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...
ZJ CZUPOR’S MYSTERY MINUTE: A Literary Pioneer, She Created the First Black Woman Sleuth
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...
ZJ CZUPOR’S MYSTERY MINUTE: The Rage of a Writer
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...
ZJ CZUPOR’S MYSTERY MINUTE: Sweetheart Sleuths, Sweet Deals and Sour Endings
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...
ZJ CZUPOR’S MYSTERY MINUTE
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...
ZJ CZUPOR’S MYSTERY MINUTE
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...
ZJ CZUPOR’S MYSTERY MINUTE
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...
ZJ CZUPOR’S MYSTERY MINUTE
THE QUEEN OF CRIME DRAMA By Z. J. Czupor This living, award-winning, and bestselling author is a true example of a rogue writer, who never let adversity stand in the way of her dreams. Eilidh Martina Cole was born on March 30, 1959, the youngest of five children to a poor, Irish Catholic family in...
Z.J. CZUPOR’S MYSTERY MINUTE
WHO WAS THIS "FIRST LADY OF MYSTERY?" by Z.J. CzuporThis prolific award-winning mystery author has an impressive resume and a name you may not know. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty languages and during the 1930s eight of her novels were adapted into films. Her books...
AUGUST ROGUE ROUNDUP
Here’s what we Rogues talked about, researched, and revealed in August... Jenny Milchman made a huge splash this month, interviewing authors and screenwriters whose work has made it big time onto the big screen! Then, Z.J. Czupor's Mystery Minute taught us a thing or two about the celebrated (but...