Patrick Reardon

Noir fiction, like film noir, deals with bad guys doing bad things, often to each other. So why do we care? James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity — serialized in 1936 [...]

John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is one of the saddest novels ever published.  It’s sad not because it is maudlin, but because it isn’t.  Williams writes of William Stoner with [...]

D.R. Sherman’s Old Mali and the Boy, published in 1964, is a complex and poignant fable about love, set in northern India in the first half of the twentieth century. [...]

American thrillers tend to be strictly for entertainment. Oh, yes, there may be a subtext message to the reader that, if you don’t do something about something — such as [...]

Herman Wouk’s short science-fiction allegory The “Lomokome” Papers was written in 1949, just four years after the United States dropped two atom bombs on Japan, ushering in the nuclear era. [...]

The plot of Louis Fitzhugh much-loved Harriet the Spy doesn’t yield a moral.  But the life of Harriet does. What I mean to say is that some schools and libraries [...]

There are two types of Christians, according to French philosopher-theologian Emmanuel Mounier.  There are those who see their faith as an adventure, a lively zestful engagement with the fullness of [...]

Andre Norton’s science-fiction novels tend to be adventures in which a central character, usually a young man, sometimes with a friend or two, goes on a journey to discover the [...]