My obsession with crime fiction began while I was still at Concordia University. In 1979, I wrote a weekly column in the student newspaper called “Ooze and Oz” and one day, on deadline and out of ideas, I banged out a private-eye story set in Biblical times. The unnamed shamus tries to figure out if Lucifer [...]
I was more than an avid fan of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series. Like many a crime writer I know, I consider him my greatest influence. Travelling in California in 1980, I decided to look up Macdonald in Santa Barbara. It didn’t work out quite the way that I planned as you'll see in this memoir, [...]
When I get serious about an author, I collect everything I can. And Elmore Leonard is the best there ever was. When Elmore Leonard died in August, shortly after suffering a stroke at age 87, tributes flowed fast and furious in newspapers, on blogs and other media. Some were from writers you would [...]
From a Toronto Star series on Lake Ontario called H2Ontario On the waterfront: The Star took this photo for an essay it commissioned on Lake Ontario. I spent the first half of my life in Montreal, an island city defined by the river that flows around it. Wherever you travelled, there were dark waters [...]
Review by Howard Shrier National Post, October 19, 2016 On a hot summer night in Atlanta – is there any other kind? – a pair of beat cops comes upon a minor car accident. The driver is clearly drunk, won’t show ID and the woman sitting beside him looks bruised. But the officers can’t arrest or [...]
Review by Howard Shrier National Post, April 24, 2017 It’s been 25 years since Commissario Guido Brunetti entered the world of crime fiction. And what an entrance it was. “Because this was Venice, the police came by boat.” With just nine words, Donna Leon showed she could set a scene and tell a story without getting in [...]
Review by Howard Shrier National Post, August 19, 2017 What would history’s greatest fictional detective make of From Holmes to Sherlock, by Swedish author Mattias Boström? A self-described “active Sherlockian for nearly 30 years,” the 46-year-old traces the arc of Holmes’s popularity from his first appearance in Beeton’s 1878 Christmas Annual to the recent British TV [...]
Author Cutter Could Be Sharper By Howard Shrier National Post, April 18, 2017 Canadian author Nick Cutter tells a wild tale in Little Heaven. It’s epic in length and scale, if not depth. The evil at its core is as scary as anything I’ve read in horror, crime or fantasy. Cutter has talent to burn and [...]
National Post, January 16, 2017 American historian Caleb Carr created a stir with his 1994 novel The Alienist. Set in New York City in 1896, the novel mixed historical characters such as then-Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt with the fictional Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a pioneer in criminal psychology. Helped by reporter John Moore, Kreizler profiled the fiend [...]
Years ago, Elmore Leonard, one of the all-time originals in crime fiction, published his ten rules of writing in the New York Times. They were both fun and instructive, the best of all being the last (“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.") The abridged versions follow; the full versions were [...]
Howard Shrier is a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award, Canada’s highest prize for crime fiction. The author of the acclaimed Jonah Geller series and other works, he publishes new stories and helps emerging authors finish their books, all on this site.
