The Twenty-Year Death by Ariel S. Winter (available August 7th) is a single book made up of three crime novels told across decades—from the years 1941, 1951, and 1961—each capturing the style and setting of a giant of crime writing from the era: Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. The three stories together tell…
We’ve talked about various kinds of zombies here at Criminal Element, and it would be remiss of us to leave out the international zombie. Now the zombie craze isn’t solely a American thing. Though George Romero did his part in making the zombie we all know and love a household-monster on par with Universal’s Fearsome…
Just as in real estate, in crime location is everything. And plenty of criminals choose hotels as the scenes of their felonious fun. Take Darius Guppy, for example. A gem merchant so well-bred and connected that if he were food, he would be Ossetra caviar, Guppy checked into Room 1208 of New York’s Halloran House…
This criminal means (show) business! There is some debate, heated and unresolved, as to whether this video is real or cinéma vérité as viral marketing for a line of rugged sports cameras. We live in a time where so much can be faked, people often discount that anything unusual and fantastic happens. In either case, the…
I discovered Fred Vargas on the plane coming back from France. In real life she’s Frédérique Audouin-Rouzeau (Fred as the short form of her name, and Vargas from Ava Gardner’s character in The Barefoot Contessa), a French historian/archaeologist with many books to her credit, among them seven mysteries featuring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Six have been…
My husband is in love with Fanny Ardant. But I don’t mind. I’m in love with her too. She’s the beguiling actress who plays the female lead in François Truffaut’s Confidentially Yours (Vivement Dimanche!, or“Finally Sunday”in the original). It was Truffaut’s last film, made in 1983—an homage to Hitchcock. Julien Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a…
(Don’t forget to read Fingerprints 101 for more about their initial discovery, Anthropometry, and the early applications in solving crime.) In the late nineteenth century, criminal identification was largely done by using Rogues’ Galleries, photographs of known criminals held in massive books that required hours to search. Enter Alphonse Bertillon, poster boy for high school…
