The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: murder-ballads

  • 4th of July: Murder Ballads and Gretchen Peters’s “Independence Day”

    Katy Horan’s gorgeously illustrated and chilling little book compiles twenty traditional murder ballads, some of them well known and others less familiar (at least to me), with insightful analysis of the genre. She Wore Black, a fun podcast about things gothic, horror, and mystery, has an interview with her that’s worth a listen. Horan talks…

  • Murder Ballads and Alice Munro’s “Open Secrets”

    I’m initially veering a little off topic again, the topic being Canadian women’s crime fiction, to speculate about an intriguing musical genre that makes an odd appearance in Alice Munro’s story “Open Secrets.” A murder ballad is a sung story about violent death and its aftermath, including the execution of the murderer. Some of my…