Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith
Modern life is stressful, face it, and many of us fantasize doing something quite different to earn a living than what we are stuck with. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to quite my job and...
Modern life is stressful, face it, and many of us fantasize doing something quite different to earn a living than what we are stuck with. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to quite my job and...
Modern life is stressful, face it, and many of us fantasize doing something quite different to earn a living than what we are stuck with. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to quite my job...
I don’t know about you, but every now and then I’m ready for a big story with a big plot and big stakes. The collapse of civilization as we know it. Nuclear holocaust, biological...
Life is not always fair. If you travel in developing countries what we used to call the Third World it s hard not to wonder about the unequal divisions of our planet s wealth,...
Camelot is forever, a myth that transcends centuries of storytelling, from Sir Thomas Malory’s 14th century classic, Le Morte d’Arthur, on through the ages, passed down to us in modern times in music and...
As a writer of mystery novels, I occasionally attend book conferences, events with names like “Bouchercon” and “Left Coast Crime” where big authors such as Sue Grafton and Elmore Leonard hold forth to auditoriums...
What’s the greatest novel ever written? This is a subjective matter, clearly: one man’s Proust is another’s Dostoevski, and the rest of the world can go to Dickens for all we care. For my...
Being a mystery writer – and someone who occasionally teaches mystery writing to wannabe authors – it’s usually a let down for me when I pick up a crime novel, too much like work....
The critically-acclaimed young Brooklyn writer, Jonathan Lethem, has come up with some fairly original notions for novels. In As She Climbed Across the Table, for instance, a woman physicist falls in love with an...
Victorian England makes a fine study of hypocrisy, a veritable Petri dish of civilized manners that are greatly at odds with the reality lurking underneath. I like to imagine proper British tea parties, London...