The Hungry Detective

This was meant to be a quick addition to my previous post on Dennis Lehane and SINCE WE FELL.  I pulled it out of that post because I found I had some small things to say about the Serial Killers genre. I read UNSUB by Meg Gardner and was let down by it. Months-long positive press raised a lot of hopes at Hungry Detective HQ. I like books about Serial Killers. I have read a ton of them. If you can believe it, before Nordic Fiction there was Serial Killer fiction...hard to imagine I know. But what most writers get wrong, and even Thomas Harris eventually got wrong about the Serial Killer genre, is that characters like Hannibal Lector only work in small doses. An author can spend 300 pages waxing rhapsodic about the preternatural abilities of their serial killer but eventually, the story will demand you spend the last act undoing all of it because justice must done. The Hannibal Lector's of the fiction world are incredibly confining characters to write and read. They are chara...

When I started getting into Crime Fiction in a serious way, what that meant was, I started going to bookstores that exclusively sold the stuff. For me that is, and now sadly was, the Milwaukee store Mystery One run by the great Richard Katz. I can't be sure what I bought that first visit.... I think it might have been CROSSROAD BLUES by Ace Atkins.  Richard quizzed me on my likes and I am pretty certain [Editor's Note: Or at least as certain as one can be in a blog post. ] that he recommended Dennis Lehane's first book, A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR. I promptly went home and ordered the book from Amazon. Sorry, Richard. As a way of an apology, for as long as I lived in Milwaukee I purchased every subsequent book Mr. Lehane released at Mystery One. It was the best place to turn a pastime into a passion. Places like Mystery One and writers like Dennis Lehane are a perfect combination to draw you in. Driving to work recently, I was trying to figure out what I like about Mr. Le...