The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: fiction

  • P.D. James and Louise Penny

    “Perhaps Adam Dalgliesh is an idealized version of what I’d have liked to be if I’d been born a man.” P.D. James, quoted in an interview by Julian Symons, NY Times, 5 October 1986. “Almost always the idea for a book comes to me as a reaction to a particular place and setting. Sometimes it’s…

  • Sad Girls: Paula Hawkins’s First Thriller

    I’m re-visiting Paula Hawkins’s 2015 Girl on the Train, which was adapted as a slightly shaky film starring Emily Blunt. Blunt is perfectly cast and holds most of the movie on her very capable shoulders, but the film version exposes a few weaknesses in the novel’s plotting while flattening out Hawkins’s more nuanced characterizations of…

  • Messy Middles: Maria Semple’s Go Gentle and Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct

    “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” Epictetus While I usually finish reading novels before I write about them, I’m in the midst of a Big Edit of my own mystery novel, and that has me thinking about the…