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Winter Counts

Julia Stein Rain Taxi
This crime novel, writes reviewer Stein, "offers a fascinating snapshot of life and Lakota culture on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota."

How White Crime Writers Justified Police Brutality

John Fram New York Times
We don't need any more novels or TV shows about cops who do the wrong thing for the "right" reason. Early crime fiction, to its credit, often viewed law enforcement with skepticism. This started to change in the 1950s.

All We Have Is Each Other – Of Crime and Sports

Gary Phillips The Stansbury Forum
Yeah, these bastards plan to shoot eightball while we perish. Certainly these bunkers must come with vaults for the fat cats to put their cash and jewels in what with banks failing as civilization collapses.

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The Soaring Writer Who Landed on His Feet

Michael Hirsch New Politics
A crime novel with a difference, this one centers on murders in a vacation town that appear to take on racial significance going back to World War Two and a segregated, elite military command.

Tidbits - May 4, 2017 - Reader Comments: We Remember-May 4, 1970; Korea; Peace Movement; Pre-Existing Conditions; March on McDonald's; Boycotts; Responses to Culture posts; Know Your Rights: What To Do; European Left; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: We Remember - May 4, 1970; New Korean War?; Where is the Peace Movement; Pre-Existing Conditions; March on McDonald's May 23; Boycotts; Workers; Luddites; Marine Le Pen; California Single-Payer; Responses to Culture posts - Identity Politics; Picasso's Guernica; The Zookeeper's Wife; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; Lunch and Bologna; Donna Leon; The Handmaid's Tale; KNOW YOUR RIGHTS: What To Do If You're Stopped; The European Left; and more...

Donna Leon: Why I Became an Eco-detective Writer

Susanna Rustin The Guardian (UK)
On the 25th anniversary of her first crime novel, the Commissario Brunetti author reveals how she is responding to dark times "I'm interested in why people do things. Crime in itself isn't interesting, it's just horrible. The convolutions of greed are more interesting intellectually than passion, because with passion the name is the answer. What happens once you open the door to temptation and to possibility, that's what fascinates me - how people worsen."

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Like Glimpses Through a Window: Fredric Jameson on Raymond Chandler

Angela Woodward Los Angeles Review of Books
Frederic Jameson writes that for Raymond Chandler, a detective novel may reveal patterns that underlie the workings of our society. Reviewer Angela Woodward agrees, crediting Chandler's novels with brilliantly illuminating the grimy microcosm, played out "in the heart of the darkness of a local world without the benefit of the federal Constitution, as in a world without God." She finds that Jameson makes every strand of Chandler's oeuvre glisten with significance.

Henning Mankell, Swedish Author of Wallander, Dies at 67

Alison Flood and David Crouch The Guardian (UK)
Diagnosed with cancer in 2014, he was a leading figure in Nordic noir, and a social activist, best known for crime novels made into the TV hit, Wallender. Last year he wrote: it is possible to live with cancer. It is possible to fight against it. Nothing is ever too late. Everything is still possible. My stance is to do ultimately with what cancer has not taken away from me. It has not robbed me of my joy at being alive, or my curiosity about what tomorrow has in store.

Tidbits - October 9, 2014

Portside
Reader Comments - Towards a Socialist America; War on the Islamic State; Ferguson New Voter Registration; Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; Economy - Still Failing; People's Climate March; War and Climate Change; Berkeley Free Speech Movement; Crime Fiction; Work, Leisure, & Consumption; Israel 'Blacklist'; An Israel Equal for All; Importance of Brazil's Elections; Announcements - Race, Policing & Civil Rights-Oct 14; Paint the Town Red-Oct 22-both Brooklyn
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