The Needle’s Eye
On the Bowery On a cold winter night I watched (by chance) a documentary called On the Bowery; it was directed by the American director Lionel Rogosin in the late 1950s. Rogosin was a pioneer in...
View ArticleWorking Your Way Through Depression to Finish a Book
“Do you ever sleep?” I’ve spent years trying to come up with a clever answer, but nothing ever seems to do the trick. I work constantly, and since my work is writing, usually—hopefully—decent enough to...
View ArticleCrime and the City: Visiting Amsterdam’s Dark Side
Amsterdam—a good place to start Literary Hub’s investigation of the world’s Crime Cities. Everyone has an image of Amsterdam, an idea of what it’s like—canals, bicycles, harmonized urban living; a...
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Crime and the City: Melbourne, Venerable Town of Vice
It’s fitting we visit Melbourne early in our journey around the world’s crime cities. The founding of Melbourne is intricately linked with Australia’s origins as a British penal colony of course, but...
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Julie Buntin on the Joys and Tragedies of Teenage Girlhood
Two girls converge in a rural wood—and one won’t make it out again. Fifteen-year-old Cat comes to Silver Lake with her mother, who is looking for a fresh start. Cat finds her own fresh start in...
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Back Stage with Hunter S. Thompson
As a retired police detective trying to produce crime fiction, I found myself under obligation to write stories that were true to police procedure. The problem was, I wasn’t having fun, and I wasn’t...
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Don Winslow on Crooked NYC Cops and Legalizing Heroin
It used to be there was a bubble over parts of New York, an illusion of peace and prosperity that seemed to hang over the Upper East Side, 57th Street, and a few other well-heeled neighborhoods where...
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Everybody Loves to Hate a Dirty Cop: 10 Books of Corruption and Greed
Everybody loves to hate a dirty cop. The idea of the corrupt or lazy policeman is a very old trope indeed—2,000 years ago Seneca was complaining about dishonest tribunes and cohortes urbanae. Edgar...
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Mothers Who Leave Their Children
This morning I heard two different stories of a mother who left with a man. Amanda Kristine Hawkins was the first; she left her two-year-old and one-year-old daughters in her car for fifteen hours....
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Daniel Silva on Seeing His Thriller Plots Come True
In 2017, reason and savvy—two qualities that have always been highly valued in the espionage trade—don’t often factor into world events, and so the authors of spy thrillers find themselves with...
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Murder in the Mediterranean: Crime Writing on Corsica
We’ll take the Mediterranean island as a whole for this instalment of Crime and the City. Corsica has a criminal reputation to rival nearby Sicily’s. With a population of 333,000 that swells...
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In Mid-Life, The Wonderful Non-Deliverance of Ayahuasca
I walked through a maze of low-flung buildings and saw Jose—thin-boned and bearded—waving at me from his small balcony. His apartment was decked in a mishmash of Indian, Chinese and South American folk...
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Every Man A Menace
Getting out of prison is like having a rotten tooth pulled from your mouth: it feels good to have it gone, but it’s hard not to keep touching at that hole. Raymond Gaspar served four years this time....
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Writing a Novel is Just Like Searching for Ecstasy in Cambodia
One morning a few years ago I was in bed in Upstate New York texting with a private investigator friend of mine. I’d just sold my first novel as part of a two-book deal, a surprise for both of us. Six...
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The Hidden Keys
Tancred Palmieri was sitting in the Green Dolphin thinking about how best to dispose of a black diamond he’d stolen from a house on the Bridle Path. He was twenty-five years old and he’d been a thief...
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The Needle’s Eye
On the Bowery On a cold winter night I watched (by chance) a documentary called On the Bowery; it was directed by the American director Lionel Rogosin in the late 1950s. Rogosin was a pioneer in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Working Your Way Through Depression to Finish a Book
“Do you ever sleep?” I’ve spent years trying to come up with a clever answer, but nothing ever seems to do the trick. I work constantly, and since my work is writing, usually—hopefully—decent enough to...
View Article