As an inveterate lover of mystery, cracking the code of a writer's true identity has the same effect, for me, as tasting forbidden fruit.
Having set its tonal template, Vertigo Crime laid low for a few months before starting in earnest at the beginning of 2010.
Oddly, the anti-heroes of both 'The Chill' and veteran comics writer Peter Milligan's 'The Bronx Kill' share a first name, though their occupations and plights couldn't be any more different.
One of the things that has puzzled me the most in my years of serious mystery reading is why there are relatively few standout books geared specifically for middle grade and young adult readers.
With only one novel to her credit, Anna Jarzab can't quite be classified in Werlin country, but 'All Unquiet Things' is a big step in that direction.
It takes about seventy-five pages for a Parker reference - from 'The Score,' specifically - to show up in Geoff Manaugh's 'A Burglar's Guide to the City.'
As I considered Parker and his absurdist reflection in the Westlake-authored 'Dortmunder' novels, I wrote, 'His natural ability to observe human behavior and to follow an idea, no matter how bizarre, through to its proper, rightful finish echoed the vision of an architect.'
We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.
In 1953, the idea of a single female police recruit to the New York City Police Department, let alone a handful, was big news.
My focus will always be crime, but it might not always be fiction, nor always for adults, nor books entirely in prose. That's a lot of ground to cover, so I might as well begin.
To understand the current state of mind of both Sara Paretsky and her private detective alter ego, one must first roll back the clock to 1982, when Victoria Iphegenia Warshawski took her first investigative bow in 'Indemnity Only.'
By the end of 1982, the game changed. Muller published her second Sharon McCone novel, Sue Grafton introduced Kinsey Millhone in 'A Is for Alibi', and the floor was now open - whether some liked it or not - for more women to claim the tropes of private eye fiction for their own.
Despite the volatile mixture of family, politics and past misdeeds darkening the present, 'Hardball' doesn't have the sharp tang of the early novels or the expansive reach of more recent series installments.
First, a confession: I liked 'The Da Vinci Code.' This news is even more of a surprise to me than it might be to those who, years ago, heard me quip that I quit reading it because 'the moment the albino assassin came through the door, I left.'
There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.
Though 'Child's Play' is ultimately more concerned with subverting storytelling expectations and satirizing the expected trajectory of traditional mystery, Posadas does embed some insights about the writer's responsibility to the reader.
The 'Vampire of Ropraz' claims to be based on a true story, but the name of Rosa's father matches that of a notable Swiss artist and restorer. The eventual suspect has the overlong teeth and shambling menace of a would-be vampire, but Chessex leaves the real possibility of his guilt an open question.
Out of the ashes of the Great War came the freewheeling cultural renaissance that was the Jazz Age, but the decade-long party of flapper dresses and bootlegging came to a crashing halt with the Crash of '29 - triggering the Great Depression and the New Deal that would help America get back on its feet, just in time for another, greater war.
The make-believe world of 'The Black Tower' succeeds by broadcasting larger truths that might otherwise elude us.
Although we might think of Holmes as the Ur-sleuth, the seminal inspiration for many writers comes not from the chronicles of Baker Street but from the intricately plotted novels of Charles Dickens and his colleague Wilkie Collins, who in works like 'Bleak House' and 'The Moonstone' established the modern, character-driven mystery novel.
