by Derek | May 31, 2020 | Reading, Reviews, Writing
Back when I was an aspiring writer, one thing would always puzzle me, and that thing was the oft-repeated phrase “Find your own voice.”“Understand character,” I got, as I did “Know the difference between story and plot,” but the own voice thing – especially because it...
by Derek | Feb 23, 2020 | Reading, Reviews, Writers Life, Writing
It’s often commented that the classic American Noir is basically a Western retold: That the lone Gumshoe making right in a corrupt and lawless world is Shane, strolling into town and restoring fairness. It’s also been noted that crime fiction, in it’s purest, is a...
by Derek | Oct 25, 2019 | Reading, Reviews
Jo Perry is well known and loved, round these parts, for her series of “Dead is…” books featuring Charlie & Rose. Those books – which I have described as being what would happen if Samuel Beckett wrote a crime series, as well as being “Like ‘The Wire’ meets ‘The...
by Derek | Oct 3, 2015 | Reading
Lawrence Block has been writing since God was in his heaven and Kennedy in the White House. That he’s had an esteemed career goes without saying. He’s written slight pulpy books (After the First Death), Bigger City-wide Blockbusters (the counterintuitively named Small...
by Derek | Sep 18, 2015 | Reading
I have an admission to make: I love melancholy: that sense of ennui at the human condition, a despair at the inevitable entropy and ending of everything, and – bubbling just under it – the anger at man’s impotence in the face of a world that just won’t be set right....
