The Man in the Tower

We continue with personal reminiscences of Cold War Vienna: Vienna was my Paris. From the late 1960s through the 1980s I made it my home, my workshop, my personal museum. I became a writer there coasting on the strong dollar: a krügel, or pint of beer was a quarter; dinner, a schnitzel so big it [...]

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The France of Author/Cartoonist Peter Steiner

Peter Steiner is the author of three novels featuring former State Department expert Louis Morgon, currently retired in the Loire Valley of France. However, Morgon gets up to more hi-jinx than your normal septuagenarian. Steiner, who has been a New Yorker cartoonist for several decades with over 400 cartoons sold, has written three books in [...]

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Botswana Mysteries: The Works of Michael Stanley

The continent of Africa has been carved up by many talented mystery writers, as we shall see in future posts. Botswana has been laid claim to by Michael Stanley–the writing team of Michael Sears (left in the picture) and Stanley Trollip. Both are retired professors who have worked in academia and business. Sears is a [...]

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“İstanbul Is Always There”: Barbara Nadel’s Inspector İkmen Series

Dubbed the Donna Leon of Istanbul by critics, British writer Barbara Nadel has built a fascinating and deeply felt series of contemporary procedurals set in the Turkish capital and featuring the chain-smoking, brandy-swilling Inspector Ikmen, husband to a strict Muslim woman (who disapproves of his drinking) and loving father of numerous bairns. Her series debut, [...]

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The “Prince” of Spies: Alan Furst and His Interwar Novels

Alan Furst exploded onto the espionage literary scene with his 1988 novel, Night Soldiers. A former Fulbright Teaching fellow at the Faculte des Lettres at the University of Montpellier, freelance writer for magazines, and author of four novels, Furst returned to France in the mid 1980s where he began writing for the International Herald Tribune. [...]

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Meredith Cole’s Williamsburg Brooklyn: A Photo to Die For

Winner of the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic best traditional first mystery contest with her book Posed for Murder, Meredith Cole was also a finalist for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her series protagonist is Lydia McKenzie, an edgy art photographer who recreates murder scenes in a film noir style. In the series debut, [...]

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Karl Kraus: Vienna 1900′s Intellectual Pitbull

This post continues a series of  personal reflections on Vienna, a city that is my very own Scene of the Crime–setting for my Viennese Mystery series and for much of my other published work.  That this article appears on Mothers Day is purely fortuitous and more than somewhat ironic. Read on to discover why. For [...]

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Mystery Down Under: Adrian Hyland’s Outback

Australian author Adrian Hyland joins us at Scene of the Crime to discuss crime down under. His protagonist is the college-educated, half-aboriginal Emily Tempest, who has, in the series opener, Moonlight Downs (published as Diamond Dove in Australia) returned to her native Outback in Australia after years of traveling the world. Back in her native [...]

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Toronto on the Mind: John McFetridge and Canadian Noir

Dubbed “Canada’s answer to Elmore Leonard” by the Toronto Star, Canadian mystery author John McFetridge has a voice that is “colder, starker than Leonard’s,” according to January Magazine. His work has been called a “noir love song to Toronto” by Publishers Weekly. Speaking to January Magazine, McFetridge remarked, “My books aren’t mysteries with a crime [...]

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Me and My Watcher in Cold War Vienna

I am reprising this post I wrote for BookPage blog earlier this year upon publication of the second novel in my Viennese Mystery series, Requiem in Vienna. It explains, in part, how I came to use Vienna as a setting for much of my fiction. Vienna of the 1960s and 1970s was a schizophrenic city: [...]

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