The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: thriller

  • Dial M for Murder: From Grace Kelly to a Lesbian Update

    Grace Kelly as Margot and Anthony Dawson as her would-be killer; a still from the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film. Earlier in February I spent several days in Vancouver conducting interviews and doing background research for two features that I’m hoping to finish up over the next few months. One is on the play’s director, the…

  • “Turn Back, Turn Back, You Young Bride”: Grim/m Stories of Murderous Husbands

    The most common trope of one strand of domestic thriller is the murderous spouse, nearly always a husband. In a milder version of the story, he’s merely untrustworthy: a liar, a con man, a bigamist (arguably, Jane Eyre‘s Rochester is all three). But from Hitchcock’s Suspicion to the gaslighting husband of The Girl on the…

  • The Mystery of Bestsellers

    As part of my Certificate in Creative Writing at U of T, I’ve been trying to take a course on how to write bestsellers, but it’s been cancelled a couple of times in a row (surely not for lack of student interest?). I’m signing up again for a spring session, but the instructor is ominously…