A CRIME WRITER IS BORN   In 1981 my parents purchased a JVC HR-3660, one of the first VHS-based VCRs commercially available in Ireland. It was top-loading, weighed more than thirty pounds and had a row of gleaming silver levers that reminded my mother of piano keys. The VCR cost 795 Irish pounds or almost […]

MY TOP TEN AUSTRALIAN MYSTERIES WITH A UNIQUE SENSE OF PLACE The diverse Australian landscape offers a wealth of opportunities for the mystery and thriller writer. Beyond the cosmopolitan cities it’s a harsh, unforgiving country, and there’s peril at every turn for those who are unprepared, desperate or unaware. There’s a vast maze of tinder-dry […]

So what actually is Folk Horror?   In times of national – and international – uncertainty we often turn to genre fiction for escapism and entertainment. This has been borne out throughout the Twentieth Century. Vicious new methods of killing devised during the First World War and, coupled with improvements in healthcare, meant that what […]

The True Grist of Oklahoma Thrillers Oklahoma!—a mostly bouncy show—also has a murder in it. My native state has only been a state for about a hundred years. Long before statehood, the land was traversed by nomadic hunting tribes like the Kiowas and Comanches. It was also tilled by agricultural tribes like the Caddos and […]

Top Ten Holiday Mysteries Having to work on a holiday has been known to put me in a horrible mood, yet Poirot, Holmes, and Inspector Alleyn seem to delight in having their holidays marred by the odd murder or theft. Here’s a list of the top ten novels and stories set during the holiday season […]

Top 10 Audiobooks Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind By Lisa Regan What makes an outstanding audiobook? It’s the combination of a great story and a narrator who can deliver every line of the book in the perfect tone, at the perfect pace, and sometimes even in the perfect accent. A narrator can make or break […]

10 Undervalued Golden Age Mysteries   Anyone who enjoys classic crime is well aware of the merits of books like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case. But there are plenty of novels, by these authors and others, that in my opinion deserve to be much better known, […]

 GO FIGURE: FIGURING OUT YOUR CHARACTERS AS THEY FIGURE THINGS OUT FOR YOU  As a writer of thrillers and mysteries, my job is, in part, to have my protagonists figure stuff out under tense, suspenseful circumstances, usually with life-or-death consequences. If I’m working on a cozy, my hero or heroine might be trying to solve […]

CONFESSIONS OF A STORY-TELLER I can’t say for certain when the urge to tell a story first came to me, but I suspect it was when I read Kipling’s The Jungle Book. It wasn’t a mystery, of course, like the books I was later to write, but I can remember to this day how the […]

Nelson DeMille and Alex DeMille’s Top 5 Espionage Novels   Nelson: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carré This is a successful blend of popular fiction and fine English literature. The post-war world of the book is mostly bleak, but true to the times. Le Carré is a master of […]