Weekly Crime Column

  • Crime: Macavity Macavity… Award-winning mysteries.

    Most crime readers are aware that there are mystery awards – the Edgars, right? – but not everyone knows just how many awards there are. There are the Agatha Awards for best domestic mystery; the Shamus Awards for detective novels; Britain’s Dagger Awards, and many, many more. And for a quarter of a century, the Mystery Readers International’s Macavity Awards (named… Continue reading

  • Alphabet of Crime: Keeping up with the Jameses.

    The book’s location is MYSTERY > JAMES. Quick – who’s the author? Chances are you guessed P.D. James, the doyenne of contemporary British crime fiction, who over the past fifty years has penned over a score of titles – most featuring buttoned-down Inspector-cum-Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh – that have consistently raised the bar on what is possible… Continue reading

  • SPL Discoveries: David Peace

    Okay, maybe we didn’t exactly discover them,  but here are writers, old and new, that we’d love to see more readers to discover themselves. It happens this way a lot at the library: call it serendipity in the stacks. I stumbled upon David Peace’s unsettling works quite by chance. Picking up a book titled Occupied City, I was arrested… Continue reading

  • Crime: Is Dorothy L. Sayers still worth reading?

    “Is Dorothy L. Sayers still worth reading?” Well I’ve been reading her lately (in anticipation of the Taproot Theatre’s upcoming production of Gaudy Night), and my unsurprising answer is yes, but why? After all, her hero – Edwardian aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey – seems at first blush to be just the kind of plummy, pompous plutocrat that we’ve… Continue reading

  • Crime: Beneath the Antimacassars

    I like a dark, creepy Victorian crime novel — the real doozies – stories so strange and bizarre, nobody’s thought of them yet. The Thing about Thugs by Tabish Khair is a doozy. The Victorian mystery as we know it is turned on its head, so to speak, with a “normal” scientist, Captain William T.… Continue reading

  • September Sleuthing: Women Detectives to Die For

    Looking for another Stephanie Plum or Kay Scarpetta to slink into your life? Check out these lesser-known women detectives who reveal the darker underbellies of locales from coastal Florida to the Alaskan wilderness. Artifacts, by Mary Anna Evans (Faye Longchamp Mysteries) Aspiring archeologist Faye Longchamp resorts to “pot-hunting” to save her ancestral home, an island… Continue reading

  • Crime: Blood and Circuses.

    Recently I read a story as part of Thrilling Tales, Seattle Public Library’s storytime for grownups, that was a bit out there even for me: “Spurs,” by the obscure pulp writer Tod Robbins. (You can listen to it here – Fair warning: I had a cold, and I really chewed the scenery on this one). Published in 1923,… Continue reading

  • Murder at the Olympic Games

    I foolishly tried to resist getting caught up in the fervor, but it’s no use: once again my attention has been totally dominated by the Olympic Games. Such is the case for many of our patrons if the small talk at our service desk is any indication. There’s also been a run on all of our books about the Games,… Continue reading

  • Crime: The I’s Have It.

    As I set out to read my way through my alphabet of crime, I was a little worried about the letter ‘I,’ but it turned out to be quite a little Anglo-French treasure trove. Here are three great authors in our mystery “I’s,” each with their own distinct voice. Graham Ison is one of the many… Continue reading

  • If You Like Daniel Silva… (he’s coming to the Library!)

    Come see #1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva in conversation with Warren Etheredge at the Central Library’s Microsoft Auditorium, at 7 p.m., Monday, July 23. I love July for the warmth and light to read a good book in the evening on the porch, and the sure and certain knowledge that I’ll have… Continue reading

  • Are You Tough Enough? Derek Raymond’s Dare.

    Among crime readers, there are certain qualities that serve as points on our criminal compass. For example, authors who put a scalpel to the subtle psychological underpinnings of crime contrast with those for whom swift action on every page is essential. Another scale lies between whodunnits with a humorous or “cozy” feel, and those on the darker, grittier… Continue reading

  • H is for Gar Anthony Haywood

    Talking with fans of detective fiction, you tend to hear the same authors come up a lot, so it is a real pleasure to introduce readers to great crime novelists who are less well known, such as Gar Anthony Haywood. Hawyood’a Fear of the Dark won a Shamus Award in 1989 for best first private eye novel, introducing… Continue reading

  • Beyond Tea & Crumpets: Gritty Brits on DVD

    Think of British TV mystery and you may conjure up images of teacup wielding dowager sleuths, peering through the foxgloves at some suspicious goings on about the Village green. Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Marple. Arsenic and tweed. But there’s a whole other side to British Crime – a tough contemporary side where hardened detectives battle it… Continue reading

  • Crime: Imagining Jack the Ripper

    Whitechapel, London, 1888 Would Sherlock Holmes identify Jack the Ripper using his astute powers of deduction? Arthur Conan Doyle never put Holmes on the Whitechapel set, but Lyndsay Faye pits the pipe-smoking, cognitively-advanced detective against the Ripper with disastrous results in her novel Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John… Continue reading

  • Crime: Stealing Mona Lisa

    You think someone would notice if the Mona Lisa (or La Gioconda, as I now like to call her) disappeared from a wall in the Louvre. But in 1911, the painting was gone an entire day before anyone reported it stolen. Guards actually did notice it was gone, but assumed it had been taken by… Continue reading

  • G is for Goodis, Dark Prince of Noir.

    I know – you were thinking G was for Grafton, but as the Kinsey Milhone series already made an appearance in a recent post on the most prolific female detectives, I get to resume my Alphabet of Crime with one of my all time favorites: David Goodis. Close your eyes and think of “Noir.” What do you see, hear, feel?… Continue reading

  • Crime: Evil under the Rising Sun.

    Watching the cherry blossoms burst forth and fade always makes me think of Japan. But my Japan is not a place of samurai, ninja and serene Zen temples. The Japan I think of is lit by neon rather than a rising sun. A place of tailored suits, leather jackets, discos and hostess bars, a place where… Continue reading

  • Crime: If You Like Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series.

    In his 1950 essay The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler outlined the character of the modern detective, in words fit to quote at length: “…down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. … He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual… Continue reading