It's All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives is the latest effort in the recent renaissance of the reputation of the mid-century detective writer who was born Kenneth Millar.
When a culture critic is as prolific and well known as Greil Marcus, and has written books as revered as Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, it's a mouthful to say any one book defines him
The latest benefit to readers in the stage of enlightenment exemplified by the Library of America's expanding coverage of post-war pulp is the new two-volume collection devoted to Women Crime Writers, the first of which covers the 1940s
In fiction or life, I generally turn a cold shoulder to studies in psychopathy.
Remarking on the distinction between English drawing room mysteries and America's hard-boiled crime dramas, Raymond Chandler famously wrote that his role model, Dashiell Hammett, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.
Charles Hughes' Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, starts with some serious limitations.
Me, the Mob and the Music is the autobiography of sixties' hit-maker Tommy James (as told to Martin Fitzpatrick).
Among the heavy hitters in the history of American crime fiction, the late Elmore Leonard was something of a 'tweener': not quite as purely entertaining as Donald Westlake, not as morally serious as Patricia Highsmith or Ross MacDonald, not as stylistically interesting as Raymond Chandler or as clos
Greil Marcus has been a big-time rock critic for over forty years.
More than any other American city–even New York–Los Angeles occupies a psychic space as well as a geographic one.
The basic premise of Fragments–a collection of Marilyn Monroe's writings that ranges from bits of poetry and thoughts on psychoanalysis to rehearsed answers for upcoming interviews and favorite recipes (all complete with cross outs and noodlings)–is that the “mind of Marilyn” was, by definit
The best thing about Blackbird, Tom Wright's second novel featuring a character named Jim Bonham (who almost nobody calls Jim), is the cover design, which is spare, evocative, compelling.
Holly George-Warren's A Man Called Destruction is the first full-length biography of Alex Chilton.
Despite its title and its almost documentary feel for period spy-craft, David Downing's Jack of Spies isn't necessarily bound by genre.
Some writers are valued for the window they provide into their own time, others for their prescience.
“But few of them would enter the war as these directors did, with the sense that, in impending middle age, they had found themselves with a new world to conquer, a task that would test their abilities to help win the hearts and minds of the American people under the hardest imaginable circumstance
The fiftieth anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination last November turned up an avalanche of books seeking to present new angles or re-hash old ones.
John Knox, the great Scottish reformer, emerged from a densely tangled thicket of sixteenth century history, politics and theology.
The Gods of Guilt is actually my introduction to Michael Connelly's tremendously popular Lincoln Lawyer series (though, like a lot of characters in this volume, I have seen the movie).
