Why the Best Murder Mysteries Are Always About the Past
Why the Best Murder Mysteries Are Always About the Past The greatest murder mysteries share a particular structure, one that Christie understood instinctively and which the best crime writers in every generation have returned to: the crime happens in the present, but its roots reach back into the past. The detective’s job is not merely…
The Weight of the Past: Memory in The Long Game
One of the things that distinguishes literary crime fiction from the purely commercial thriller is its relationship to time. The thriller tends to move forward, urgently, toward resolution. The literary mystery moves inward and backward — toward the past that produced the present, toward the events that made the crime not just possible but, in…
What Inspector Morse and DS Gibson Have in Common
Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse endures because he is more interesting than the cases he solves. A man of fierce intelligence, personal difficulty and considerable stubbornness, operating in a setting — Oxford, its colleges and hierarchies — that he understands far better than it understands him. The crimes matter. Morse matters more. Readers who love that…
Chandler Meets Christie — And Both Live in The Long Game
Crime fiction has two great traditions, and they could hardly be more different. On one side: Agatha Christie, the puzzle, the closed circle of suspects, the detective who assembles truth from fragments and delivers it with quiet precision. On the other: Raymond Chandler, the hardboiled detective moving through a corrupt world, following a moral code…
If You Love Jack Reacher and Carl Hiaasen, You Need to Meet Frankie Armstrong
You’ve finished the Reacher series. Again. You’ve burned through every Carl Hiaasen novel set in Florida. You need something new — but it has to hit that same nerve. Gritty. Fast. Smart. With a protagonist who doesn’t flinch. Meet Frankie Armstrong. The DNA of a Great Crime Thriller Hero What makes Jack Reacher work isn’t…