From adolescent non-reader to adult writer of crime thrillers, the story of award-winning author Amanda Kyle Williams is as inspiring as it is surprising. Throw in surviving a chemical addiction and endometrial cancer, and it becomes nothing short of miraculous. If you ask Williams how it happened, she’ll tell you it can only be explained […]
Tag Archives: crime fiction
The Pocket Wife is Dana Catrell, who feels she is slowly going crazy. Celia, Dana’s friend and neighbor, has been murdered, and Dana suspects that she is the killer. Published by HarperCollins and launching on March 17, The Pocket Wife is Susan Crawford’s first novel, and it’s a humdinger. It follows the stories of Dana […]
In Part I, I wrote about early crime fiction, its Golden Age, and Hard-boiled American crime fiction. It should come as no surprise that the favorite fiction book genre among readers is mystery, thriller and crime. With the popularity of Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayres, Dashiell Hammet, and other writers, crime fiction […]
In detective crime fiction, there must be a crime, typically a murder; an investigative process, and a solution to the crime or satisfactory conclusion. We can thank Edgar Allan Poe for what is now the most popular type of fiction. The master of gothic and the macabre introduced Parisian crime solver Auguste Dupin in 1841 […]
We think of Sweden as dark. Close to the Arctic Circle, the winters are long and frigid with little sunshine. A Darker Shade of Sweden, published by Grove Atlantic’s The Mysterious Press and released January 7, has seventeen short stories by twenty of Sweden’s acclaimed crime writers. About half of the stories are set in […]
A month ago, I read an interesting post by Julianna Baggott, entitled ‘Do You Want to Write or Do You Want to Be a Writer?’ Up until that point I had never thought about doing or being one or the other. I had always thought of the two as joined at the hip, since a […]
I have not kept a running list of all the mysteries I have read—hundreds and hundreds, to be sure, but every time I begin a new one, there is an indefinable “something” that makes me want to continue reading. In Chrinda Jones’ debut crime novel Darkness Knows Me, that something had me punching the Kindle’s […]
Chrinda Jones, one of our bloggers at Readers Unbound, has recently published her debut crime novel, Darkness Knows Me. Here, she joins me for a discussion of the interplay of reading and writing in her life. Chris: What particular kinds of books are you drawn to? Chrinda: I greatly enjoy reading memoirs. I suppose they […]
The first post in this series revealed how I was driven to the point of writing my own fiction novel – a series of bad reads being the culprit. Now, we’ll fast forward a month or so to where you would likely hear me saying, “What have I gotten myself into?” for probably the hundredth […]
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