Posts Tagged: Chester Himes

Criss Cross by author Tom Kakonis

Don Herron is a crime fiction reviewer and an acknowledged expert on the hardboiled greats Dashiell Hammett and Charles Willeford, two authors that are hard to match, much less top. But now he says there's a writer on the scene who is in the same league... Okay, so you’ve read Hammett and you’ve read Raymond Chandler, and you still want more great hardboiled writing. I’m not going to give a personal recommendation to a lot more, but then I’m tough. I think the novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity by James M. Cain and Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson are great. You won’t go wrong reading the crime novels of the black ex-patriat writer Chester... more

Read More of Tom Kakonis: The Best Hardboiled Writer Working Today

Our guest blogger Naomi Hirahara is the award-winning author of the mysteries featuring gardener-sleuth Mas Arai: Summer of the Big Bachi, Gasa-Gasa Girl, Blood Hina, and the Edgar Award-winning Snakeskin Shamisen. Hirahara is the past president of the Southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Today she talks about how much she loves Barbara Neely's Blanche on the Lam. Before Mma Precious Ramotswe came on the American scene, there was another “traditionally built” sleuth who had been introduced to mystery readers here--Barbara Neely’s Blanche White, an African-American housekeeper in the South who is on the run for writing some bad checks in the first book in the... more

Read More of How “Blanche On the Lam” Inspired Naomi Hirahara