Raritania

In 1971 Robert Ludlum became a name in the spy genre with The Scarlatti Inheritance . Counting the works he produced under two pseudonyms (J...

In 1953 the "international man of mystery"-type spy was an old, well-worn, frankly stale tradition. It had already been a half cen...

MILD SPOILERS I will say up front--for the benefit of those who have never read this blog before--that I tend to be less than enthusiasti...

If you're one of those who thinks that any and everything that is ever said of any artistic work is entirely "subjective," an...

I recently caught Mortdecai on cable--and found the film a pleasant surprise. Enough of one that I found myself remembering the severity of...

Looking back at the history of spy fiction one is struck by British domination of the field for most of its history, where significant, gen...

I remember I was a relative newcomer to the techno-thriller genre when Tom Clancy's Without Remorse (1993) hit the stores. Still, by ...

Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 152. Ernest Mandel, whom I was surprised to see writing about crime fiction (as ...

It is widely recognized that, from the standpoint of how people treat each other, the Internet is a good deal worse than real life, which is...

Can there be such a thing as respectful disagreement? Well, let's consider what that word "respect" means. We can boil it do...

The pop culture of our time appears to be dominated by relentless, shameless exploitation of a small set of rather tired IPs--mainly because...

As word trickles through the entertainment press about what the world can expect of "Bond 25," a glance back at Bond 24 seems appr...

What seems like a thousand years ago, I was gulled by the hype into reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club . I ultimately found it incoh...

This essay is a development of two prior posts, "The Secrets of Tom Clancy's Success: The Boom Years" (August 22, 2019), and ...

A surprising number of Americans seem to romanticize Britain's upper classes, and its associated trappings--the ultimate symbol, idol, f...