Regan MacArthur Writes

  "...as late as 1949 you could buy a military saber in the cutlery department at Harrods*." -Paul Fussell, WARTIME *a luxury department store in London

  From Arthur Conan Doyle to Wodehouse to McBain, crime to comedy and back to crime again. A family tree tracing literary influence will always hold a fascination for me.

  Douglas Kennedy has been selling a lot of books for a lot of years and yet I never knew he even existed until very recently.* THE BIG PICTURE isn't a crime novel but Mr. Kennedy certainly did his homework on how to make a pesky corpse unidentifiable to the authorities.** I doubt I'll ever be able to look at a jewelry hammer the same way again. *He's big in France, naturally. **The book was written in the '90s. DNA wasn't quite a thing yet.

  Two movies. One good, one lousy. (I bet you can guess which is which.) Anyway, it took me a moment but I realized that both films share the same strong thriller premise: An intended murder victim becomes wrongfully accused of the killing meant to take out her or him. The price of the twist is that the protagonist loses all agency in the Third Act and has to be rescued by the love interest. But I might be the only who cares about that.

That carousel sequence in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN taunts me as a writer. Movies will always have the edge when it comes to suspense, but I take some comfort in remembering the times I've been made breathless while reading books by Ed McBain and Ken Follett.

 Damn you, Stark House! Damn you to Hell!