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Photo by Shane LeonardAs I wrote in World Literature Today some years ago, the quality of Stephen King’s writing abilities are all too frequently underestimated because of his popularity and…
J. Madison Davis
June 25, 2024
IN 2004 I was thinking about the way that the very American style of hard-boiled or “noir” detective story has spread around the world, even to languages and literatures that had not…
Eddie Muller, the host of “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies, has what just might be the ideal job. TCM is a cultural gem, a visual museum airing silent and foreign movies, curious tra…
PHOTOS, clockwise from top: Members of AIEP in front of Ernest Hemingway’s house in 1994. AIEP dinner in Reykjavík. Group photo in Unna, Germany. CIRCUMSTANCES WERE QUITE different i…
Clare-Hope Ashitey in Seven SecondsMore than one critic has proclaimed that television in the early twenty-first century is in a “Golden Age” in which the complexities of character and plot,…
Photo: Richard Burger/Flickr Given the years of apprenticeship that most professional writers put in, it is not surprising that notable persons in sports, politics, and other fields rarely have the t…
Illustration by Stephanie Kubo The conventional wisdom in publishing for many years has been that women read and men don’t. Market research shows that men, on the whole, read for work, concentrating…
photo: Victrola gramophone by jimmy baikovicius/flickr W hat is crime fiction about? One glib answer is the struggle between good and evil. As light is defined by darkness, there is no hero without t…
This postcard illustration shows the Ohio State Penitentiary before the 1930 fire that “forever tormented” Himes. I have reservations about the value of writers’ biographies in appreciating their wr…
Nellie Bly One of the most implausible failures of realism that mystery readers generally accept is one posed by the series detectives, particularly the amateur sleuths in traditional mysteries. In n…
Photo: Katherine Dewey Hill On a sultry and tinto-infused afternoon in Spain some years ago, a group of mystery writers from several nations were gossiping about editors and agents, contract…
The impact of British literature on India was profound, altering the poetry, fiction, and drama of the many cultures and languages unified by the empire, and it has lingered. Victorian attitudes in p…
Photo: Beau Rogers The indignities and brutalities suffered by ethnic and racial groups at the hands of others are legion on the unhappiest pages of human history. Not the least of these insults is,…
Image: NEYRO2008/123rf stock photo In his address to the International Association of Crime Writers 2013 meeting in Oxford, Christopher MacLehose commented that publishers like him are always looking…
Rowan Atkinson as Maigret in the ITV feature-length adaptation of Maigret Sets a Trap. Early last year, fans of the actor Rowan Atkinson were surprised, and many astonished, by the British n…
Dick Francis and wife, Mary, stroll along the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Photo: Acey Harper / Life Image Collection / Getty Images When I was a newly minted assistant professor, Twayne’s Engl…
A promotional still from the 1995 film adaptation of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington as private eye Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. Mexican crime novelist Paco Igna…
Anna Maria Schenkel, Nina George, and Sascha Arango. Schenkel photo: Jürgen Bauer, George photo: Jakob B. Ârner, Arango photo: Frank May Although the impact of German culture on America is enormous i…
Photo by Stephen Murphy New Zealand is, relatively speaking, a tiny country with a population half the size of New York City and in a location so remote, a commercial flight from Los Angeles takes ov…
It is hard for me to believe that this column has appeared in almost every issue of WLT for a decade, and I am gratified that it has been so well received. For that I thank WLT’…- The Frankfurt Book Fair is considered one of the most important annual events—maybe the most important—in international publishing, and the German book market is among the largest in the world. Even t…
