The Queens Of Crime by Z.J. Czupor In the span of sixty years from 1920-1980, five women published 143 mystery novels and dominated the genre in what is known as the “Golden Age” of British mystery fiction. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, and Ngaio Marsh were...
The Movie that Inspired Another Movie Based on Two Novels, one of which Inspired Another Novel that Inspired the Movie that Redefined the Thriller Genre by Z.J. Czupor Before we follow this curvilinear thread of which movie or novel begat which other series of films and other novels, and the...
Before There was Stephen King… There was… by Z.J. Czupor You may not know this author's name, but you'll certainly recognize his works. He only wrote seven novels, and they were all adapted into films. He wrote tense, taut plots in multiple genres including mystery, Gothic horror, and science...
She Moved Our Collective Consciousness by Z.J. Czupor This best-selling author lived a lifetime of contradiction and experimentation. She was born with a man's name. She wrote and experimented across numerous genres. She grew out of poverty to became rich and famous, and her writing explored the...
By ZJ Czupor This author didn't hit her literary stride until late in life. After a successful career as a criminal justice advocate, as the director of a community-based corrections facility in Pennsylvania, as the producer of an award-winning radio show for the University of Massachusetts, and...
By ZJ Czupor Chester Himes If you stopped to chat with this famous author on the street, you might decide he had few redeeming qualities and keep walking. And you might, on second thought, think that with his sketchy past, he was a lost cause. Just look at his early record: As a student at...
By ZJ Czupor Every February, in "Mystery Fanfare," Janet Rudolph posts a list of "Sweetheart Sleuths," fictious detective couples who combine murder and mayhem. She updates her list every year for Valentine's Day and claims there are roughly eighty authors who’ve written about “sweetheart...
The Nightmare Life of William Lindsay Gresham By ZJ Czupor At the end of 2021, a disturbing film was released to the public. Tagged as a neo-noir psychological thriller and directed by Guillermo del Toro, it quickly won nine major awards and received forty-two nominations. The film is Nightmare...
A MYSTERY WITHIN A MYSTERY By Z.J. Czupor In the canon of mystery novels lies an unfinished but published mystery—the last novel written by an iconic author—and the mystery within that novel is still waiting to be solved. American librarian and author, Edmund Pearson (1880-1937), called it "the...
By Z.J. Czupor She Wrote the First Legal Thriller On a Saturday morning, September 16, 1922, the Episcopal Reverend Edward W. Hall and his choir member (lover) Eleanor Mills were discovered shot dead under a crabapple tree in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Their love letters had been torn up and left...
