mysteries – Michael A. Kahn

A Mystery for the Ages

Posted on April 18, 2017April 19, 2017 by Michael Kahn

The folks at Goodreads.com asked me to answer the following question: What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book? I mulled that over for awhile. After all, the life of a trial lawyer is a life of dealing with small and big mysteries in every case. Indeed, like any good detective…

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Mystery #7 for Literary Snobs: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Michael Kahn

Conrad Brenner, writing in The New Republic, describes this book as “the most perverse novel you are ever likely to encounter.” And John Updike wrote, “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically” If that doesn’t whet your appetite, then go back to your annotated Finnegans Wake and leave us…

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Mystery #2 for Literary Snobs: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Michael Kahn

With our second mystery, we move from the surreal river running through the dark continent to the surreal freeways running through sunny California. Same themes, same structure. In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, our reluctant detective is Oedipa Mass, a California housewife whose name is our first hint at the crazy world…

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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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Mysteries for Literary Snobs

Posted on February 14, 2013February 16, 2013 by Michael Kahn

Once upon a time, novels were just, well, novels. Pride and Prejudice was once just a novel, as were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Woman in White. If first published this year, however, each would be slotted into one of the genre ghettos constructed by the literary snobs….

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Dead Lawyers, Pet Cemeteries, and First Novels

Posted on November 24, 2012December 12, 2012 by Michael Kahn

The two questions readers most frequently ask me are: 1. Why are so many legal thrillers written by trial lawyers? 2. How do you come up with the crazy ideas for your novels? I try to answer both questions in a recent piece I wrote for the blog on Poisoned Pen Press, which will be publishing my next…

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