Heart of Darkness – Michael A. Kahn

Napoleon’s Penis: The Ultimate MacGuffin?

Posted on March 15, 2020March 16, 2020 by Michael Kahn

The answer: absolutely. And yes, I know where you focused on that painting of Napoleon. But before we take a closer look at that titular appendage, we need to understand the MacGuffin and its key role in many of your favorite books and movies. So what is a MacGuffin? Coined by master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock,…

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Maybe You Can’t Tell a Book by Its Cover, But You Can Sure Sell It That Way

Posted on February 15, 2019February 17, 2019 by Michael Kahn

I read a fascinating post on the Jezebel website by Kelly Faircloth in which she recounted the history–or, per the title of her post, the “steaming, throbbing history”–of the covers of romance novels, from the sweet innocent covers of the 1950s to the soft-porn bodice-rippers of later decades, many of which featured the male model…

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Baseball Walk-Up Songs for Mystery Detectives

Posted on May 14, 2016 by Michael Kahn

Time for my annual baseball post. Last year I wrote one on the Top 10 Baseball Walk-Up Songs in Literature. For the uninitiated, a walk-up song is that hard rock, hip hop, or country tune that blares over the speakers throughout the stadium as the ballplayer walks from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box. True…

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My 5 Favorite Narrators (Part 3)

Posted on October 23, 2013May 25, 2016 by Michael Kahn

In my last post, I discussed the 2nd of my 5 favorite narrators, Raymond Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe. As I now turn to #3, it’s worth noting his surprising overlap with #2. In several important ways, Chandler’s The Big Sleep, set in the Los Angeles of the 1930s, is similar to Joseph Conrad’s brilliant novella, The…

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Mystery #1 for Literary Snobs: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Michael Kahn

The topic of my last post on the Poisoned Pen Press blog was about the challenge of convincing literary snobs that there are indeed great works of literature that meet all criteria of that lowly genre known as Mystery. The 3 basic requirements of the genre (as more fully explained in the original post) are:…

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