Darkness in Glaring Sunlight
Earworms are songs that stick in your head. Midland, Texas, is my eyeworm. Cultivating a noir sensibility means looking keenly into dark, bleak, and dangerous settings: the back alleys of New York (Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder), the fetid underbelly of Chicago (Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski), the dreary winters of Boston (Robert Parker’s Spenser, who grew up in Laramie, Wyoming—a little known fact about fiction), or the fog-shrouded streets of San Francisco (if this w
Controversial Chimera
Here is an intriguing email and my response (both somewhat abridged, so let me know if you’d like the full versions). I showed the controversial image in question (Grasshopper in Cyberspace, Galina Lukshina, 2003) during a university presentation about my writing, when discussing the Riley mystery series. CONCERN: Your seminar was fascinating [but] the image of the woman on her back in a very sexualized position, with the insect head twisted around is not appropriate. Yes, p
