Latest Blog Posts: Mysteries/Thrillers (page 7)

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 ...

Here’s something I did not know before: Louisa May Alcott—yes, the New Englander who penned Little Women—was a crime writer. Sort of. As editor Otto Penzler explains in his latest short-fiction collection, The Best American Mystery Stories of the 19th Century, Alcott “wrote numerous thrillers and melodramatic novels and stories anonymously and pseudonymously as A.M. Barnard, and with such skill that her payments were substantially greater than those for the work she produced under her own name.” ...

My father was a huge fan of the James Bond movies, much to my mother’s chagrin. (She never did learn to appreciate author Ian Fleming’s male-oriented sex-and-spy fairy tales.) So I was pretty young when I came to know Agent 007. I remember huddling with my dad and brother around our family’s undersized black-and-white TV set, sometime in the mid-1970s, to watch Dr. No (1962), the picture that had introduced actor Sean Connery as Fleming’s quick-witted and lascivious British intelligencer ...

2014 marks Peter Lovesey’s 44th year as a published mystery writer—which is particularly impressive, given that his career might have taken a very different course, had he not won a first crime novel-writing contest sponsored by British publisher Macmillan back in 1969. The book he entered was Wobble to Death, about the killing of a contender in an 1879 race-walking challenge known as a “wobble.” The investigator Lovesey sent to tackle that extraordinary case was Sergeant Cribb, certainly one ...

Over the coming four months, fans of crime and thriller fiction will have plenty to celebrate. On November 6, Agatha Christie’s 1939 stand-alone whodunit, And Then There Were None (its name taken from the last line of a British blackface minstrel song), will mark 75 years of publication. If it’s been a long while since you read that novel about 10 people—all of whom have escaped justice in some fashion—being enticed onto a remote island and then slain in ways ...

Lee Goldberg and his new business cohort, fellow author Joel Goldman, hadn’t set out to launch a crime-fiction publishing company. “The idea came together by happenstance last September at Bouchercon [in Albany, N.Y.],” Goldberg explains. Both men have achieved some success in the tricky field of self-publishing, and as a result other attendees of the New York convention were anxious to solicit their advice on making that same professional leap. Meanwhile, says Goldberg, he “was in talks with ...

“[O]ne of life’s thorniest problems was knowing who to believe, since too many people, maybe most, were born or bred liars.”

That quote appears somewhat short of halfway through Ken Kuhlken’s The Good Know Nothing, but it can be understood as the principal maxim of this novel—the seventh and, by all accounts, final installment in Kuhlken’s series featuring Tom Hickey and his trouble-attracting descendants. Even for a work of mystery fiction, The Good Know Nothing is thick ...

Richard Hoyt was 39 years old and in his fourth year of teaching journalism at a small liberal-arts college in Portland, Oregon, when his first novel hit stores in 1980. Titled Decoys, it introduced readers to John Denson, a Seattle-based private investigator who was inordinately fond of screw-top red wine and cauliflower, played darts with a passion and was described by folks who knew him as a curious person, if also something of a “flake.” Arriving on the scene ...