Jon Breen is a mystery fiction critic, author, and scholar who contributed reviews and essays on crime and detective fiction to The Weekly Standard from 2001 to 2017. His extensive coverage for the magazine spanned classic and contemporary mystery writers, including pieces on Ellery Queen, Margaret Millar, and the broader evolution of the genre. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost authorities on mystery fiction criticism.
With its adversarial structure and set procedural rules, the trial can be a perfect dramatic vehicle, offering the strategy and suspense of a sports event alongside the seriousness of life and death. The Big Trial subgenre of American fiction dates back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s…
With its adversarial structure and set procedural rules, the trial can be a perfect dramatic vehicle, offering the strategy and suspense of a sports event alongside the seriousness of life and death. The Big Trial subgenre of American fiction dates back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s…
The locked-room mystery was a favorite subcategory of detective stories in the early 20th century. By 1941, it seemed all possible variations on getting a murderer into or out of a room locked, sealed, barred, closely observed, or otherwise inaccessible, without resort to supernatural agencies, had…
The religious detective, dating back at least to the early 20th century with Melville Davisson Post's Protestant layman Uncle Abner and G. K. Chesterton's Roman Catholic priest Father Brown, has continued to occupy a distinguished (and often lucrative) niche in the world of fictional sleuthing.
The religious detective, dating back at least to the early 20th century with Melville Davisson Post’s Protestant layman Uncle Abner and G. K. Chesterton's Roman Catholic priest Father Brown, has continued to occupy a distinguished (and often lucrative) niche in the world of fictional sleuthing.
Supersleuths in the mode of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Hercule Poirot are an endangered species. With scattered exceptions, the Great Detective has fallen out of fashion in favor of mere smart people—driven cops, dogged private eyes, curious amateurs—without special deductive powers.
How many literary genres and how many specialized backgrounds can one novel encompass? The latest from Gerard Woodward, a British writer frequently shortlisted for prestigious literary awards, has aspects of war, espionage, coming-of-age, comedy, mystery, saga, gay romance, and courtroom drama. It…
Among classic American murder cases, the 1922 shooting death of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor is one of the most intriguing. Although Lizzie Borden’s axe murders, the assassinations of Kennedy and Lincoln, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the O. J. Simpson trial continue to inspire…
Until recently, Italian mystery writers did not loom large in the criminous hierarchy, and the genre was not viewed respectfully by Italian critics. Andrea Camilleri got a late start in the field. Born in Sicily in 1925, he came from a solidly Fascist background and, as a schoolboy, allegedly wrote…
Houston detective Roland March is in many ways a typical police procedural protagonist.
When Donald E. Westlake died on New Year’s Eve 2008 at the age of 75, he was mourned as an expert and notably prolific writer of crime fiction under multiple bylines, and also as a comic novelist whose stature (in a different milieu) rivaled that of P. G. Wodehouse. To some, his position was even…
Consider this dialogue exchange:
Rex Stout, asked his opinion of writers who take over a deceased colleague’s fictional characters, compared them to vampires and cannibals and said they should “roll their own.” But that didn’t stop Robert Goldsborough from writing several new cases for the team of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin…
Best American Mystery Stories 2009
Ultimatum
The Price of Butcher's Meat
True Crime
Gone to Ground
Red Cat
Up in Honey's Room
The Man Who Smiled
Nicotine Kiss
LITERARY REPUTATION IS AS FRAGILE in crime fiction as anywhere else, but the precipitous decline of Ellery Queen may be unique, one of the most total, and in some ways inexplicable, cases of devalued stock in the annals of American letters. From the 1930s into the 1970s, Frederic Dannay (1905-1982)…
The Couple Next Door
Chaucer and the House of Fame
The Dead Letter & The Figure Eight
Law of Return
Night and Fear
The Murder Room
THE MYSTERY WRITER Nicolas Freeling made a dreadful commercial decision--and a dubious artistic one--when he killed off his popular detective, Amsterdam police inspector Piet Van der Valk. But is that the complete explanation for why one of the most gifted and original writers of crime fiction has…
Black Dahlia Avenger
My Sherlock Holmes
A Crossworder's Holiday by Nero Blanc Prime Crime, 224 pp., $22.95 A Puzzle in a Pear Tree by Parnell Hall Bantam, 308 pp., $23.95 The Christmas Garden Affair by Ann Ripley Kensington, 293 pp., $22 THE TRADITION of telling ghost stories at Christmas has a venerable lineage, reaching back well into…
Jon L. Breen explains why Patricia Cornwall doesn’t catch Jack the Ripper.
Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume Writing for a Living by Donald Bain Barricade, 239 pp., $22.95 Murder at Ford's Theatre by Margaret Truman Ballantine, 326 pp., $24.95 A BIZARRE PHENOMENON first observed in the 1940s became a crime-fiction epidemic by the 1990s. Famous entertainers, athletes,…
The Anthony Boucher Chronicles Reviews and Commentary 1942-1947 edited by Francis M. Nevins Ramble House, 3 volumes, $21.95 each The Sound of Detection Ellery Queen's Adventures in Radio by Francis M. Nevins and Martin Grams Jr. OTR, 267 pp., $29.95 AFTER PRODUCING seven detective novels between…
Murder, Mystery, and Malone by Craig Rice Crippen & Landru, 196 pp., $27 IN 1946 CRAIG RICE, a female novelist with a masculine-sounding name, became the first writer of detective fiction to make the cover of Time magazine. Her hardcover sales figures matched those of her bestselling contemporaries…
Yeats Is Dead! A Mystery by 15 Irish Writers edited by Joseph O'Connor Knopf, 256 pp., $23 Naked Came the Phoenix edited by Marcia Talley Minotaur, 320 pp., $24.95 Natural Suspect devised by William Bernhardt Ballantine, 192 pp., $23.95 A MULTIPLE-AUTHOR NOVEL is the equivalent of an old-time…
In 1926, a teenage busboy in Cleveland's Wade Park Manor Hotel opened an elevator door, stepped through without looking, and fell forty feet. A half century later, an American novelist in Spain, watching his wife change a tire, backed his wheelchair off the road and tumbled down into the ditch.…
The American Regional Mystery