Whether authors will admit it or not, some of us use personal experiences as inspiration for our writing. In the case of my latest psychological thriller The Alone Time, I drew inspiration from a plane crash that I survived when I was a child. The influence of my experience can be identified in the first few chapters of the book, while the rest of the story and its characters are all highly fictionalized.  Yet, writing this book while drawing on my real-life memories led me to wonder just how many other authors do the same thing. Was I overstepping in mining this moment for creative purp ..read more

After the publication of Nedra Tyre’s first book, a collection of dramatic monologues based upon her career as a social services caseworker entitled Red Wine First, the native Georgian author joined a writing group in Atlanta, one of whose members, Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, would, over the next forty-odd years, devote occasional columns to her colleague in the pages of the Constitution. After Nedra’s death in 1990 Celestine recalled that in their writing group, ironically named the Plot Club (“We had no plots and it was no club”), Nedra as a successfully published autho ..read more

The notion of “Identity” can be regarded in multiple ways: Identity (noun): the condition or fact of being a specific person or thing; the ways that people’s self-concepts are based on their membership in social groups; the characteristics and qualities of a person, considered collectively and regarded as essential to that person’s self-awareness. This discussion explores ways in which each of these concepts can be central to crime fiction and how, as an author, I have explored each of them. * In mysteries and thrillers, it’s often customary to follow a plot to find out “Whodunnit?”, that i ..read more

After the publication of Nedra Tyre’s first book, a collection of dramatic monologues based upon her career as a social services caseworker entitled Red Wine First, the native Georgian author joined a writing group in Atlanta, one of whose members, Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, would, over the next forty-odd years, devote occasional columns to her colleague in the pages of the Constitution. After Nedra’s death in 1990 Celestine recalled that in their writing group, ironically named the Plot Club (“We had no plots and it was no club”), Nedra as a successfully published autho ..read more

The Harlem Detectives arrived like a thunderbolt.    Like a meteor screaming across the sky.     I had seen detectives before, but nothing compared to this.   Or so I felt when I was introduced to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones.    They make their appearance at the start of chapter 8 of A Rage in Harlem, the 1957 novel that started Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle, conducting their unique brand of “crowd control” at the legendary Savoy Ballroom: “Grave Digger stood on the right side of the front end of the line, at the entrance ..read more

I love feminism, and I love serial killer novel, but for many years I could never find enough novels featuring feminist female killers. (Aside from Sweetpea by CJ Skuse, the evergreen classic series of this genre.) So I decided to write one. My novel Bad Men is the story of heiress Saffy Huntley-Oliver, whose hobby is killing bad men—murderers, rapists, sex pests, abusers. She’s on a one-woman crusade to take down the patriarchy. The problem is, that it’s hard to have a love life as a straight woman when you’re busy murdering men. So Saffy sets out to get a boyfriend, leaving way too many sev ..read more

I should really have titled this column “The Best International Crime Fiction of May Plus One From April and One From Last Year”: mistakes were made in my reading preparations, and when you read two-thirds of a book that came out last year thinking it was out this month, you feel compelled to recommend it. Thanks, as always, to my loyal readers, and our search engine overlords. Also, thank you translators! This column was initially conceived to showcase the intricate art of those who distill meaning from words, and the following titles are all testaments to their superlative skill. Layla Mar ..read more

One autumn afternoon in the German town of Zwickau, a woman splashed ten liters of gasoline around her apartment, then set it on fire. She had been dreading this day for years, hoping it wouldn’t come to this. But on November 4, 2011, it did, and she needed to act quickly to save her two cats from the flames. Their names were Lilly and Heidi. One was black with white spots on its paws, while the other had gray and black stripes. She scooped them up, put them in their carriers, and walked downstairs to the street. Version 1.0.0 A passing neighbor recognized ..read more

Authors tend to be solitary creatures, so the idea of collaborating with one another is a rather odd event. That said, when Clive Cussler called me up some years back and asked if I’d like to work on his Oregon Files series of adventure novels, I said yes even before we discussed salary. Clive liked to say, tongue firmly in cheek, that he made the money while I did the work. But nothing could be further from the truth. Writing and editing are two entirely different disciplines. I know a legendary editor in New York whose only attempt at writing a novel churned out one of the worst books I’ve ..read more

To step into a campus novel, like stepping onto a college campus, is to enter a miniature world. It’s a place with a particular geography, made of dorm rooms and classrooms, student centers and dining halls. Time is both fixed and in motion: for students, it’s always moving toward an endpoint, while for professors, time passes, but their students remain young. As a setting for fiction, the campus offers a natural structure and urgency: the arc of the semester, seasons of the academic year. Its insularity can make things seem outsized, dramatic, whether the arcane traditions or the eccentricit ..read more