A Psychological Analysis of James Bond

Top 10 Crime Novels of All Time

The list, care of the Telegraph.

In Cold Blood - It's Got Some, Well, Problems

Truman Capote's classic recently tarnished with newly emerged files.

From a piece in the Wall Street Journal...

But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote's claim that his best seller was an "immaculately factual" recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse. It also calls into question the image of Mr. Dewey as the brilliant, haunted hero.

A long-forgotten cache of Kansas Bureau of Investigation documents from the investigation into the deaths suggests that the events described in two crucial chapters of the 1966 book differ significantly from what actually happened. Separately, a contract reviewed and authenticated by The Wall Street Journal shows that Mr. Capote in 1965 required Columbia Pictures to offer Mr. Dewey's wife a job as a consultant to the film version of his book for a fee far greater than the U.S. median family income that year.

In researching "In Cold Blood," Truman Capote received first-class service from the KBI and Mr. Dewey, its lead detective on the case. Mr. Dewey gave the author access to the diary of 16-year-old Nancy Clutter—her final entry logged only moments before two strangers invaded her home in late 1959 and murdered her, her brother and her parents. Mr. Dewey opened the KBI's case file to Mr. Capote. He pressured press-shy locals to cooperate with the author and granted him extraordinary access to the killers. Mr. Dewey even helped Mr. Capote, a New Yorker with no home in Kansas, obtain a Kansas driver's license.

Did Agatha Christie Have a Spy Inside?

That's the question the government wanted to know.

From a piece in the Guardian...

What made MI5 suspect one of Britain's famous crime writers? The answer, it can now be revealed, lay in the name of a character in her wartime novel N or M, whom she called Major Bletchley. He appears in the book as a friend of Christie's pair of detectives, Tommy and Tuppence.

In the book, published in 1941, N and M are the initials given to two of Hitler's agents as Tommy and Tuppence hunt for the enemy within. Major Bletchley comes across as a tedious former Indian army officer who claims to know the secrets of Britain's wartime efforts.

Christie happened to be a close friend of Dilly Knox, one of the leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park. MI5 was concerned that the major's inside knowledge of the progress of the war was based on what the codebreakers knew about Hitler's plans. Had Christie mischievously named the character Bletchley because Knox told her what was going on there?

Raymond Chandler's Cameo in "Double Indemnity"

11 Things You Probably Didn't Know about James Bond

The list, care of io9.

From said list...

10. Ian Fleming had literary aspirations for the Bond novels

He referred to his books not as literature, but as "thrillers designed to be read as literature." In a 1957 letter to CBS, Fleming explained: "In hard covers, my books are written for and appeal primarily to an "A" readership but they have all been reprinted in paperbacks in both England and America and it appears that the "B" and "C" classes find them equally readable, although one might have thought that the sophistication of the background and detail would be outside their experience and in part incomprehensible." Much later, Fleming was vindicated, when the critic Umberto Eco embarked on a rigorous study of the Bond books using the then-trendy field of Structural Analysis.

Europe's Long Tradition of Literary Super Sleuths

Crime fiction is a magnifying glass that reveals the fingerprints of history. From Holmes and Poirot to Montalbano and the rise of Scandi-noir, the Guardian investigates the long tradition of European super-sleuths and their role in turbulent times.

From the piece...

As keen readers in the field might guess, the undisputed godfathers of the genre remain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) and Sherlock Holmes, who lived in print from 1887 to 1923, although he carries on immortally in all entertainment forms. So long and so strong is the shadow of Holmes that anyone subsequently creating a detective in any culture has had to make a deliberate gesture of homage or avoidance to the resident of 221B Baker Street.

For example, it is my strong suspicion that the reason Hercule Poirot (print-dates 1920-75) is Belgian is that, if Christie (1890-1976) had made him English, the detective's characteristics – intuitive, aloof, fastidious about couture and cuisine – would have made him too transparently a Holmes clone. The most dramatised detective after Holmes and Poirot, Commissaire Jules Maigret (1931-72), is again distanced from the template by his Parisian location, but he too has certain Holmesian aspects (hyper-intelligence, a pipe) that feel like deliberate nods from his creator, the officially Belgian but temperamentally French George Simenon (1903-89).

With remarkable consistency across generations and nations, Holmes is the genre's homepage.

Murder He Wrote

Dismissed by Aldous Huxley as 'vulgar', Edgar Allan Poe is saluted now as a virtuoso of the short story. The grisly deaths he inflicted on his characters helped make him the master of the macabre. Adam Frost, Jim Kynvin and Jamie Lenman investigate how he killed them off, here.

James Bond's Style

Rural Noir Primer

Keith Rawson, for Lit Reactor, offers up some reading recommendations for "Rural Noir."

The Evolution of Detectives in Fiction

Max Allan Collins discusses it on the Huffington Post.

From the piece...

I, the Jury was a game-changer, revitalizing the tired private eye genre, which by the late '40s had been reduced to self-parody by B movies and spoofy radio series. Every now and then, the mystery novel - particularly the private eye variety - seems played out; and then someone like Mickey comes along to kick-start it in some imaginative new way.

Fictional detectives thrived through the twentieth century, but the genre only began sixty years before, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote his handful of stories about amateur sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin. Detectives and police forces were relatively new in Western civilization, an outgrowth of the democracies of Europe and the United States in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Soon detectives and mystery plots began emerging from such popular authors as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and real-life private eye Allan Pinkerton's celebrated cases sparked a wave of dime-novel detectives, perhaps most memorably Nick Carter.

Detectives were entrenched in the popular culture by the turn of the twentieth century, with the famed pulp magazine Black Mask at the forefront. In those pages, a largely forgotten author, Carroll John Daly, created the literary private eye, his Race Williams a western gunfighter moved bodily to the urban jungle, where his blazing .45 and merciless sense of justice excited a young boy in New Jersey named Mickey Spillane.

A Beginner's Guide to Crime Fiction

Flavorwire helps out readers, here.

From the piece...

Everyone needs a little mystery in their lives. Like any immense body of work, however (and boy is it immense), we’ve always been a little intimidated about diving into the crime/mystery genre. Luckily for us (and for you, if you’ve ever shared our sentiments), celebrated mystery writer Max Allan Collins, who wrote Road to Perdition, and whose newest book Lady, Go Die (we bet you can guess which genre) comes out May 8th, has offered to give us a mini-lesson on the correct way to dive in to the world of crime fiction — and it’s pretty much head first. ”The following list is designed for readers unfamiliar with the crime/mystery genre,” he tells us. “It will also work for those only familiar with the current crop of bestselling mystery writers.” Click through to get started with ten essential crime and mystery novels for any budding reader of the genre, and let us know if you’d add any books to Collins’s list in the comments.