Latest Blog Posts: Mysteries/Thrillers (page 7)

So here are the bloody facts of the case: Just after Halloween, 1828, William Burke and William Hare—immigrants from Ireland’s northern Ulster province, who had come to work in Scotland on canal excavations—were arrested in Edinburgh, along with Hare’s wife and Burke’s mistress. The charge: murder. It was alleged that during the previous 10 or 11 months, they’d killed at least 15 people (possibly as many as 30) and peddled their corpses to a renowned anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox. At ...

Veteran professional athletes, so accustomed to enduring extraordinary physical challenges and periodic abuse, seem to have a habit of re-creating themselves as investigators in mystery fiction. Think, for instance, of former Los Angeles Rams guard Brock Callahan, who, during the 1950s and ’60s, starred in a fine series of private-eye novels by William Campbell Gault. Or how about Harvey Blissberg, the ex-Boston Red Sox outfielder who first turned to a life of crime-solving in Richard Rosen’s Strike Three, You’re Dead ...

On Nov. 7, 1916, Woodrow Wilson achieved a goal that for the previous 79 years—ever since Andrew Jackson’s time—had eluded Democratic candidates for the U.S. presidency: He was elected to a second consecutive term. His hard-fought triumph over Republican nominee Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, took place in the midst of World War I (1914-1918).

Wilson had intended to make his last bid for public office on the strength of ...

You should see my office! Actually, it looks very much like it usually does at this time of year—wonderfully, beautifully out of control. Piled along one side of the room, beneath already stuffed wooden bookcases, are crime, mystery and thriller works I enjoyed reading during the last 12 months, some of which I wrote about in my recent year-end wrap-up. Tucked into an adjacent alcove are other genre entries from 2014, most of which I found time to enjoy, but ...

It was the recent death of P.D. James, at 94, that woke me up to my literary fickleness.

In part because British “Queen of Crime” Phyllis Dorothy James wasn’t especially prolific during her half-century as a mystery fictionist, publishing only 19 novels, for a long time I was able to keep up quite nicely with her output. The first James tale I recall reading was Death of an Expert Witness (1977), her sixth to feature the introspective, poetry-penning Scotland ...

It strikes me as the appropriate thing during this Thanksgiving week to express appreciation for some of the remarkable crime, mystery and thriller novels I read over the last 12 months. Although I certainly encountered my share of disappointments and oversold works, 2014 also brought into my hands such worthwhile reads as Walter Mosley’s Rose Gold, Ben H. Winters’ World of Trouble, Hilary Davidson’s Blood Always Tells, Benjamin Black’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, Terry Hayes’ I Am Pilgrim, Kim Cooper’s The ...

Lately I’ve been reading a variety of detective novels set during the so-called Age of Aquarius—the 1960s, early ’70s. Prominent among those was Walter Mosley’s new, 12th Easy Rawlins novel, Rose Gold, which finds the African-American Los Angeles sleuth searching for the daughter of a prosperous arms manufacturer in 1967. Said young woman may or may not have been abducted by a militant black boxer; her father may or may not have been involved in hiring Easy to bring her ...

Charles Ardai, the editor at publishing imprint Hard Case Crime, doesn’t hesitate to heap accolades upon Robert McGinnis for helping to popularize soft-cover crime and mystery fiction during the mid-20th century. “There were hundreds of artists who turned out a cover or two during the paperback boom that began in the 1940s,” Ardai says, “but only one who turned out more than a thousand, and that was Robert McGinnis. By sheer volume, then, he had a disproportionate impact on ...