Surviving (and Writing) During a Pandemic Writing is never easy, not even under the most ideal of circumstances. It’s even harder during a virus-driven lockdown, no matter what your individual situation. Even if you have lots of time to sit down and write, the worldwide tension is so heavy that it risks coming through the walls of your house-turned-prison, crushing your urge to create in the process. It was under these circumstances that Steve Weddle and I decided to edit an anthology of crime and suspense fiction, “Lockdown,” that’s out now from
Read More The Schrödinger’s Cat of noir adaptations Nick Kolakowski on the filming of Dashiell Hammett’s novel Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest was published in February 1929, an auspicious moment in American history. The glitter and rot of the Roaring Twenties had reached a crescendo; by October, the Wall Street Crash would usher in a decade of privation so acute it threatened the foundations of Western capitalism. In his query letter to Knopf, Hammett termed the book an “action-detective novel,” but it was much more than that; in describing the Continental Op’s attempts to clean out “Poisonville” of gangsters and
Read More Ignorance About the Current State of Crime Fiction is Rampant The old-school pulp writers are all dead, but their creations’ shadows loom over the crime fiction genre. That’s the only conclusion I can draw after reading articles like Jacqueline Sheehan’s hilariously misinformed piece in “The Writer.” Sheehan insists that the crime/thriller genre is male dominated, overstuffed with “the old tropes of hookers, cheating wives, or objects of sexual desire for the male protagonist.” In addition, she writes, “some female characters seem to be so enthralled with the male protagonist that they flip
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