Why is location so important in psychological thrillers? Who can forget the wild, windy moors in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, or the rugged Cornish cliffs and rough seas in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca? For me, as a reader and a writer, location is just as important as the plot and the characters in […]
Category Archives: Blog Article
Five Tips on Emotions for Riveting Story-telling
I’ve always loved writing suspense for a number of reasons. I love the fight for justice and the assurance that the good guys will always win. I love taking a real-world situation, like human trafficking, or a bio-terrorism threat, and dropping my characters into the middle of the chaos as they risk their lives […]
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 […]
Write Like A Picker
Write Like A Picker by Lindsay K. Bandy Anyone who enjoys historical fiction knows it’s all about the details—but not just any details. Writers who enjoy the rabbit trails of research sometimes lose their way and end up in a confusing plot-maze that leads nowhere. Others collect facts like a flea market dealer—you know, the […]
Hooked on the Drug War
Seized as we are by dysfunction in our political and social institutions, it might well be time to cut our losses. We must fix certain problems—health care, the environment, education—but fifty years is long enough for the War on Drugs. And America lost. Of course America lost. The fighting is the loss. As […]
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. […]
Cluefinders
By Martin Edwards ‘Fair play’ is a defining principle of the traditional detective story. The author makes an implicit promise that readers will be given a reasonable opportunity to unravel the mystery for themselves before all is revealed at the end. Clues will be given to the solution – and they need to be […]