In his book Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud points out that hand-drawn static-image super hero stories can’t compete against first-person power fantasies presented in film, video games, or on television—that action is much more exciting on a screen than in a comic book. If you don’t believe him, check out how many people have seen the…
When Sweet Girl debuted on Netflix on August 20th, it instantly became the most popular offering on the site, enticing viewers with its medley of dynamic fight sequences combined with a crime thriller story, throwing in a twist worthy of an early-career M. Night Shyamalan. Jason Momoa plays a sympathetic dad going after the big…
In my review of Lupin’s first season, I opened with the difficulty I had in identifying what the show was exactly. Lupin season two is easier to nail down: It’s a show about a man who wants to get revenge in as stylish and dramatic a way as possible. Putting a bullet into the swine who caused the…
It’s appropriate that the Netflix series Lupin, a show named after a master of disguise, could be described in many different ways, with few of those descriptions being entirely accurate. Lupin has apparently proved more popular even than the previous Netflix phenomenon The Queen’s Gambit, but it’s also harder to sum up. It’s inspired by…
Crime has inspired so much music that multiple volumes could be devoted to the subject. Certainly the blues, country, punk, and hip-hop have all produced songs with crime at the center, but so have Cole Porter (“Miss Otis Regrets”), Berthold Brecht (The Threepenny Opera), folk singers, and big bands. There are whole categories of songs—“murder…
Sherlock Holmes was, is, and likely will remain a solid fuel source for the entertainment industry, and the very latest offering is the Netflix film Enola Holmes, based on the Edgar Award-nominated YA series by Nancy Springer. Millie Bobby Brown, who launched her career playing Eleven on Stranger Things, dives into the part of Sherlock…
Celebrating its 100th birthday this year, The Haunted Bookshop—a fun little novella by prolific bibliophile Christopher Morley—remains in print to this day, and continues to make its welcome presence felt in the world of literature. Although the title implies ghosts, there are no supernatural elements to be found, though it does contain crime novel tropes…
At the 1993 Edgar Awards banquet, the best first novel award went to a new author named Michael Connelly, whose debut Harry Bosch novel The Black Echo had been published the previous year. The promise of that first book has clearly been fulfilled, with Connelly going on to become one of the most prolific and…
Ken Follett published Eye of the Needle in 1978, and the book achieved a level of success that few other Edgar Award winners have matched; I can only think of a small handful of Edgar winners that ascended to similar heights (The Long Goodbye, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and The Day…
Like many other distinguished science fiction and fantasy authors, Jack Vance won multiple Hugo awards, a Nebula award, a World Fantasy Award, and plenty of other honors. Unlike most other holders of these awards, Vance also has the highest award in the field of mystery writing, an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.…
