Sarah Weinman

In 1953, the idea of a single female police recruit to the New York City Police Department, let alone a handful, was big news.

Beginning in the 11th century, a less-fragmented Europe began to take shape, and what we now call medieval culture - in which literature and learning made a noticeable rebound - spread through much of the territory Rome had once dominated.

Though 'Child's Play' is ultimately more concerned with subverting storytelling expectations and satirizing the expected trajectory of traditional mystery, Posadas does embed some insights about the writer's responsibility to the reader.

What I learned in school made me a better journalist and a better writer because forensic science is, as scientific disciplines must be, about critical thinking and objective analysis.

A few hours after the news broke about the death of crime writer Donald E. Westlake, a newspaper asked me to write a tribute. In short order I did so, calling attention to his decades-long career, both under his own name and that of his primary alter ego, Richard Stark, who introduced the unsentimental antihero-heister Parker to the literary canon.

In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada's federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college.

Britain proves to be an ideal setting for many a medieval-minded crime novelist, regardless of century.

Dorothy B. Hughes - there's a robust elegance to her writing that I keep responding to again and again. I've read her novel 'In a Lonely Place' about eight or nine times.

Film rights were in the offing for 'The Onion Field,' eventually made into a movie in 1979; 'The New Centurions' became a 1972 film starring George C. Scott, while 'The Blue Knight' starred William Holden in a 1973 mini-series version.

We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.

Imagine a world, if you will, where crime does not exist. A startling proposition that seems outlandish, but our imaginations, of course, need not be bounded by the rules and restrictions imposed by realism. It would be a world, one might suppose, where equality reigned, where the thought of violence was so alien that it need not be practiced.

As Paretsky detailed in her short memoir Writing in an Age of Silence (2007), early optimism buoyed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s has, in her view, all but crumbled in the face of a bombardment of sadism and misogyny, the withholding of civil liberties, and the nation's move from proud speech into near-deafening silence.