Explore historical mystery books—unraveling crime, intrigue, and hidden secrets in gripping stories set in the Baltimore’s early 20th-century past
The following is a reprint of my 2021 article from Mystery & Suspense titled “Supernatural Detectives: Ten Supernatural Thrillers That Are Also Great Detective Stories.” For more on crime fiction, see my post Hard-Boiled Detectives: Unveiling Detective Fiction’s Thrilling Dark Influence. Any good mystery draws the reader into a sinister puzzle (usually involving murder) while…
The following is my review of Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History by Susanna Lee, as published in Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy in March 2023. Susanna Lee’s Detectives in the Shadows is an incisive, entertaining jaunt through the hard-boiled genre from its pulp-fiction origins to the present. Lee, Professor…
Autistic characters—both in stories and in real life—have always existed. What we now call autism has long been part of the human condition, even though medicine only began identifying the particular set of physical and mental traits associated with it within the last 100 years. This issue has special relevance to me. I have an…
Women doctors now make up about 60 percent of practitioners under 35. The situation was very different in the past. No Women Doctors Need Apply In her book “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975, Mary Roth Walsh recounts the terrible difficulty women faced in studying medicine and in…