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 ...
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 ...
Robert Wilson photographed by Simon Weinstock
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
