Dark Passages: An Archive of Columns

"The Book of Murder" and "The Killing Circle" consider a very lethal set: the writers' group

'The Curse of the Pogo Stick' and 'The Case of the Missing Books' join the 'No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency' series as beach reads that are light on the grisly crime.

Installment by installment, 'The Lemur' by Benjamin Black follows an old trend that has become--at least among writers--popular again.

Can nothing bridge the gap separating readers of true crime and crime fiction? Consider "The Monster of Florence," "The Girl with the Crooked Nose" and "The Forger's Spell."

When literary figures are turned into detectives, there's great promise in the material--and little margin for error

Two complex new mysteries explore the continent's darker side

Three debut authors didn't live long enough to see their novels published.

The tropes of the P.I. novel may have been exhausted long ago, but the genre isn't dead. Hardly, as succeeding generations of mystery writers have shown.

The genius presiding over forensic thrillers is still the one and only Sherlock Holmes

John Bingham not only wrote fascinating spy novels -- he also inspired one of John Le Carre's singular characters

Thomas Harris has a lot to answer for. Before he created Hannibal Lecter, the mere idea of a multiple murderer was enough to scare people into locking their doors and avoiding anyone remotely suspicious. Seemingly ordinary, many serial killers lived "normal" lives with wives and children, masking monstrous deeds with a placid veneer. Novelists Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson and Robert Bloch evoked these chilling figures to outstanding effect, respectively, in "In a Lonely Place" (1947), "The Killer Inside Me" (1952) and "Psycho" (1959).

In February 2004, former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath created a minor controversy with an essay in which he wondered why most contemporary thriller writers "don't seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape." The mystery world is excellent at defending its turf, so it's hardly surprising that several months later, spy novelist Gayle Lynds would write a rebuttal piece. Citing upwardly trending statistics and her own career as a model, Lynds challenged McGrath and readers to "look realistically at espionage thrillers again. They're not only alive, readers are excited about them."

Mysteries and thrillers hinge on basic questions: whodunit, whydunit and the dreaded had-I-but-known. Then there's what-might-have-been, which is the domain of thrillers that recount alternate histories. Instead of fashioning chaos out of order in a world with which we're familiar (or, as in the case of historical fiction, one that predates us but did, in fact, exist), alternate histories engage in narrative hypotheses. What if the South had been victorious in the Civil War (the premise of alternate-history king Harry Turtledove's latest forays into this subgenre)? What if a section of Alaska became the site of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish homeland (as in Michael Chabon's genre-bending "The Yiddish Policemen's Union")? And, most popular of all, what if the Nazis had won World War II?

A pair since the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

One might not have expected Comic-Con International, the extravaganza held in San Diego every July, to become a major promotional vehicle for mystery writers. But in recent years, increasing numbers of crime novelists have flocked to the graphic format and made it their own. Greg Rucka is better known for his "Whiteout" and "Queen & Country" comics than for the Atticus Kodiak thrillers that originally launched his writing career; Denise Mina, the author of gritty Glasgow-based novels, penned an entire run of "Hellblazer"; David Morrell (of "Rambo" fame) signed on for a stint scripting "Captain America"; and internationally bestselling novelist Karin Slaughter recently teamed up with Oni Press to launch a new line of graphic novels.