Murder
A lurid fascination
After months of conversations with Ireland’s most notorious murderer, Mark O’Connell got both more and less than he bargained for, says Frances Wilson
A deadly blame game
Alan Philps reveals how many western journalists, duped by Stalinist propaganda, rushed to blame the Nazis for the Soviet atrocity
Did she jump or was she pushed?
A police detective inherits a country estate and looks forward to early retirement, but is forced back into action when human bones surface at a village treasure hunt
Evil geniuses
Does knowledge of the wrongs committed by Caravaggio, Picasso, Roman Polanski and other ‘monsters’ condition our response to their art, wonders Claire Dederer
Was it murder?
In a beautifully told novel, O’Callaghan focuses on the mysterious death of the footballer Matthias Sindelar in 1939 – possibly as a result of defying Hitler
Foul play in Ferrara
There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the…
Serious entertainment
What a weird lot crime writers are. I don’t come to this conclusion lightly, since I’m a crime writer myself,…
Life in the Afterworld
Angus Mooney is dead. Freshly murdered, he’s appalled to find himself in an Afterworld, having always rejected the possibility of…
Will Macron surrender to the mob?
It has been a torrid few days in France. In the early hours of Saturday morning, a former Argentine rugby…
Wild life
Laikipia Plateau, Kenya Our local chief Panta wore a government-issue khaki uniform with epaulettes, beret and swagger stick. On a…
This rough game
Through her diaries and notebooks we finally catch a glimpse of the real Patricia Highsmith, says Christopher Priest
Mawkish melodrama
Rose Tremain’s 15th novel begins with a favoured schmaltzy image of high Victoriana: it is a night (if not dark…
The Met must face the truth about Sarah Everard’s murder
‘We are sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes which betray everything we stand for,’ said the Metropolitan Police…
A man with a plan for Manhattan
What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive…
Sweden’s gun crime epidemic is spiralling out of control
The shots were fired at 1pm on a Sunday, in spite of a heavy police presence at the scene. A…
Celebrity gangster
Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s…
He shall not grow old
Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was…
Northern noir
It is winter in north Yorkshire. On the brink of New Year, Jake, a laconic, isolated former farmhand in his…
The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge
A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving…
You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park
Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth…
The crime of passion that kept the nation enthralled
No matter how exquisitely English —gobbets of blood amid the fireplace ornaments — murder annihilates meaning. Even when the motive…
An outsider inside: We, The Survivors, by Tash Aw, reviewed
It’s not immediately obvious who the survivors in Tash Aw’s formidable new novel are, or who the narrator even is,…
True crime has never been more popular, but it often forgets the families left behind
I’ve talked to Denise Horvath-Allan more than my own mother this year. Denise’s son Charles went missing while backpacking in…
The ghostly Thames: Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield, reviewed
While its shape is famous — prominent on maps of London and Oxford — the Thames is ‘unmappable’, according to…
Death of a rock star: Slow Motion Ghosts, by Jeff Noon, reviewed
Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory…
