1. In the Beginning Was the Crime In the last months of his life, Italian writer Andrea Camilleri reminded us, through the intense pages of his Autodifesa di Caino (Cain’s self-defense, 2019), that crime has existed since the very beginnings of the human race. Not only that – crime is a multifaceted phenomenon, not to…

What are the virtues of attaining late middle age in the early 21st century? Are there any? Well… for males, there’s better life expectancy than our fathers had — mine didn’t even make it to my age, but then his high-cholesterol, low-exercise lifestyle didn’t exactly lend itself to longevity (wine apart, I’m hoping that mine…

“A New Crop of Mom Thrillers Taps Into Our Worst Fears” declared an essay by Jen Gann published in February 2018. I had been trolling for information about crime fiction from the mother’s perspective to help shed light on my approach to three suspense novels by Argentine author Claudia Piñeiro that featured mothers who had…

In a famous essay, The Simple Art of Murder, published many years ago, Raymond Chandler characterized the classic, mostly British detective novel, the whodunit, as a form that has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”  In a limited sense, he was entirely correct, though of course he was also arguing in favor of the kind of…