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CRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noHARD-BOILED FICTION
American Hard-Boiled Crime Writing, 1920s-1940s. Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Early twentieth-century American crime fiction wasn’t entirely ‘hard-boiled’. America also produced its share of classic Golden Age whodunits, written in the 20s, for example, by S. S. Van Dine, and in the 30s by Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.But the
CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION British Detective Fiction, 1890s – 1940s An extract from The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Turn-of-the-Century Detection. Like the body in the library, Sherlock Holmes is both starting point and end point in the history of detective fiction, a phenomenon to be explained by constructing a history of the crimes and detectives of earlierexamples of the
PAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of all FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why it FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.CRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noHARD-BOILED FICTION
American Hard-Boiled Crime Writing, 1920s-1940s. Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Early twentieth-century American crime fiction wasn’t entirely ‘hard-boiled’. America also produced its share of classic Golden Age whodunits, written in the 20s, for example, by S. S. Van Dine, and in the 30s by Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.But the
CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION British Detective Fiction, 1890s – 1940s An extract from The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Turn-of-the-Century Detection. Like the body in the library, Sherlock Holmes is both starting point and end point in the history of detective fiction, a phenomenon to be explained by constructing a history of the crimes and detectives of earlierexamples of the
PAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of all FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why it FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.CRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
PAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
MISSING PERSON NOVELS So many different ways of disappearing: five of the best missing person novels. Reviewed by Lee Horsley. When someone goes missing, Megan Miranda writes, the realization that they’re gone “grows into a hollow terror a void that gets filled with all the horrible possibilities existing all at once.”BRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
TRUE CRIME COVERS
True crime covers almost invariably stress the woman’s sexual allure, and the combination of this with her victimisation implies that the woman has invited her fate by making herself too available: like the hapless Veronica Gedeon, female victims have flaunted themselves, tempting men to RACE, GENDER AND EMPIRE John Cullen Gruesser, Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction, Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, forthcoming Fall/Winter 2013 As John Gruesser says in his Introduction, his intention isn’t to offer a comprehensive history of American detective fiction but to demonstrate the malleability and the range of the form. THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street is a surreal and fascinating novel. In the opening chapters, it would seem to be about a serial killer, Ted Bannerman, hunted by Dee, a young woman who is convinced he killed her sister when she was six.LYNN KOSTOFF
Lynn Kostoff. It is 1962. I am eight years old. My father builds me a treehouse in a crooked-limbed apple tree. When the leaves are full, the treehouse is virtually invisible from the ground. The tree is on the western border of our farm in northeast Ohio and lies in a wide shallow valley bisected by WHY AM I GETTING SPAM EMAILS FROM DATING SITES About Us Lee Horsley Kate Horsley Allan L Branson Additional Contributors Crime Fiction learn more here Classic Detective FictionCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noPAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
HARD-BOILED FICTION
American Hard-Boiled Crime Writing, 1920s-1940s. Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Early twentieth-century American crime fiction wasn’t entirely ‘hard-boiled’. America also produced its share of classic Golden Age whodunits, written in the 20s, for example, by S. S. Van Dine, and in the 30s by Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.But the
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of all FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why itBRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.LYNN KOSTOFF
Lynn Kostoff. It is 1962. I am eight years old. My father builds me a treehouse in a crooked-limbed apple tree. When the leaves are full, the treehouse is virtually invisible from the ground. The tree is on the western border of our farm in northeast Ohio and lies in a wide shallow valley bisected byCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noPAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
HARD-BOILED FICTION
American Hard-Boiled Crime Writing, 1920s-1940s. Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Early twentieth-century American crime fiction wasn’t entirely ‘hard-boiled’. America also produced its share of classic Golden Age whodunits, written in the 20s, for example, by S. S. Van Dine, and in the 30s by Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.But the
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of all FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why itBRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.LYNN KOSTOFF
Lynn Kostoff. It is 1962. I am eight years old. My father builds me a treehouse in a crooked-limbed apple tree. When the leaves are full, the treehouse is virtually invisible from the ground. The tree is on the western border of our farm in northeast Ohio and lies in a wide shallow valley bisected byCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION British Detective Fiction, 1890s – 1940s An extract from The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Turn-of-the-Century Detection. Like the body in the library, Sherlock Holmes is both starting point and end point in the history of detective fiction, a phenomenon to be explained by constructing a history of the crimes and detectives of earlierexamples of the
CRIME ACROSS CULTURES Special 2013 “Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings The “Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds” seeks to examine how discourses of crime and criminality are produced in a global context that extends well beyond the cloisters of Orwell’s English middle class. We ask how writers and cultural practitioners from around the world have MISSING PERSON NOVELS So many different ways of disappearing: five of the best missing person novels. Reviewed by Lee Horsley. When someone goes missing, Megan Miranda writes, the realization that they’re gone “grows into a hollow terror a void that gets filled with all the horrible possibilities existing all at once.”BRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
LEE HORSLEY
Lee Horsley. Lee Horsley has written two books on literature and politics – Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995). More recently, she has written or edited numerous articles and books on crime fiction. The Noir Thriller (2001, reissued in paperback in 2009) ranges from pulp thrillers of the 1920s to neo-noir films VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION An Introduction. Christopher Pittard, University of Newcastle. There are two points to consider when talking about Victorian detective fiction: firstly, that the detective story as a distinct genre is a product of the nineteenth century; and secondly, that only a small amount of the detective fiction produced at the time is still read andstudied.
MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER Oyinkan Braithwaite’s widely acclaimed debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is a fast-paced, sharply observed, often darkly humorous portrait of the complex, protective relationship between two sisters, one of whom has the unfortunate habit of ending relationships by killing her boyfriends. The events of the novel are driven by the actions of Ayoola, a beautiful, self-centred young woman. RACE, GENDER AND EMPIRE John Cullen Gruesser, Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction, Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, forthcoming Fall/Winter 2013 As John Gruesser says in his Introduction, his intention isn’t to offer a comprehensive history of American detective fiction but to demonstrate the malleability and the range of the form.CRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noPAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
HARD-BOILED FICTION
American Hard-Boiled Crime Writing, 1920s-1940s. Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Early twentieth-century American crime fiction wasn’t entirely ‘hard-boiled’. America also produced its share of classic Golden Age whodunits, written in the 20s, for example, by S. S. Van Dine, and in the 30s by Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.But the
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of all FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why itBRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.LYNN KOSTOFF
Lynn Kostoff. It is 1962. I am eight years old. My father builds me a treehouse in a crooked-limbed apple tree. When the leaves are full, the treehouse is virtually invisible from the ground. The tree is on the western border of our farm in northeast Ohio and lies in a wide shallow valley bisected byCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noPAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
HARD-BOILED FICTION
American Hard-Boiled Crime Writing, 1920s-1940s. Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Early twentieth-century American crime fiction wasn’t entirely ‘hard-boiled’. America also produced its share of classic Golden Age whodunits, written in the 20s, for example, by S. S. Van Dine, and in the 30s by Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.But the
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of all FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why itBRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.LYNN KOSTOFF
Lynn Kostoff. It is 1962. I am eight years old. My father builds me a treehouse in a crooked-limbed apple tree. When the leaves are full, the treehouse is virtually invisible from the ground. The tree is on the western border of our farm in northeast Ohio and lies in a wide shallow valley bisected byCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION British Detective Fiction, 1890s – 1940s An extract from The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Turn-of-the-Century Detection. Like the body in the library, Sherlock Holmes is both starting point and end point in the history of detective fiction, a phenomenon to be explained by constructing a history of the crimes and detectives of earlierexamples of the
CRIME ACROSS CULTURES Special 2013 “Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings The “Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds” seeks to examine how discourses of crime and criminality are produced in a global context that extends well beyond the cloisters of Orwell’s English middle class. We ask how writers and cultural practitioners from around the world have MISSING PERSON NOVELS So many different ways of disappearing: five of the best missing person novels. Reviewed by Lee Horsley. When someone goes missing, Megan Miranda writes, the realization that they’re gone “grows into a hollow terror a void that gets filled with all the horrible possibilities existing all at once.”BRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
LEE HORSLEY
Lee Horsley. Lee Horsley has written two books on literature and politics – Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995). More recently, she has written or edited numerous articles and books on crime fiction. The Noir Thriller (2001, reissued in paperback in 2009) ranges from pulp thrillers of the 1920s to neo-noir films VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION An Introduction. Christopher Pittard, University of Newcastle. There are two points to consider when talking about Victorian detective fiction: firstly, that the detective story as a distinct genre is a product of the nineteenth century; and secondly, that only a small amount of the detective fiction produced at the time is still read andstudied.
MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER Oyinkan Braithwaite’s widely acclaimed debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is a fast-paced, sharply observed, often darkly humorous portrait of the complex, protective relationship between two sisters, one of whom has the unfortunate habit of ending relationships by killing her boyfriends. The events of the novel are driven by the actions of Ayoola, a beautiful, self-centred young woman. RACE, GENDER AND EMPIRE John Cullen Gruesser, Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction, Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, forthcoming Fall/Winter 2013 As John Gruesser says in his Introduction, his intention isn’t to offer a comprehensive history of American detective fiction but to demonstrate the malleability and the range of the form.CRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION British Detective Fiction, 1890s – 1940s An extract from The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Turn-of-the-Century Detection. Like the body in the library, Sherlock Holmes is both starting point and end point in the history of detective fiction, a phenomenon to be explained by constructing a history of the crimes and detectives of earlierexamples of the
PAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noHARD-BOILED FICTION
American Hard-Boiled Crime Writing, 1920s-1940s. Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Early twentieth-century American crime fiction wasn’t entirely ‘hard-boiled’. America also produced its share of classic Golden Age whodunits, written in the 20s, for example, by S. S. Van Dine, and in the 30s by Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.But the
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of all FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why it INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
LYNN KOSTOFF
Lynn Kostoff. It is 1962. I am eight years old. My father builds me a treehouse in a crooked-limbed apple tree. When the leaves are full, the treehouse is virtually invisible from the ground. The tree is on the western border of our farm in northeast Ohio and lies in a wide shallow valley bisected byCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION British Detective Fiction, 1890s – 1940s An extract from The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Turn-of-the-Century Detection. Like the body in the library, Sherlock Holmes is both starting point and end point in the history of detective fiction, a phenomenon to be explained by constructing a history of the crimes and detectives of earlierexamples of the
PAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noHARD-BOILED FICTION
American Hard-Boiled Crime Writing, 1920s-1940s. Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Early twentieth-century American crime fiction wasn’t entirely ‘hard-boiled’. America also produced its share of classic Golden Age whodunits, written in the 20s, for example, by S. S. Van Dine, and in the 30s by Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.But the
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of all FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why it INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
LYNN KOSTOFF
Lynn Kostoff. It is 1962. I am eight years old. My father builds me a treehouse in a crooked-limbed apple tree. When the leaves are full, the treehouse is virtually invisible from the ground. The tree is on the western border of our farm in northeast Ohio and lies in a wide shallow valley bisected byCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
BRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
CRIME ACROSS CULTURES Special 2013 “Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings The “Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds” seeks to examine how discourses of crime and criminality are produced in a global context that extends well beyond the cloisters of Orwell’s English middle class. We ask how writers and cultural practitioners from around the world have SERIAL KILLER FICTION The reason for the rapid growth of fiction about serial killers during this period is the F.B.I.’s success in both building up a full-scale moral panic around serial murder, and establishing the Bureau as the solution to the ‘epidemic’ of marauding serial killers plaguing the land. Just as its hunting down of gangsters in THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street is a surreal and fascinating novel.In the opening chapters, it would seem to be about a serial killer, Ted Bannerman, hunted by Dee, a young woman who is convinced he killed her sister when she was six. MISSING PERSON NOVELS So many different ways of disappearing: five of the best missing person novels. Reviewed by Lee Horsley. When someone goes missing, Megan Miranda writes, the realization that they’re gone “grows into a hollow terror a void that gets filled with all the horrible possibilities existing all at once.”LEE HORSLEY
Lee Horsley. Lee Horsley has written two books on literature and politics – Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995). More recently, she has written or edited numerous articles and books on crime fiction. The Noir Thriller (2001, reissued in paperback in 2009) ranges from pulp thrillers of the 1920s to neo-noir films RACE, GENDER AND EMPIRE John Cullen Gruesser, Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction, Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, forthcoming Fall/Winter 2013 As John Gruesser says in his Introduction, his intention isn’t to offer a comprehensive history of American detective fiction but to demonstrate the malleability and the range of the form. WHY AM I GETTING SPAM EMAILS FROM DATING SITES About Us Lee Horsley Kate Horsley Allan L Branson Additional Contributors Crime Fiction learn more here Classic Detective FictionCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street is a surreal and fascinating novel.In the opening chapters, it would seem to be about a serial killer, Ted Bannerman, hunted by Dee, a young woman who is convinced he killed her sister when she was six. CRIME ACROSS CULTURES Crime Across Cultures. Special 2013 “Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings. The “ Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds ” seeks to examine how discourses of crime and criminality are produced in a global context that extends well beyond the cloisters of Orwell’s English middleclass.
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of allPAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
BRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
WHY AM I GETTING SPAM EMAILS FROM DATING SITES About Us Lee Horsley Kate Horsley Allan L Branson Additional Contributors Crime Fiction learn more here Classic Detective FictionCRIMECULTURE
Crimeculture’s first three reviews of this year are of powerfully feminist crime novels, by Caitlin Mullen, Inga Vesper and Jessica Barry. All three give readers gripping, suspenseful narratives centring on the bonds that form between women fighting to survive. Mullen’s protagonists, Lily and Clara, are very unlike one another,but both
THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street is a surreal and fascinating novel.In the opening chapters, it would seem to be about a serial killer, Ted Bannerman, hunted by Dee, a young woman who is convinced he killed her sister when she was six. CRIME ACROSS CULTURES Crime Across Cultures. Special 2013 “Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings. The “ Crime Across Cultures” issue of Moving Worlds ” seeks to examine how discourses of crime and criminality are produced in a global context that extends well beyond the cloisters of Orwell’s English middleclass.
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR All Things Cease to Appear is a beautifully written novel that works on many levels. It is thoughtful and lyrical, a penetrating study of a psychopath and a deeply disturbing portrait of a doomed marriage, but also a meditation on the deceptiveness of allPAPERBACK ORIGINALS
He was the first writer of paperback originals to be reviewed in The New York Times : writing about his 1953 novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Anthony Boucher praised the “striking suspense technique”, the “bitter blend of sex and criminality” and his “refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.”. Twelve of Williams’ novelshave been
FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
BRITISH NOIR
British New Wave crime writing. Since the late 1980s, Britain has seen the growth of a distinctively British kind of neo-noir, encouraged particularly by Maxim Jakubowski’s publication of two crime imprints, Black Box thrillers and Blue Murder. These introduced a new readership to the classics of American hard-boiled crime fiction –to
INTERVIEW WITH J. A. JANCE J. A. Jance interviewed by Charles J. Rzepka, June 4, 2017. Introduction: Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017.AYO ONATADE
There is also my day job to contend with as well. Social Networking Administrator Ayo is a clerk for a judge in the Court of Appeal, a book reviewer and a major fan of athletics and American football living in London, England. She is the Special Crime Reporter at Shots Ezine and also is an associate member of The Crime Writers Association(CWA
WHY AM I GETTING SPAM EMAILS FROM DATING SITES About Us Lee Horsley Kate Horsley Allan L Branson Additional Contributors Crime Fiction learn more here Classic Detective Fiction CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION British Detective Fiction, 1890s – 1940s An extract from The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction Lee Horsley, Lancaster University. Turn-of-the-Century Detection. Like the body in the library, Sherlock Holmes is both starting point and end point in the history of detective fiction, a phenomenon to be explained by constructing a history of the crimes and detectives of earlierexamples of the
FILM NOIR – CRIMECULTURE Definitions of Film Noir. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as closely related to the modernist crisis of culture – as reflecting the feelings of nightmarish alienation, disorientation and disintegration that are often taken as hallmarks of the modernist sensibility. James Naremore, in his recent analysis of the contexts offilm
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION An Introduction to American Crime Writing, 1970-2000. The inheritors of the hard-boiled tradition are diverse, producing many different forms of contemporary American crime writing. The darkly comic tone of much earlier crime fiction has resurfaced in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen; the tough detective has spawned (noDETECTIVE FILMS
These popular detectives included Philo Vance, Bulldog Drummond, The Saint, The Falcon, The Crime Doctor, Michael Shayne, Dick Tracy, Boston Blackie, and Perry Mason. Female amateur sleuths like Hildegarde Withers and Nancy Drew, and the Asian detectives like Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, and Mr. Wong, also appeared in detective series in the 1930s. FRENCH CRIME FICTION Crime fiction aficionados are lucky that some of the best contemporary French authors are now being published in English. For anyone who is not familiar with this interesting branch of the genre, what follows is a brief history that will clarify what makes it special and why itTHE HIGHWAYMEN
Suffice it to say that when it comes to cowboys, southern gentlemen and bounty hunters, Kevin Costner fits the bill. I believe it all started with Dances with Wolves and then all that followed – Open Range, Wyatt, Hatfields and McCoys as well as the recent television series Yellowstone.. Kevin Costner is often touted as the Gary Cooperof his age.
THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street is a surreal and fascinating novel.In the opening chapters, it would seem to be about a serial killer, Ted Bannerman, hunted by Dee, a young woman who is convinced he killed her sister when she was six. VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION An Introduction. Christopher Pittard, University of Newcastle. There are two points to consider when talking about Victorian detective fiction: firstly, that the detective story as a distinct genre is a product of the nineteenth century; and secondly, that only a small amount of the detective fiction produced at the time is still read andstudied.
LEE HORSLEY
Lee Horsley. Lee Horsley has written two books on literature and politics – Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995). More recently, she has written or edited numerous articles and books on crime fiction. The Noir Thriller (2001, reissued in paperback in 2009) ranges from pulp thrillers of the 1920s to neo-noir filmsDON’T TURN AROUND
Jessica Barry’s Don’t Turn Around is a gripping, swiftly paced female road novel. Her evocative prose propels us into the lives of two strong, determined women, thrown together on a nightmarish journey, facing dangers that neither of them anticipated. One of the women, Cait Monaghan, is helping out at an Austin, Texas, organisationcalled
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JASON PINTER, THE CASTLEBOOK REVIEW
JANE HARPER, THE DRYBOOK REVIEW
FATAL ISOLATION
BOOK REVIEWS
LATEST BOOK REVIEWS
_Crimeculture continues its series of book reviews, covering some of the best recently published crime fiction. Read our recommendations and reviews for 2016-17 below._ THE HAUNTING LANDSCAPES OF NORDIC NOIR _Reviewed by Lee Horsley _ Some of the most riveting Scandinavian crime fiction torments its characters with the disorienting effects of an isolated, threatening landscape. Crimeculture highly recommends four of the best recent Nordic noir novels (translated into English 2014-16), each of which enthrals readers with the peculiar power of such a setting: Agnes Ravatn’s _The Bird Tribunal_, Ragnar Jonasson’s _Snowblind_, Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s _Why Did You Lie?_ and Antti Tuomainen’s _Dark asMy Heart_.
Other countries can, of course, provide crime writers with similarly inhospitable terrain – environments so remote and hostile that they inflict their own kind of psychological damage. Crimeculture has recently, for example, reviewed Jane Harper’s _The Dry_ , a powerful novel in which human greed and hatred play out amidst the devastating effects of a drought that is destroying an entire Australian community. In the UK, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s literary thriller, _His Bloody Project_, brilliantly represents a brutally controlled crofting community in the nineteenth-century Scottish Highlands, a place so cut off that escapeseems impossible.
Scandinavian crime writers, however, have proven themselves exceptionally adept at fictionally exploiting the rich resources of their native landscapes. A few years ago, a piece in _The Economist_ (Sept 2012) ascribed the success of the Nordic crime-writing boom in part to the novelty of the locations, to writers’ ability to provide “a sense of place—the more distinctive and unusual the better.” But in truth the strength of Scandinavian locations is less to do with novelty than with sheer evocative power – with the pressure of the elements and the extremities of experience endured in places far removed from conventional society. The novels reviewed here – from Norway, Iceland and Finland – give us harrowing dramas enacted in darkly mysterious forests and secluded estates overlooking spectacular fjords, on rocky stacks in a raging sea, or on the sea’s edge in a fishing village made inaccessible by blizzards, mountains and avalanches. In all four novels, the drama is intensified by the claustrophobic sense of entrapment somewhere so isolated that the conditions of ordinary life no longer apply. AGNES RAVATN’S _THE BIRD TRIBUNAL _In
Agnes Ravatn’s dark, mesmerising novel, _The Bird Tribunal_ (published in Norway 2013, trans 2016), the natural world both surrounds and drives the tense human drama. Escaping her past life, Allis Hagtorn takes a job housekeeping and gardening for Sigurd Bagge – a strangely silent man living on the edge of a silent forest above an isolated Norwegian fjord. As she sets about trying to bring his disorderly garden under control, she begins to believe that she might also transform herself, that “there was salvation to be found.” But salvation is no simple matter, and Ravatn’s taut, haunting prose generates a mounting sense of dread. She draws together several strands of myth and gothic archetype, with hints of _Bluebeard _and _Rebecca_. But most of all, emanating from the landscape itself, there are the themes and emotions of Norse mythology – salvation and transformation, death, guilt and retribution. The fjord and forest are beautiful but increasingly charged with sinister meanings. As Allis walks into the “silent forest of roots and pinecones”, she feels almost entirely separated from the outside world: “living here was like ceasing to exist,” except in an increasingly menacing world of shared stories. Bagge recounts his dream of an ominous bird tribunal convening in the depths of the forest, a vision of twelve judges in bird masks sitting in silence and condemning him, charging him with “skemdarvig”, a crime so vile that no atonement is possible. Allis in turn tells him the story of Balder and Loki, of violence, revenge and the potential for evil: “Old guilt… destroyed by fire and swallowed by the sea,” a dragon that “sweeps through the air…with human corpses nestled among its feathers”. Who are Bagge and Allis in this mythic world? Our sense of foreboding grows as the story is ever more strongly infused by the threatening, hallucinatory imagery of the ancient Eddas. _The Bird Tribunal_ is a fascinating novel that lingers in readers’ minds long after they have finished reading. RAGNAR JONASSON’S _SNOWBLIND _The
five novels of Ragnar Jonasson’s Dark Iceland series, which debuted in Iceland in 2010, have received much deserved critical acclaim since the first English translations began to appear: _Snowblind_ and _Nightblind_ in 2015, _Blackout_, _Rupture_ and _Whiteout_ in 2016-17. In the gripping _Snowblind_, he creates the setting that defines the essence of his vision of “Dark Iceland” – the tiny, isolated fishing village of Siglufjördur, “at the edge of the northern ocean,” as stunningly beautiful as it is claustrophobic, surrounded by a ring of mountains and inaccessible for much of the year except via a small tunnel. The protagonist, a young outsider and rookie policeman, Ari Thor, proves himself capable of patient investigation and sharp insights, but is hampered throughout by his sense of not belonging to this alien environment: “He felt like a stranger… a traveller who had forgotten to buy a return ticket.” A translator of Agatha Christie, Jonasson is skilled in the construction of an absorbing mystery story. _Snowblind_, like the later novels in the Dark Iceland series, is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of classic detective fiction, with the enclosed space of Siglufjördur providing a circumscribed cast of characters, harbouring secrets and concealing hidden connections that must be uncovered if the mystery is to be solved. What most distinguishes Jonasson’s series, however, is an environment that throughout the novel applies its own frightening and unpredictable pressures. Iceland has provided some of the most haunting and life-threatening landscapes of contemporary crime fiction. Even the Reykjavík-set novels of Arnaldur Indridason’s are shadowed by memories of lives lost in the mountains and frozen fjords. In Jonasson’s _Snowblind_, the destructive depths of the Icelandic winter – freezing darkness, blizzards, avalanches – all reinforce the sense of dangerous entrapment. When a murder is committed the scene of the crime has a perverse beauty: the “blood-red snow that formed a halo” around the body of the victim. The mysteriousness of the scene adds to our sense of the inhuman otherness of a savage natural world that thwarts Ari Thor’s investigation at every turn: “This peaceful little town was being compressed by the snow, no longer a familiar winter embrace but a threat like never before.” READ MORE, INCLUDING OUR REVIEWS OF YRSA SIGURDARDOTTIR’S_ WHY DID YOU LIE? _AND ANTTI TUOMAINEN’S_DARK AS MY HEART._
JANE HARPER, _THE DRY_ (2016) _Review by Lee Horsley __
_Jane
Harper’s debut novel, _The Dry__ _(2016), is an unusually taut and engrossing novel. In many ways, it is a traditional investigative crime narrative. The protagonist, Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk, returns to the Australian country town of Kiewarra, a place he left twenty years ago, to attend the funerals of three members of the Hadler family – his childhood friend Luke, Luke’s wife and young son. The police and press have judged it to be a murder-suicide, explained by a struggling farmer having gone off the rails: “With the drought, who knows? Everyone is so desperate.” Pressed by the Hadler family to challenge this verdict, Falk reluctantly takes leave and agrees to investigate unofficially. He soon realizes that past crimes and secrets from his own earlier life seem to be inextricably entangled with the horrific murders. The accusations made against him may prove to be unfounded, but he nevertheless feels that he carries some of the blame: “It was a cry that had come from too many lips since he’d returned to Kiewarra. If I’d known, I would have done things differently. It was too late for that now. Some things had to be lived with.” Harper very skilfully creates suspense. Small pieces of evidence accumulate, misleading clues come to light and townsfolk provide false leads, propelling the investigation towards a gripping conclusion. What really sets _The Dry__ _apart, however, is the integration of plot and setting. The town of Kiewarra is so small that it is analogous to the self-contained world of classic detection, but the hostile landscape itself remorselessly shapes past and current events, affecting every strand of the plot. Characters who engender fear seem to share in the cruelty of the landscape, and no one is untouched by “the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of theland”.
The blowflies that swarm over the prologue “didn’t discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.” Harper’s opening horror film close-up of the indifferent flies feeding on “unblinking eyes and sticky wounds” conveys the pitiless effects of the worst drought conditions in a century: ‘”It’s a pressure cooker round here, mate. Little things become big things faster than you expect.”’ People who struggle to survive under such conditions are psychologically deformed in an environment that magnifies every feeling of anger, bitterness and desperation. Brutal crime and the savage natural world become inextricably linked in this expertly constructed narrative, making it intense and disturbing throughout. JASON PINTER, _THE CASTLE_ (2017) _Review by Lee Horsley _Jason
Pinter’s _The Castle_ is a tense, fast-moving thriller, a nightmare journey through a contemporary political world that is all too alarmingly familiar to us. Having written the book during the bizarre electoral circus that culminated in the victory of Donald Trump, Pinter “wanted people to be able to read it now right in the wake of the election” (_Hudson Reporter_),
so opted to avoid the delays of conventional publishing by creating a new company, Armina Press, which was able to bring the novel out inJune 2017.
In the months following Trump’s election, many have echoed the question posed by the journalist and thriller writer, JonathanFreedland
:
“How could any fiction come up with a drama as lurid and compelling as the nightly news from the US?” When the highest office is gained by a chaotic, ignorant, paranoid narcissist, wielding his power with no apparent moral compass, how is it possible to incorporate such a reality into the fictional world of the political thriller? How does a novelist give urgency to his plot when all taboos seem already to have been broken, all lines crossed? The approach of _The Castle_ to this formidable task is bold and effective. An action-packed thriller can’t really afford to wade into the sort of political quagmire that has been created by the real-life model for Pinter’s man of power. In constructing _The Castle_, Pinter’s key move is to excise some of the more repetitive and exhausting aspects of the politician represented – the childish petulance, wild inconsistencies, insecurity, absurd lies and weak excuses. Instead, Rawson Griggs, the billionaire arch villain of _The Castle_, is sharply intelligent and focused – a far more competent and altogether more coherent adversary: “Rawson does what it takes to win. It’s not always pretty. But it’s effective.” There is abundant common ground between actual and fictional worlds: Griggs is bullying, self-centred, hubristic and paranoid. But although this utterly unscrupulous manipulator habitually deceives people, his lies are cunning rather than transparent. His deceptions are the Machiavellian manoeuvres of a strong, determined political operator who, behind the scenes, threatens everyone around him. The protagonist drawn into this arrogant, aggressive world is Remy Stanton, a young corporate strategist who, in a moment of rash daring, intervenes to rescue two strangers being attacked by a gunman. When it turns out that the lives he has saved are those of Griggs’ daughter and son-in-law, Remy suddenly finds himself a central figure in the third-party political campaign of the powerful business magnate. He is a useful hero of the hour, with a clear role to play in the supporting cast of a populist, nativist bid for the presidency. It is a far more hazardous and unpredictable role than Remy bargained for. With his talk of unleashing “the Beast Within”, Rawson Griggs is spiralling out of control, and there is no one he won’t sacrifice should they threaten to undermine his cult of personality or to interfere with his rise to power. By turns credulous, appalled and terrified, Remy gives us increasingly alarmed insights into this surreal political landscape, and Pinter creates an unfailingly suspenseful encounter with the underlying brutality of political ambition on this scale: “…it seemed that Rawson had grown unhinged, bolder. And if what Remy Stanton had said was true, Rawson was capable of truly frightening things.” SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS OF DISAPPEARING: FIVE OF THE BEST MISSINGPERSON NOVELS
_Reviewed by Lee Horsley _ When someone goes missing, Megan Miranda writes, the realization that they’re gone “grows into a hollow terror… a void that gets filled with all the horrible possibilities existing all at once.” Unlike mystery stories that begin with some version of the corpse on the library floor, the missing person narrative keeps us in suspense with a multitude of “horrible possibilities”, and at the same time with the tormenting hope that the missing person might still be found alive and well. Here are some of Crimeculture’s 2015-16 favourites – a selection of five tense, beautifully crafted and very different stories about people who disappear, and about those who might (or might not) succeed in finding them: Megan Miranda’s _All the Missing Girls_, Lisa Jewell’s _I Found You_, David Swinson’s _The Second Girl_, Lisa Ballantyne’s _Redemption Road_, and Rachel Abbott’s _Stranger Child_. MEGAN MIRANDA, _ALL THE MISSING GIRLS_ (2016)”PEOPLE
SLIPPING AWAY RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES”: It happened ten years ago and now it has happened again. In this slow-burning, suspenseful tale another girl has gone missing in the small southern town of Cooley Ridge, and Nic Farrell has been drawn back to a place she thought she had long ago left behind. In order to work out what’s going on, we have to “go back in time”, a recapturing of the past embodied in the novel’s intricate structure, with the central chapters in reverse chronological order. As we move backwards, we come gradually to understand how things have, over the years, slipped away, faded and disappeared – girls, identities, memories, grainy photographs, once-familiar paths through the woods. The mysterious events of the novel keep us guessing to the end. Disappearances are ultimately explained, but at the same time we become increasingly attuned to the narrator’s sense that parts of herself are also missing, perhaps irretrievably: her own lost self is one of the things she is trying to discover, and there are so many “different versions of me”. Is Nic’s lost self innocent or guilty? Will her quest bring closure or will she one day “walk through the woods, fade to nothing”? A teasing, compelling, thoughtful and very cleverly plotted novel. LISA JEWELL, _I FOUND YOU_ (2016)“I
DON’T KNOW WHAT MY NAME IS”: _I Found You_ opens with a man in a fugue state sitting in the rain on a Yorkshire beach. He doesn’t know who he is or where he has come from. A woman who lives near the beach takes him in and looks after him, but no amount of kindness can cancel out his sense that life has gone badly wrong: “‘The longer I’m here, the more I know that I’ve done something really bad…Someone was ringing about me… And maybe it was someone who loves me. Or maybe it was someone who wants to kill me. Or maybe it was someone I’ve hurt.” A second storyline introduces us to a young woman in Surrey desperate to know what has happened to her new husband, who has failed to come home from work. We initially assume, of course, that these mysteries are related. And indeed, in a way, they are, but the complexity of the connections begins to become apparent when a third storyline takes us back to a family holidaying in the same Yorkshire seaside town in the early 1990s. The deaths and disappearances of that earlier decade are brilliantly interwoven with the search for a lost identity and a lost husband twenty years later. The editors of Crimeculture were pleased to read that, the older Lisa Jewell gets, the more she loves writing psychological thrillers(_Independent_
). _I
Found You_ is an excellent example of the quirky, nuanced qualities she brings to the genre – the taut, suspenseful plotting of a good thriller combined with an exceptional ability to create relationships imbued with the warmth and humour of domestic drama and romance. _READ MORE, INCLUDING OUR REVIEWS OF DAVID SWINSON, LISA BALLANTYNE AND RACHEL ABBOTT. _ _An online magazine offering reviews of crime fiction and film, interviews with writers and more._ 2015 copyright Crimeculture // All rights reserved // Site designed by Ingenious Frog . This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve yourexperience.
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