Elmore Leonard’s 1980 novel Gold Coast has one of the best brush-off, get-out-of-my-life, this-relationship-is-over lines I’ve ever seen: “I enjoyed meeting you.  Now beat it.  Okay?” I mention that as [...]

The 18-year-old blond boy runs, and Detective/2nd Grade Steve Carella gives chase through the large city park. He couldn't understand why the kid was risking more trouble than a small narcotics [...]

One parent who makes a short appearance in Louise Fitzhugh’s 1974 young adult novel Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change is a poverty-stricken ex-prize fighter named Mad Dog Madden. He’s [...]

Ken Follett’s 1978 novel Eye of the Needle works so well — nearly half a century later, it remains a gripping read — that it may well be the perfect [...]

Shroud for a Nightingale, published in 1971, was the fourth crime novel by P.D. James, the fourth of a series centered on Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh that would eventually [...]

This is where I came in. In 2000, The Fifth Elephant was Terry Pratchett’s 24th Discworld novel, and his American publisher was pushing the book and the Discworld series as [...]

It’s ironic that Spoon River Anthology — perhaps the most famous book about an American small town and one that has helped shape the way Americans think about small towns [...]

British cultural historian Rosemary Hill begins her 2008 book Stonehenge about the famed prehistoric place with these words: What we now call Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire at [...]

Patrolman Bert Kling is 24 and newly back from serving in Korea where he’d seen terrorized women, and starving women, and begging women.  But, writes Ed McBain in The Mugger, [...]