neighborhood scampered through wild grasses up to their armpits or engaged in lazy innings of softball on luminous summer afternoons, I remained behind. My mother, wary of overmedicating her two sons, didn’t want me popping pills or receiving shots that might have reduced my allergy symptoms, even if the alternative was that I spend the most agreeable days of June, July and August inside or, at best, in a rocking chair out on my bedroom ...

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Resisting Little Boxes: The Soul of Walter Mosley

In 2007’s Blonde Faith, Los Angeles PI Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins drove off a cliff, like Sherlock Holmes plunging down Reichenbach Falls, and for much the same reason. “I wasn’t interested in where we were going,” admits Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries. “It didn’t feel to me like I was being creative. I wasn’t happy with [Easy’s] future. I didn’t think I could do this to him.”

So six years passed, leaving Easy’s fate unknown, and the writer moved on to other projects. But just as Holmes returned for more adventures ...

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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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Red Moon, and a Lot of Lycan Unease

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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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Driving Down the Highway to Hell (or Christmasland)

Victoria McQueen has the ability to find lost objects by riding her bicycle on a covered bridge that no longer exists—a magical construct known as an inscape. A rebellious teen, Victoria uses her bridge to find trouble, and succeeds beyond her wildest nightmares when her power leads her to Charlie Manx, who kidnaps children and drives them in his evil Rolls-Royce Wraith to his own inscape, Christmasland, a magical theme park which promises an eternity of snowy fun…in exchange for their souls. Victoria just barely manages to escape Manx; afterward, her power lies fallow for years of troubled ...

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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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Poor Little Innocent

Many people like crime thrillers for just as many reasons, but here are two big ones: chase scenes and kingpins. Chase scenes are popular for the erudite argument that they usually add up to at least the sum of their parts–parts like "bullets" and "large pieces of fast-moving machinery"–that have a well-established kinetic appeal. Kingpins are popular for the more human reason that they mirror some distorted version of ourselves. Everyone wonders what they could accomplish if they let their predatory side roam free, the bold Heisenberg to our shy Walter White.

Alexander Söderberg’s debut thriller ...

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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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Anniversaries: Foucault’s Pendulum

A bit of conspiracy theory to open this month of ides and signs and portents: For decades, a giant pendulum slowly swung inside the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology. When the museum was renovated to become the Museum of American History, the pendulum disappeared. Where did it go? And why, in those closing days of the Bush administration, did it go?

It was not just any pendulum. It was a Foucault pendulum, designed by a 19th-century French scientist to show the rotation of the Earth. Now, the physical world, ancient philosophers and modern scientists agree, is governed by ...

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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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The Disappearing Act

You’d be forgiven, if you knocked up against him in Portland, Ore., for having no clue that Roger Hobbs is the hottest new thriller writer to emerge this spring. I don’t know what new thriller writers are supposed to look like, exactly—they arrive in all shapes and sizes—but experience tells me they all look more wizened than Roger Hobbs. He is 24 and graduated from Reed College in 2011. He looks like he shouldn’t just be carded but quizzed as to which sweetheart he’s taking to the senior prom.

His baby-faced looks are notable ...

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Run, Kill, Bleed: Getting to Know Guy Saville

The old Luftwaffe headquarters dominates central Berlin, covering 100 thousand square meters with a concrete structure so large it was used by allied pilots during the war as a landmark for air raids. Appropriated by the post-war government, the campus looks like a cross between the New York Public Library and Sing Sing, a grim office block that functions as a perfect testament to the megalomania symptomatic of Nazi architecture (and thought). But the offices aren't just historical oddities. In addition to housing the current German Ministry of Finance, they also provide the unofficial blueprint for the granite columns ...

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The Slow Burn

Stephen Dobyns’s career path has been curious. Yes, there are the predictable footprints of a literary life—an MFA from the University of Iowa, a steady stream of well-received poetry, university teaching assignments and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. But Dobyns isn’t afraid to escape the ivory tower and get a little muddy. As the author of over 20 mysteries (some with pulpy titles like The Church of the Dead Girls and Saratoga Fleshpot), he is an unapologetic practitioner of the genre novel.

“I think the more I learn about the ...

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