Friday, July 29, 2016

Thrillers Resonate This Political Season

Recently, Russian digital hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee were revealed, raising the specter of foreign government interference in U.S. elections. That's a plot you'd expect to find in a Cold War-era political thriller, not 2016 news stories. So this very unusual political season has inspired me to take a closer look at political thrillers. An example is the just released novel about ISIS terrorism in France from bestselling political thriller author Daniel Silva. In The Black Widow, the spy hero is poised for promotion to chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service but takes on one final operation after ISIS detonates a massive bomb in Paris, and the desperate French government asks him to eliminate the man responsible before he can strike again. But the classic political thrillers emerged after World War II when the West faced a nuclear-armed world divided by Cold War ideologies and post-colonial chaos. Among the best-known works is Richard Condon's 1959 The Manchurian Candidate about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into becoming an unwitting Communist assassin controlled by his domineering mother, who seeks to make her husband, a McCarthy-esque senator, into a puppet dictator. In 1955, Graham Greene's prescient The Quiet American depicts French and British colonialism in Vietnam being uprooted by American involvement during the 1950s, revealing a blind American "exceptionalism" that fails to see disaster looming. Colonialism's poisonous roots in the Muslim world are exposed in 1972's Edgar Award-winning The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, about a mysterious professional assassin contracted to kill French President Charles de Gaulle by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organization upset by France's Algeria policy. More recently, America's racial politics are the subject of A Certain Justice by John Lescroart, published in 2006: When an angry white mob in San Francisco murders an innocent black man, the only man who tried to stop the killing is framed and goes on the run amid riots, political posturing, and pressure on police to subvert justice. Of course, money is at the root of political evil, and in 2001's The Constant Gardner, by famed British spy novelist John le CarrĂ©, a British diplomat's search for the truth about his activist wife's murder in Africa uncovers an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucrats and pharmaceutical industry money. For Amazon's latest political thrillers, see https://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/7538395011/ref=zg_bs_tab_t_bsnr

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Physical Challenges Can't Stop These Sleuths

If you like triumph-over-physical-adversity tales, you may want to check out mystery writing's long tradition of physically challenged detectives. There are many reasons for authors to create sleuths who are blind, deaf, paralyzed or otherwise physically limited. By literally handicapping crime-solving via a detective's impaired ability to personally gather clues from crime scene inspection or interrogations, an author boosts the puzzle-solving challenge. The social stigma often faced by people with physical issues also creates reader empathy and increases reader satisfaction in the protagonist's ability to overcome and triumph. Authors usually offset a character's physical disadvantage by honing intellect, senses, instincts or determination to a point beyond the skills of ordinary sleuths. A disability, because it can be misread as incapability, can even give a surprise edge in outwitting arrogant suspects, deceptive witnesses or uncooperative authorities. Among the well-known detectives in this group is bestselling author Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic New York City detective. NYC culprits also find a nemesis in George Chesbro's dwarf criminology professor and private-eye Robert 'Mongo' Fredrickson. Proving lack of sight is not lack of insight is Jane A. Adams' Naomi Blake, a blind ex-policewoman in the Midlands of England, while reading lips doesn't hinder reading clues in Penny Warner's Connor Westphal mysteries about a deaf newspaper journalist in California. For a list of more mysteries featuring physically challenged detectives, go to

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Mystery on Board: Cruising Into Murder

It's vacation time, and maybe you're longing to sail away from it all. You may even be one of the folks actually taking a cruise ship to exotic destinations. But what if there is a murderer hunting among the passengers trapped on that floating hotel? If you don't mind a frisson of anxiety with your real or imagined cruise adventure, add some of these noted mystery authors' tales of shipboard murder to your reading list. A well-known classic is Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, in which her Belgian sleuth Hercules Poirot plans a leisurely cruise down the Nile but ends up sifting through suspicious passengers and false leads to solve the murder of a wealthy young woman. Bestselling suspense author Mary Higgins Clark also penned a thriller with a cruise setting. In Clark's You Belong to Me, a killer stalks lonely women on board cruise ships as a radio-show psychologist rushes to catch the murderer before he can literally stop her dead. Famed New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh even introduced her mystery series' police detective Roderick Alleyn to the high seas in Singing in the Shrouds, sending Alleyn on a ship voyage in pursuit of a serial killer. But the King of Ocean-Liner Fiction is Conrad Allen. Allen's eight mysteries in the "Murder on the..." series are all set aboard pre-World War I cruise ships, starting with Murder on the Lusitania, and feature a husband and wife sleuthing team. For an updated ocean liner tale, fans of the "Murder, She Wrote" mystery series will appreciate Murder on the QE2, by Donald Bain and "Jessica Fletcher," as Jessica, invited aboard as one of seven guest lecturers, tries to solve the murder of a fellow speaker. For more mysteries with cruise ship settings, see http://www.cozy-mystery.com/blog/mystery-books-that-take-place-on-cruise-ships-mystery-books-at-sea.html