Was Sherlock Holmes a real person? What’s the difference between a crime novel and a mystery novel? What really happened to all the TP? Survey mystery fiction and its conventions, from the genre’s 19th-century origins to the classic Golden Age puzzle to its many postmodern manifestations. Writers to be studied will include Edgar Allan Poe, […]
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L.A. Requiem is a detective novel by Robert Crais published in 1999. It is the 8th in the series that centers on Elvis Cole, a private detective of the hard-boiled ilk in Los Angeles, California. Cole is brought into the mysterious death of Karen Garcia by his business partner, long-time friend and former Police Officer, […]
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SPOILER ALERT Post Title: Dragnet (Movie) 1954 Opening Statement: Dragnet, directed by Jack Webb, written by Richard L. Breen, and starring Jack Webb as Detective Joe Friday. The film is both a police procedural and of the hard-boiled detective genres. Brief Synopsis: The film begins with the murder of mobster, Miller Starkie. The killers are […]
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Fiction Review: Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury (1947) I, The Jury was written in 1947 and is considered a classic of early hard-boiled detective fiction. It was Mickey Spillane’s first novel starring the manly detective Mike Hammer, the last of which was published in 1996. I was attracted to the story after reading an interview […]
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The Cuckoo’s Calling (Cormoran Strike #1), Mystery/Professional Sleuth and Robert Galbraith (Pseudonym of J.K. Rowling). In 2013, J.K. Rowling wrote a work of fiction that did not once mention magic, wands, or anyone named Harry. Hoping to receive unbiased reviews of her work, she attempted to publish it under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. “I was […]
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Story by DANIEL MILLER Illustrations by MORGAN SCHWEITZER Photography by GINA FERAZZI NOVEMBER 1, 2014, LA Times http://graphics.latimes.com/finding-marlowe/?=hpt It was hot and I was late for lunch. I was feeling mean, like I’d been left out in the sun too long. We were meeting at a joint on La Brea, the kind of place where […]
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AirTalk | December 29th, 2014, 10:43am “All us tough guys are hopeless sentimentalists at heart,” author Raymond Chandler once wrote. The statement applies to Chandler as well as to his literary alter ego Phillip Marlowe. Readers have come to know about what Chandler thought about Los Angeles and a number of other subjects through his […]
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SEPTEMBER 08, 2014 6:39 PM ET By JASON SHEEHAN NPR Listen to the review here: http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=343414349&m=346879430&t=audio James Ellroy’s ‘Perfidia’ Is A Brutal, Beautiful Police Procedural There are a lot of reasons not to read James Ellroy’s newest novel, Perfidia — the opening shot in his proposed second L.A. Quartet. It’s a long and sprawling book […]
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by DAN SALTZSTEIN, June 27, 2014 San Francisco is well known for its transformations, the most recent one fueled by tech money that has seemingly scrubbed much of the city clean. Evidence of it tends to be easy to mock: the $4 artisanal toast, the shuttle buses carrying workers from the city interior to Silicon […]
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Berkeley Mystery Fiction 