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 […]
Category Archives: Detectives
Sophie Hannah’s Top Ten Favorite Agatha Christie Novels
Sophie Hannah’s Favorite Agatha Christie Novel I like to approach the choice of favorite Agatha Christie novels (a question I’m asked rather a lot) in the same way that I approach any search for a new home. Some people, if they want to buy a house, start out with a list of requirements that they […]
Leon Turrou: The Greatest Detective of them All?
by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Look at the FBI’s official website, and you’ll find a reference to one of America’s greatest detectives, Leon Turrou. The website explains that in 1938 Turrou was the Bureau’s lead investigator into a German spy ring. However, this official FBI narrative observes that his “background simply did not prepare him for […]
5 Women of Color in Mystery on the Complex Histories of LA
5 Women of Color in Mystery on the Complex Histories of LA By Nancy Jooyoun Kim Often depicted as a playground for the rich, a city of movie and sports stars, muscle, and palm trees against spectacular sunsets, Los Angeles as a setting has long fascinated mystery readers with seedy and sensational stories that […]
DVD Review: Blue Bloods: The Ninth Season and Blue Bloods: The Tenth Season
DVD Review: Blue Bloods: The Ninth Season and Blue Bloods: The Tenth Season The police procedural has been a staple of television screens for nearly seventy years, and for just as long, viewers and critics have critiqued how dramatic descriptions of police. In the early 1950s, Dragnet (a continuation of the radio series of the same name) was […]
What Makes Sherlock So Special
What Makes Sherlock So Special What indeed! Sherlock Holmes has been with us for over one hundred years and the public’s interest for him remains unquenchable. He is known the world over and is so familiar that his name has become part of our vernacular. Moreover, he is the most portrayed character in film and […]
The Author So Prodigious He Had No Idea How Many Books He’d Written
The author so prodigious he had no idea how many books he’d written Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle regularly come top of lists of mystery authors with the most titles sold. But in a contest to win Most Consistently Prolific Crime Writer of All Time, there’s one man who is in a […]
Psychology as a Forensic Science: From Auguste Dupin to Sherlock Holmes
Since some of the earliest detective fiction, authors have used mysteries to explore human behavior. While many investigations begin with physical evidence, it is often the act of diving deeper into the minds of the criminals or villains that reveal the truth. Author of the Bhrigu Mahesh murder mystery series Nisha Singh examines the study of […]
FROM JACK REACHER TO SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE ENDURING POWER OF PREQUELS
FROM JACK REACHER TO SHERLOCK HOLMES THE ENDURING POWER OF PREQUELS “LET’S START AT THE VERY BEGINNING” Those of you humming the song that begins with the title of this piece will likely know the next line is “A very good place to start…” but, for us authors, that’s usually not true. Think about […]
The Legacy of Raymond Chandler (Part II)
The Legacy of Raymond Chandler Part II A ‘Lost’ Generation, Found: Raymond Chandler’s Legacy Although physical violence and brutality have always existed as important facets of crime fiction, the early pioneers of the genre created a style of writing in which acts of violence came to symbolize the ugliness and unpredictability of society. In his […]
The Legacy of Raymond Chandler (Part I)
The Legacy of Raymond Chandler A ‘Lost’ Generation, Found: Raymond Chandler’s Legacy Many 20th-century writers, particularly in the post-Vietnam era, cite Raymond Chandler as one of their main influences. Inspired by his self-consciousness within the genre and his desire to understand and explore the confines of the form, contemporary writers took their lead from Chandler’s […]
Top Ten Detective Duos
It Takes Two To Make a Thing Go Right: Ten Great Detective Duos “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody f**king chance.” — Ernest Hemingway So let’s talk a moment about detective teams, detective duos, detective buddies. However you want to call them. They’re interesting to me and I like them and […]