THIS WEEK: In 1967, Joseph Otto Kesserling, best known for authoring the slapstick murder mystery play (later film), Arsenic and Old Lace, dies.
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- “You’re on a plane. You’re on a train. You’re wheeling through American space…Who are you going to read, in this condition? Henry James? No. You’re going to read Lee Child.” | The Atlantic
- “Go too far over the top and you’ll find yourself in Austin Powers land.” Anthony Horowitz on the joys and challenges of continuing Fleming’s characters. | Criminal Element
- “Lake Superior is moody, awesome (in the real sense of that word), and enormously powerful.” Wendy Webb talks Northern Gothic, and what makes lakes so creepy. | The Big Thrill
- From ghost stories and haunted houses to Southern Gothic fables, Wendy Webb recommends 8 modern gothics to keep you reading all winter long. | CrimeReads
- Take a tour of South Central with Joe Ide, the noir poet of Los Angeles, who marries Sherlockian inspirations with the rough streets of his youth. | Sydney Morning Herald
- “If you’re not subverting some kind of established narrative, why tell the story at all?” Idra Novey talks bookstores, despots, and revolution with Maaza Mengiste. | CrimeReads
- Tel Aviv means many things to many people: and that goes ditto for crime writers. Paul French investigates the crime writing scene in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. | CrimeReads
- For those looking to whet their appetite for mystery, but aren’t quite sure where to start, here’s a guide to the last 100 years of crime and mystery. | Forma Journal
- “They were equal in this regard: they could be hanged.” Laura Thompson on the long history of hanging women in England, and how loopholes gradually replaced nooses. | CrimeReads
- Serial killers in the family, gender-bending Pinkertons, and mysterious disappearances: all the debuts you need to read this November.| CrimeReads
- “How could a woman go missing inside her own home?” An investigation into a woman’s disappearance becomes the basis for a broader look at isolation in America. | Tampa Bay Times
- “Something about my childhood in New York in the seventies was a kind of urban ferality…” Jonathan Lethem on childhood, Leonard Cohen, Raymond Chandler, and utopia.| CrimeReads
