On my night table at the moment is Simon Schama's The Face of Britain, a much-read, much-loved copy of The Scold's Bridle, and a recent book on Kitty Genovese, who was murdered a few miles from my house.
History. Mystery. Crime. I read a lot of books with dead people. What can I say? The departed—and the stories of how they made the trip—are fascinating. Especially when someone helped them along.
So this website is going to dedicated to that subject. Muhr-der. Throughout history. Both fictional and not. I'll be talking to many people who write about murder professionally. (Not so many who commit murder professionally, but we can always hope.) The narratives we construct around death—say, the Triangle Fire or Nicole Brown Simpson—reveal a lot. I'll talk about my books as well. But really, this site is a way to waste time thinking about one of my favorite obsessions.
Dead people. And how they got that way.