The Ten, 2023 Edition

One of the side effects of the long writer's block that bugged me in the past year is that I failed to issue my Top 10 for 2022, much to your disappointment I'm sure. I may post it sometime but suffice to say that the top spot was hotly debated and ultimately went to Hugh …

Trouble isn’t My Business

Popular and critical wisdom has it that fictional detectives can be classified into three main categories:  Amateurs, as the name implies, are people with no formal training in criminal matters that out of superior intellect or sheer luck manage nevertheless to solve cases that leave the pros baffled. This kind of sleuth is arguably the …

Back to Basics: JDC (yet) again

Let's face it: You people just like it when I'm talking - hopefully not nonsense - about The Master. The ratings show it, and the comments section too. I'm more than happy to oblige, especially as I did some thinking on the issue of late - some MORE thinking as I have mined the subject …

Some Blasphemous Thoughts

It will be fifteen years this November that I started this blog, which makes it one of the oldest crime fiction blogs in activity, assuming so irregular an outlet can be unironically called "active". While I intended it to be a receptacle for my "random thoughts" on all kinds of subjects it ultimately turned out …

In Praise of… Lawrence G. Blochman

Lawrence Goldtree Blochman's resume is impressive: he wrote hundreds short stories, a few novels, some screenplays and also did some translating on his "free" time. He was an early president of the MWA and won an Edgar for his short-story collection Diagnosis: Homicide. The only thing that constantly eluded him both in his lifetime and …

A Study in Power: Henry Slesar’s « The Slave »

The following post is an unusual one, for at least three reasons. The first and most obvious one is that it is a review, which readers of this blog know I don't do very often. Then there is the object of said review, which is a short story - only the second one thus honoured …

A Few Thoughts about McCloy, Carr (yet again) and Literary Influeces

When reading Alias Basil Willing last year I was surprised to find that Helen McCloy had inscribed her book to John Dickson Carr and his wife Clarice as nothing I knew about their respective works suggested they might have known, let alone appreciated, each other. Now one year later and upon finishing McCloy's The Deadly …

Telling Stories

It is interesting, though not entirely surprising, that the same people who spent years and years deriding, ridiculing and overall dismissing the HIBK school as "feminine" fluff never tried to account for its success other than by more or less subtly impugning the intelligence of its readers. Surely those ladies - for they were all …

La Parenthèse enchantée

Les années d'après-guerre ne sont pas une période que l'on associe généralement avec de grandes avancées pour les droits des femmes, bien au contraire. La décennie qui suit la fin des hostilités est même souvent considérée, aux Etats-Unis surtout, comme un repoussoir absolu en termes d'égalité et d'inclusion, au point que tout politicien jugé un …

Confessions d’un renégat involontaire

On me demande parfois pourquoi j'écris principalement en anglais. Tu es français alors écris en français que diable! Comment espères-tu toucher un public dont tu refuses de parler la langue?   Aussi étonnant que cela puisse paraître, je préfère de loin m'exprimer dans ma langue natale. Je n'ai pas à consulter un dictionnaire en ligne …