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We live in gray times, the days of stark black and white far behind us. In fiction, particularly crime fiction, the means for making sense of this gray landscape so [...]

'An unsuitable job for a woman?' Cordelia Gray interjects in P.D. James's 1972 private eye novel of the same name when a man comes up short trying to describe her [...]

'Alas,' this very magazine lamented back in 2002, 'Scandinavian dreariness just doesn't seem to have broad appeal to American readers.' The review referred not to Stieg Larsson's tattooed hacker, Lisbeth [...]

'Categories are like walls,' says bestselling author Michael Connelly, 'and walls keep people out.' What separates the genre of crime fiction from literary fiction may be more membrane than wall, [...]

'I specialize,' Agatha Christie once said, 'in murders of quiet, domestic interest.' Today, almost 90 years after the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first novel featuring the [...]

'We have the rope of Agatha around our necks,' notes Scottish crime writer Val McDermid. 'She created an expectation [about British mystery writers] that was great for when she was [...]

Like your mysteries with a wee dose of the Sill Caledonian? Give Scottish crime fiction the aye.' While it's as misleading to lump all Scottish crime authors under one umbrella [...]

'The human heart being what it is,' Truman Capote told George Plimpton in 1966 when discussing In Cold Blood, the story of a Kansas family's murder that would become a [...]

David John Moore Cornwell turned his brief stint working behind the scenes at Britain's MI6--the U.K.'s Secret Intelligence Service, essentially its version of the CIA--into a literary career spanning over [...]

Steiner follows her debut, Missing, Presumed, with Persons Unknown (Random House, July), also starring Det. Insp. Manon Bradshaw, whose nephew becomes a murder suspect. Your heroine, Manon, differs from the [...]

Real-life murderer Peter Manuel, hanged for his crimes in Scotland in 1958, is a major character in Mina's novel The Long Drop (Little, Brown, May). What drew you to writing [...]

Det. Sgt. Sean Duffy must deal with police bureaucracy as well as murder in McKinty's sixth series novel set in 1980s Northern Ireland, Police at the Station and They Don't [...]

Sitting with Phillip Margolin in Portland, Ore.'s legendary Bread and Ink Cafe, I ask him about his upcoming novel, Worthy Brown's Daughter (Harper, Feb). Set in 1860s Oregon, the story [...]

Rankin brings Edinburgh copper John Rebus out of semi-retirement for Rather Be the Devil (Little, Brown; pub month, Jan.; Reviews, Nov. 21). In his 23rd mystery, Rebus kicks around a [...]

Police corruption and violence run rampant in poet and playwright Stephen Mack Jones's debut novel, August Snow (Soho Crime, Feb. 2017). The title character, Snow, the son of a black [...]

A look at insidious, crooked coppers around the world Norway The Fifth Element Jargen Brekke. Minotaur, Feb. 2017 In Brekke's third Trondheim-set series installment featuring police inspector Odd Singsaker, Singsaker [...]

In order to tell a good lie, it's best to mix in some truth. The same often holds true for historical mysteries: to tell an authentic whodunit set in the [...]

With Downton Abbey reviving interest in the period between the two world wars, the publishing arm of the British Library has been releasing new editions of forgotten classics published in [...]

YA author Harrison's first adult novel, The Bishop's Wife (Reviews, Oct. 6; pub month, Dec.), introduces Linda Wallheim, a Mormon wife and mother who uncovers serious crime in her community. [...]

'This is a bookseller convention. The big topic is always going to be Amazon,' said New Republic editor Franklin Foer in a keynote titled 'Internet and Technology' at the New [...]

Wordstock, one of the largest celebrations of literature and literacy in the Pacific Northwest, is gaining a new parent. Literary Arts, a nonprofit literary organization based in Portland, Ore., will [...]

Cain launches a new series with One Kick (Reviews, June 9; pub month, Aug.), featuring 21-year-old Kick Lannigan, who was kidnapped at age six and rescued five years later. Like [...]

'Downing, author of the Station series, a WWII-era spy series that concluded with 2013's Masaryk Station, launches a new WWI-era spy series with Jack of Spies (Soho Crime, May) With [...]

A London-based TV news reporter, Rachel Walsh, investigates the disappearance of a young woman who turns out to be her former best friend, in Colette McBeth's first novel, Precious Thing [...]

Critical Mass (Reviews, Sept. 2; pub date, Oct. 22), Sara Paretsky's 17th crime novel featuring Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski, explores a present-day missing persons case--and pre-WWII Austria. What made [...]

College professor Sam Madison goes on trial for murdering his wife, Sandrine, in Thomas H. Cook's Sandrine's Case (Reviews, June 17; pub date, Aug. 6). What appealed to you about [...]

In her upcoming fifth novel, Eight Girls Taking Pictures (Scribner, Nov.), Otto, a photography fan, focuses on eight female photographers--six of them based on real-life photographers and two of them [...]

Return of the Thin Man (Reviews, Sept. 10; pub. date, Nov. 6), edited by Dashiell Hammett scholar Richard Layman and Hammett's granddaughter Julie M. Rivett, collects the two Dashiell Hammett [...]

Michael Robotham's damaged protagonist, psychologist Joe O'Loughlin, hunts for two kidnapped teenage girls in Say You're Sorry (Reviews, Aug. 13; pub date, Oct.). What appeals to you about this kind [...]

With her debut novel, Accelerated (Reviews, Aug. 13; pub date, Oct.), Soho Press publisher Bronwen Hruska dives into Manhattan's prep school quagmire. With younger and younger schoolchildren being prescribed drugs, [...]

In More Baths, Less Talking: Notes from the Reading Life of a Celebrated Author Locked in Battle with Football, Family and Time Itself, Nick Hornby shares his 'Stuff I've Been [...]

This isn't your first book about spies. What first attracted you to the world of espionage ? Around 1997, MIS, Britain's internal security service, began to release its classified files. [...]

What intrigued you about international arms dealing? Our idea started with seeing Sweden as the perfect country for large-scale arms smuggling. Sweden hasn't fought a war since the Napoleonic wars [...]

The strange case of the murder of a young British woman in Japan is the focus of Parry's People Who Eat Darkness (Reviews, Mar. 6; pub date, June). Did you [...]

British crime writer S.J. Bolton's feisty but damaged heroine, London Det. Constable Lacey Flint, goes undercover as a Cambridge University student in Dead Scared (Reviews, Mar. 19; pub date, May). [...]

The author of Tokyo Suckerpunch returns with Complication, a literary thriller about a man traveling to Prague to put his brother's mysterious death to rest (Reviews, Feb. 20; pub date, [...]

Crime spoils a holiday for Jade de Jong in The Fallen (Reviews, Feb. 6; pub date Apr.), Jassy Mackenzie's fourth mystery featuring the South African PI. How did you choose [...]

In Dust to Dust (Reviews, Nov. 14; publishing in Mar.) Benjamin Busch, son of novelist Frederick Busch, tells of his life drawn to sports, physical activity, and the military despite [...]

In Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts, Stacy A. Cordery delves into Low's fascinating and untraditional life (Reviews, p. 68). What first piqued your interest in [...]

The waitress at the Renaissance St. Louis Grand Hotel bar brings a bowl of potato chips. 'You're bad,' Val McDermid, the Scotswoman across the table from me, in town as [...]

Both Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui are charismatic but not necessarily sympathetic figures for American readers. Did this worry you during the writing process? Yes, it did. When I started out, [...]

In Seriously ... I'm Kidding (Reviews, Aug. 22), comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres riffs on finding life's little happy moments and all the funny stuff in between. How [...]

Danes Lene Kaaberbol, a YA fantasy writer, and Agnete Friis, a children's author and journalist, have, for their first collaborative effort, produced a crime novel, The Boy in the Suitcase [...]

Ismet Prcic talks truth in fiction, immigrant literature, and what he learned from Aleksandar Hemon, in his debut novel, Shards (Reviews, Aug. 8). Do you think readers will assume all [...]

Stuart Neville's third crime thriller featuring Belfast Det. Insp. Jack Lennon, Stolen Souls (Reviews, Aug. 8), focuses on human trafficking. Why did you decide to explore human trafficking? I wanted [...]

Karl Marlantes, author of the acclaimed novel Natterhorn, says young warriors need more than basic training to prepare for combat in What It Is Like to Go to War (Reviews, [...]

In Record Collecting for Girls (Reviews, June 20), Courtney E. Smith writes about love and coming-of-age through music. You talk about feeling strangely annoyed when a band that you loved--the [...]

Laura Lippman, best known for her Tess Monaghan PI series, sets her new stand-alone, The Most Dangerous Thing (Reviews, June 27), in Dickeyville, the Baltimore neighborhood where she grew up. [...]

Tent preaching was dying out when you were on the circuit with Brother David Terrell as a child. What made him so successful? He had this perseverance that drove him, [...]

What appealed to you about having a dual killer story line? The appeal for me came from a meeting with a category 'A' prisoner [a violent offender in the U.K.], [...]