"Sam looked out the porthole and saw nothing but water down below. His heart raced and a bead of perspiration rolled down his cheek. He knew Grimes would stand them in front of the hatch and shoot them. They would fall out of the plane to the water below, and if they didn’t die from the bullets, the impact with the surface would kill them." - From Paul Carr's 'Long Way Down'
"I’m on a crusade to prove that entertainment has value in itself, not just as a dose of sugar to help audiences swallow more important themes. Entertainment allows us to temporarily shut down our brains and waken later with emotions refreshed." - Hannah Sternberg
Reginald Hill, author of the Peter Pascoe and Andy Dalziel mystery series, passed away recently at the age of 75. He was truly one of the greatest mystery writers of the past several decades.
Although Hill preferred to be called a “crime writer,” his roots in traditional mysteries are evident. Even so, his books are unique to the genre. While the protagonists are members of the Yorkshire police, their novels are not police procedurals. Like Christie, Hill could deftly place a clue where it would be seen, allowing the reader to continue without realizing its importance. . . .
Fantasist David Eddings said once an author taps into the mythic, he may as well be peddling dope, as the customers will line up for his product. If he's right, Joe R. Lansdale had best prepare to do more business than Eli Lilly, as his new novel, Edge of Dark Water, is a brilliant mixture of myth, rural noir, and adventure. It's a shuffling of the Odyssey, Huck Finn, and James Ross's lost noir classic They Don't Dance Much, a wild East Texas hybrid of the Southwestern Humor school of American literature and Jim Thompson's bitter satire. It is both a hand from the archetypal tarot deck of fiction and something uniquely its own . . . and it's also a heck of a good read.
While literally thousands of fictional characters have fallen by the wayside over the past century, Sherlock Holmes remains imperishable. Well, why, exactly? Author Michael Dirda explains the appeal of genre fiction in his new book, "On Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling." Dirda's attractive little volume manages to range far beyond Sherlock Holmes or even Conan Doyle. The book is a paean to imaginative literature and the profound impact it has over the span of readers' lives, from childhood into older age. TAC's Curtis Evans explores Dirda's book and the enduring appeal of genre fiction.
Max Allan Collins is probably best known for having written the graphic novel on which the movie The Road To Perdition was based. His newest book is about his Jewish-Irish private eye, Nathan Heller: Chicago Lightning, a collection of short stories covering a period of about twenty years.
Collins's trick with the Heller stories is to do them as historical fiction. Each mystery is based on an actual criminal case, only minimally fictionalized, and real-life persons are depicted in the narratives. . . .
“It snowed all day and all night. On the 22nd it was still snowing. Snowballs flew, snowmen grew. Sceptical children regained their belief in fairyland, and sour adults felt like Santa Claus, buying more presents than they had ever intended. In the evening the voice of the announcer, traveling through endless white ether, informed the millions that more snow was coming…. More snow came. It floated down from its limitless source like a vast extinguisher. Sweepers, eager for their harvest, waited in vain for the snow to stop. People wondered whether it ever would stop.” –Jefferson Farjeon, Mystery in White (1937) People stranded in a country house cut off from the outside world by snow, with murderous events afoot. It’s a classic and beloved Golden Age murder mystery scenario and it’s one Jefferson Farjeon used in his 1937 thriller Mystery in White. To top it all off, the tale takes place over Christmas eve and Christmas day. As the splendid dust jacket reveals, a train is involved too, albeit briefly. Like Agatha Christie’s Orient Express, this train gets stalled by snow. Five passengers–a clerk, a chorus girl, an elderly paranormal investigator and a genteel brother and sister–make their way off
To be sure, Ian Rankin, the leading figure in the so-called “Tartan Noir” movement, has been a powerful force in moving British detective fiction away from its cozy, genteel, village and country house gentry stereotype, but in his own day Freeman Wills Crofts did much the same thing, albeit more gently, decades earlier. Both series are well worth reading and discussing today—the two detectives share a defining quality, one that readers will find bracing in an era seen as rife with immorality and excessive concentration of power.
The Nero Wolfe detective story series of Rex Stout (1886-1975) is, deservedly, one of the most famous American contributions to the genre. Wolfe is a classic genius detective, modelled in part, perhaps, upon Mycroft Holmes, the brilliant, corpulent elder brother of Sherlock. He is a man of strong views and has decided ideas of the sort of life he wants to live. While often an insightful observer of human beings and not exactly a misanthrope, he, unlike Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple, for example, has little natural interest in people. But what a character, and what stories! . . .
I've been pleased, especially since I got my Kindle, to discover some writers who are lifting Christian fiction to a higher level. When the Devil Whistles qualifies for that kind of praise.
Rick Acker's novel centers on a young woman, Allie Whitman, who leads a sort of secret life, taking temporary jobs at corporations that do business with the government, nosing out fraud, and then filing lawsuits against them through a company of her own called Devil to Pay.
Author Rick Acker works for the California Department of Justice, and writes knowledgeably of the world of whistle-blowing. Whitman works closely with her lawyer, Connor Norman, who does the litigation while she stays anonymous. Each of them is attracted to the other, but any romance would spoil their profitable business.
Then Allie is caught out by an employer, a deep-sea salvage company. Instead of just firing her, they blackmail her into investigating another company, a business rival.
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