The Misread City

ONE of my liveliest conversations with an author came the day a few years ago when I met with the crime-fiction writer Don Winslow . We met ...

FOR years now we've been hearing about a charismatic Norwegian crime writer whose novels were plotted with verve and driven by a weirdly...

AFTER many years as a child psychologist, and more than a decade of rejection slips for his literary endeavors, Jonathan Kellerman discovere...

LOS Angeles thriller/detective novelist Robert Crais will probably always be known for his detective hero Elvis Cole, a rock n roll fan wit...

CRIME novelist James Ellroy is hosting a new television show that goes up Wednesday night. He's both perfect for this -- who's writ...

LOCAL culture vultures know Denise Hamilton for her work as a journalist and mystery writer. She's also edited two anthologies of crime...

HERE at The Misread City we’re longtime fans of Ted Gioia, whose book West Coast Jazz recreated the worlds of Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker,...

About a decade ago I was tipped off to an odd, inscrutable film by a budding English director living in LA. Christopher Nolan's Memento,...

WITH the film adaptation of Michael Winterbotton’s The Killer Inside Me opening in Los Angeles today, I turned to the author's biographe...

RECENTLY I spent some time with Casey Affleck, who appears in Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of the Jim Thompson noir novel, The Kill...

ONE of LA's greatest exports has always been dread, and our signature writer is still, three quarters of a century later, noir novelist ...

THIS winter in LA it has been raining, as we used to say in high school, like a mofo, and every times the heavens open I think of the upcomi...

TOMORROW is the release date for the new novel by Robert Crais, "The First Rule." Crime fiction aficionados know Crais as a deft, ...

Sometimes it's the outsiders who tell us the most. And Ross Macdonald, the Canadian-reared detective novelist who spent most of his care...

ONE of the highlights of the Guadalajara International Book Festival -- devoted this year to the literature of Los Angeles -- was a panel c...

THE strange case of Amanda Knox -- a cute American exchange student accused of killing her British roomate -- just took a yet stranger turn ...

BOOKS on chandler's LA have become a kind of cottage industry. still, i'm enjoying a new book of photographs called "daylight n...

SOME called 1991 – a decade and a half after the rumbles in London – “the year punk broke.” If so, 2009 is shaping up as the year Nordic Noi...

ALMOST exactly two years ago i was walking through Book Expo America in ny with the galley for denis johnson's then-new "tree of sm...

OVER the last year or so i've been lucky enough to hang out with james ellroy, self-proclaimed demon dog of american crime fiction, incl...