CrimeReads Brief: Week of July 15, 2018

THIS WEEK: In 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is first published.

• • Lyndsay Faye on Anthony Bourdain, voracious appetites, crime fiction, food, and the lure of transgressive behavior. |Criminal Element
  • Megan Abbott on reading Raymond Chandler in the #MeToo era and coming to grips with noir’s role in sustaining “toxic white masculinity.” | Slate
  • “I wanted to write about a dark, damaged, screwed-up, troubled female protagonist.” Gillian Flynn on writing complex, compelling women for her latest sensation, Sharp Objects. | BBC
  • The State of the Thriller. A roundtable discussion, as authors of the year’s biggest books discuss where the genre has been and where it’s headed. |CrimeReads
  • Saul Austerlitz on the strange, complicated relationship between the original motorcycle outlaws and the radical left in Sixties California. |CrimeReads
  • How crime fiction can make you a better person. Sheena Kamal on 9 crime novels that taught her about empathy in the most trying of circumstances. | CrimeReads
  • “This film is only a means to take audiences down a series of rabbit holes.” A very Godardian take on French crime fiction. | Slant Magazine
  • Wallace Stroby on the romance of the newsroom, the end of an era, and how he finally found a way to bring a reporter into his fiction. | CrimeReads
  •  C.W. Gortner on the Romanovs, the birth of the tabloid era, and the long history of bold and bizarre Romanov impersonators. | CrimeReads
  •  Allison Yarrow asks why 1990s television was so full of violence against women. |Lit Hub
  • Lucy Atkins on Italy, the South of France, the north of Iceland, and other picturesque settings shattered in classics of crime fiction. | CrimeReads
  • Ellison Cooper looks at the history and neurology of psychopaths and asks whether serial killers are born bad or man-made monsters. | CrimeReads

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