Why do we read novels? We all know they aren’t true, but we allow ourselves to believe, to get caught up as though in a dream. Readers’ willingness to suspend disbelief is perhaps one of the strangest things about fiction. However, there are limits. Some readers will happily swallow stories with fanciful creatures, sci-fi […]
Author Archives: The Strand Magazine
Seven spellbinding books that shaped modern ‘Western’ magic
Corpus Hermeticum (1st-3rd centuries CE), Anon These mysterious ‘wisdom texts’, written in Greek and attributed to an ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, could claim to be foundational to both Western magic and science! Their huge influence followed their rediscovery and translation during the Italian renaissance, and the hermetic idea of controlling nature by […]
The Killer’s Shadow – Author Q&A with John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
AFG: Tell us about your latest book. The Killer’s Shadow is about the hunt for Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist serial killer who roamed the country with the self-imposed mission of killing African Americans, mixed-race couples and Jews, all with the intent of fomenting a race war in the United States. My first […]
WHAT PUTS THE THRILL INTO DOMESTIC FICTION?
Writing across several genres—women’s fiction, romance and domestic thrillers—can be challenging and a question I’m often asked is ‘what is a domestic thriller?’ For me, it’s women’s fiction with a killer twist…or many. Domestic thrillers are also labelled as domestic suspense, domestic noir and psychological thrillers, when in fact they’re a subgenre of the […]
The Writer Inside Me
Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) established him as one of the preeminent practitioners of hardboiled crime fiction. A first-person confession of a small town deputy sheriff going on a murder spree, it is a frightening and gripping novel that earned Thompson the sobriquet “Dimestore Dostoevsky.” Stanley Kubrick, who directed two Jim […]
THE 6 BOOKS KEEPING ME SANE DURING THE PANDEMIC
I was gazing over at my bedside table the other morning and noticed that the content and size of my ‘currently reading’ pile has changed over the last few months. In the world before Covid, there was always a judicious mix of business books and literary novels—literature and business being two of my great […]
English Domestic Thrillers
The most difficult part of writing this article was deciding which books to recommend. English domestic thrillers have long been popular and perhaps never more so than in the past decade when the choice of suspenseful, chilling reads feels as if it has never been more plentiful. The current market for domestic thrillers […]
Those Meddling Kids: A History of Our Favorite Young Detectives
No doubt about it, we love our amateur sleuths. We delight in watching the unassuming and underestimated outsmart the bad guys—and the pros. We want to root for the little guy. Or the little girl. Literally. Young detectives have been solving their share of fictional crimes as long as we’ve been reading mysteries. […]
The Man behind Merlin
The historical figure who inspired a legend. By Signe Pike Nearly 1,500 years ago, a man stood on top of a hill fort in Scotland knowing he was about to die. He was not alone, though he might as well have been, given the size of the army marching to lay siege upon the fortress. […]
An Exclusive with Colleen Coble
Strand Magazine Interview – Colleen Coble Best-selling romantic suspense author Colleen Coble’s novels have won or finaled in awards ranging from the Best Books of Indiana, the ACFW Carol Award, the Romance Writers of America RITA, the Holt Medallion, the Daphne du Maurier, National Readers’ Choice, and the Booksellers Best. She has nearly 4 million books […]
An Exclusive with Siri Mitchell
Strand Magazine Interview – Siri Mitchell Siri Mitchell graduated from the University of Washington with a business degree and worked in various levels of government. As a military spouse, she has lived all over the world, including Paris and Tokyo. Siri enjoys observing and learning from different cultures. She is fluent in French and […]
Excerpt from Henning Mankell’s Novel AFTER THE FIRE…
Excerpt from Henning Mankell’s Novel AFTER THE FIRE… (Translated by Marlaine Delargy) Chapter II I watched as one boat after another disappeared, the sounds of the different engines gradually dying away. I knew who each person was out here in the archipelago. There are two dominant families: the Hanssons and the Westerlunds. Many of them […]