I can hear Ian Rankin’s wise Detective Inspector John Rebus saying, “Next to a dram of Scotland’s finest single malt whisky, a deadline is a police officer’s best friend.” For, in Exit Music, a nasty murder has occurred on his watch and the story is Rebus’s attempting to solve this final case before he is […]
I’ve been traveling; I’m in France now, working on my new novel in a lovely old stone maison beside a broad, flowing river. It’s in the countryside, so I’ve plenty of opportunities for bicycling. Ah, contentment. Which makes for good times reading mysteries. I was at Amsterdam’s Centraal Station, preparing to take the train to […]
Many, if not most, authors get genre-locked by either their publisher or their audience, denying us the opportunity to see the full range of their interests and talents. Fortunately, that is not the case with author James D. Best. Jim began writing the Steve Dancy westerns a number of years ago, and I’ve enjoyed reading […]
I recently gave a talk at the Cary Memorial Library in my hometown, Lexington, Massachusetts, on the American literary trilogy of the 20th century. My talk focused on the works of John Updike, John Dos Passos, and Philip Roth. My interest in the subject was, perhaps not coincidentally, because of writing my own trilogy and […]
There’s something particularly appealing to me about reading (in this case listening to, ably read by Lewis Arlt) a novel by a female: great characterization. It’s sadly lacking in a lot of science fiction, where the male author is much more interested in technology, or space exploration, or things having to do with the warp […]
After more than a year of anticipation, I’ve just finished Whitney Scharer’s The Age of Light. Perhaps I should say I’ve just finished devouring it, because it was an utterly engrossing read in every respect. Reading Scharer’s prose is like tasting gourmet food. If you’d like a little background illumination, please read this Fictional Café […]
We live in a world overpopulated not only with people but with books. I’ve heard there are currently about a million books published each year. This plethora of storytelling is diffuse: hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, ebook, audio – what we once called books on tape. The one constant among these formats or versions […]
