SELECTED ESSAYS
The Forgotten Female Action Stars of the 1910s (Atlantic)
“ [M]ore than a century ago… actresses headed up some of the U.S’s most popular and successful action movies—even if they performed stunts in skirts that ended only a few inches above their ankles….
It’s Time for More Period Dramas To Embrace the Diversity of People of Color (CrimeReads)
“[A] little digging quickly reveals that there were indeed all sorts of Black Victorians in London engaged in a variety of activities, particularly in the East End, just as there were people of all different races, religions, and ethnic backgrounds living and going about their business in the capital of the British Empire.”
Yes, Crime Fiction is Literature (and Other Observations on the Genre) (Kirkus Reviews)
“The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow has always felt arbitrary to me. And it is perhaps the accessibility of crime fiction—thanks precisely to its genre constraints—that obscures the sophistication involved in writing even the simplest crime story, and the sophistication involved in reading one.”
When Progress Ebbs: Career Women at the Turn of the 20th Century (LA Review of Books)
“The idea that opportunities had been better for professional women in the early years of the 20th century, but went downhill in the following decades, might seem strange. It’s common to believe that social progress moves in one direction — upward — and to conflate different kinds of freedoms: political, social, economic.”
The Harvard Professor Who Shot a Financial Titan and Fomented Anti-German Sentiment in a Pre-WWI America (SmithsonianMag.Com)
“Stories and letters poured into newspapers questioning the loyalty of so-called “hyphenated Americans,” especially German-Americans, who were looked upon with suspicion in the aftermath of the sinking of the Lusitania by German U-boats earlier in May.”
Is Noir Possible in Iraq? On International Crime Fiction, Part I (Kirkus Reviews)
“As I read the stories in Baghdad Noir, many of which are set in Saddam-era Baghdad or after, I kept wondering how noir is possible in a place where violent deaths are a daily occurrence, where even the veneer of normalcy has already been shattered, and where reality seems darker than fiction.”
Why Spiral Doesn’t Deserve To Be Compared to The Wire (CrimeReads)
“Spiral is fiction, and yet, under cover of a gritty, no-holds-barred “realism,” it is constantly making choices—bold ones for its white heroine and her comrades, and disappointing ones for the minorities who have the misfortune to people its vision of multi-ethnic France.”
Searching For Crime Fiction In Mumbai’s Beloved English-Language Bookstore (CrimeReads)
“I grew up in Mumbai reading Agatha Christie, Frederick Forsyth and Dick Francis alongside Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jane Austen… It was only much later, when I started to write crime fiction and was looking to publish that I realized that in the US, crime fiction, like other genre fiction, is marketed separately and physically placed on separate bookstore shelves.”
What We Owe To Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White: On The 19th Century Origins of the Modern Psychological Thriller (CrimeReads)
“[Woman in White] is fascinated by women’s sexuality, women’s mental stability (or lack thereof), and the perception of women’s physical vulnerability. These themes have provided rich narrative fodder all the way from Collins’s time through noir, neo-noir and to the present. If handled with originality and flair, they not only deliver the fuel to keep the narrative engine going but can turn suspenseful domestic dramas into blockbusters.”
Click here for a complete list of my essays for Kirkus and CrimeReads.
STORIES
Magnetic Sleep (Brooklyn Rail)
Inspired by: John Adams Whipple, Hypnotism, c.1845. Daguerrotype, 5 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches. Gilman Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (see above)